HP Pavilion Plus 16 Review

HP has got it’s design just right. Instead of looking and feeling like an overweight monster, the Pavilion Plus comes across as accessible and sleek for its size. The chassis has a frosted surface that not only looks great but is fingerprint resistant, so your grime and sweaty finger marks are no issue. Another thing I absolutely love about it is the 1.8Kg weight! It is a joy to carry around in your backpack all day without needing a trip to your chiropractor. 

The build quality is good and the aluminum finish looks premium. It’s a no frills approach here and I dig it! Created for creators, the Pavilion Plus features a host of ports on the side and that huge trackpad is unmissable. There’s Thunderbolt 4 on board here with 40GBs speeds and another Type C which supports 10GB rates. But the winner here is the full fledged HDMI 2.1 port that allows you to connect to any high-speed display. What’s missing though is an SD card slot.

The gorgeous 16in WQXGA display is plenty bright at 400 nits and works well even when you’re sitting at an outdoor cafe. The colours are great too and the 16:10 aspect ratio makes sure most of the content fits wonderfully on your screen. Of course it is no match to the more expensive MacBook Pro display, both in terms of colour accuracy and brightness. 

The keyboard is backlit and well spaced out and the typing experience is quite amazing. There’s no flex to the body either but the big trackpad is susceptible to accidental palm swipes and touches. But on the other hand, having a huge trackpad makes life very easy especially if you aren’t one to lug around a mouse everywhere you go.

The Intel Core i7 13700H is no stranger to us and performs with urgency. It’s probably the fastest we’ve seen around this price and dismisses tasks like a veteran. It scored a cool 15,231 in the Cinebench R23 multi-core round and 1723 in the Single Core run. The Pavilion Plus also comes with the Nvidia RTX 3050 GPU which is a step down from what you get in something like a Dell XPS 17 which sports the RTX4050 but for considerably more money.

In TimeSpy the 3050 scores a respectable 4122 and FireStrike results in a 9126. These numbers are just okay when in isolation but compare it to something better like the RTX 4050 and things start to look a bit bleak for the RTX 3050. However, the Pavilion comes at a price and we can’t complain much here. We played a bit of God of War and on FullHD with settings on low we managed a cool 52fps. Cyberpunk 77 also ran a respectable 55fps but dropped down to 35fps when we set the graphics quality to medium. Lighter games work just fine too.

The HP Pavilion offers a great balance of price and performance. If you can’t stretch to a MacBook Pro or even the Dell XPS 17 and need a workhorse that gets the job done without a fuss, the Pavilion should be on your list. It won’t give you the oomph factor or the flair, but it’s a no-show all-go machine which you can lug around anywhere despite the size and one that will serve you well when crunching those tasks.