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日本HP Pavilion 14 x360 (14-ba000) review – a 2-in-1 laptop with many capabilities
One of the latest tendencies with ultra portable mobile computers is to seek the combination of a laptop and tablet in one device, providing a touchscreen with the opportunity to rotate at 360 degrees. This effect is sought in order to improve the overall comfortable use of the device and it also adds an additional feature. The laptop sports a discrete NVIDIA GeForce 940MX GPU realized with 2GB of dedicated memory. Considering the Full HD resolution of the display, we are going to check how the GeForce 940MX handles gaming in native resolution.
Namely one such convertible is the Pavilion 14 x360 model by the Hewlett-Packard company which we shall discuss in this review. This model stands out among most computers on the market with its simple and stylish silver body with thickness of 21 mm and weight of 1.7 kg. In addition, the 14-inch 360-degree rotating display allows us to use the device in three modes – normal laptop, presentation mode, as well as tablet.
HP Pavilion x360 also offers wireless communication capabilities via WiFi module Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3168 which supports Bluetooth 4.1.
You can check prices and configurations: Buy from Amazon.com (#CommissionsEarned)
Contents
- Retail package
- Design and construction
- Cooling system
- Upgrade options
- Display quality
- PWM (Screen flickering)
- Buy our display profiles
- Sound
- Conclusion
- Specs sheet
- HP Pavilion 14 x360 (14-ba000) configurations
- Software
- Battery
- CPU – Intel Core i5-7200U
- GPU – Intel HD Graphics 620
- GPU – NVIDIA GeForce 940MX
- Temperatures
- Gaming tests
- Verdict
Retail package
The laptop came well-packed in a box. It includes a 65 W AC power adapter providing 19.5V voltage and 3.33A currency. Here, we also found user manuals and the tablet itself.
Design and construction
The laptop features a plastic body and only the upper part of the construction, where the keyboard is positioned, is made of metal. The surface is smooth and pleasant to touch, comes in silver and it is not stained by fingerprints. There is also no twisting of the lid or the chassis, the construction is made firm and stable. HP Pavilion x360 is at the same time light and compact. Its weight, as we mentioned, is just 1.7 kg, while the thickness – 21 mm.
The laptop features a 14-inch touch screen display which can rotate at 360 degrees and can be used as a tablet. Especially this quality is a huge plus for those who want to use the device on their lap while sitting or lying down. The finish of the body allows firm grip of the laptop in tablet mode. At the bottom, there are no service lids. In order to access the internal part of the laptop you need to remove the entire bottom which is secured with clamps and 6 screws. The openings from which the cooling system takes in cool air are also visible.
The hinges are tightened and thick and they are also stable enough to keep the display in its position and it won’t alter even when we work in the so called tent mode. When closed the lid sticks firmly to the corpus. In addition, the laptop has stereo speakers mounted in the area above the keyboard and they are positioned below the decorative panel.
Overall, the keyboard is comfortable, the keys have a slightly concave shape, they are pleasant to touch and response well. The laptop also sports key backlight. In addition, the touchpad is big and comfortable to use. The touchpad buttons and the touchpad itself have short key travel.
The sensor panel of the display works very well. As we mentioned above, the display is touchscreen and features Corning Gorilla Glass. It has good sensitivity in the peripheral areas, it’s quite smooth and keeps its sensitivity even after leaving fingerprints on it. There is also an HD camera in the upper part of the display.
One last aspect that deserves attention in terms of the construction are the input-output ports. On the right side of the laptop you will notice 2x USB 3.1 ports, a single USB 3.1 Type-C port, HDMI port and one integrated SD card slot. On the left side of the laptop are positioned an audio jack. Kensington lock slot, as well as volume and power rockers. The wireless connectivity includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.
Cooling system
The laptop has active cooling which is realized by a fan and a turbine. It seems that this cooling system is designed well and manages to cope with its task. You can see the result of its action in the review below.
Upgrade options
The storage devices are limited by the size of the device so you can only take advantage of an M.2 SSD (2280) slot. In our case, we received the laptop with a 256GB SSD SanDisk SD8SN8U.
| Slot | Unit | Upgrade price |
|---|---|---|
| M.2 slot | SanDisk SD8SN8U – 256GB SSD | Buy from Amazon.com |
Display quality
The HP Pavilion x360 (14-inch) display features a Full HD sensor panel with an IPS matrix, model Chi Mei CMN14B6 (N140HCE-EBA). Its diagonal is 14-inch (35.56 cm), while the resolution – 1920 х 1080 pixels. In addition, the aspect ratio is 16:9, the pixel density – 157 ppi, the pixel pitch – 0.161 х 0.161 mm. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal to or greater than 56 cm.
HP Pavilion x360 (14-inch) has comfortable viewing angles. We offer photos to evaluate image quality.
We were able to record a maximum brightness of 255 cd/m2 in the center and 237 cd/m2 as average across the surface of the display with a maximum of 10% deviation. Тhe brightness is sufficient for indoor use but because of the glossy finish it may turn out to be low in direct sunlight. The correlated color temperature on white screen at maximum luminance is 6730K with the optimal being 6500K but as we go along the grayscale, the average color temperature is 6670К. You can see how these values change at 140 cd/m2 (83% brightness).
The maximum color deviation (dE2000) at 85% brightness compared to the center of the screen is 3.1, which is rather fine as values above 4.0 are unwanted.
The contrast ratio is high – 1270:1 (1100:1 after calibration).
Color reproduction
To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.
Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.
Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.
Тhe display covers 50% of the sRGB color gamut in CIE1976.
The “Design and Gaming” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.
We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.
The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.
The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.
Response time
We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.
We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 28 ms.
PWM (Screen flickering)
Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.
The HP Pavilion x360 (14-inch) display uses PWM only up to 70 cd/m2 at high frequencies making it comfortable for continuous work in this aspect.
Blue light emissions
Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.
You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SPD) graph.
Buy our display profiles
Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for HP Pavilion x360 (14-inch) configurations with 14″ Chi Mei CMN14B6 (N140HCE-EBA) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: Buy from Amazon.com (#CommissionsEarned)
*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].
Read more about the profiles HERE.
In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.
Office Work
Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.
Design and Gaming
This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.
Health-Guard
Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.
Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount
Sound
HP Pavilion x360 (14-inch) has high-quality sound. The tones are clear in the whole range from low to high frequencies.
Conclusion
The HP Pavilion x360 (14-inch) has high contrast, Full HD resolution, comfortable viewing angles. It is touch-enabled which is not a small advantage. The color range is modest.
Specs sheet
The current specs sheet is for this particular model and configurations may differ depending on your region.
HP Pavilion 14 x360 technical specifications table
Not available
HP Pavilion 14 x360 (14-ba000) configurations
Software
We used the pre-installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for the writing of this review but if you wish to perform a clean install of the OS without the bloatware, we suggest downloading all of the latest drivers from HP’s official support page.
Battery
Hewlett-Packard has chosen 3-cell battery with capacity of 65 W which gets the job done relatively well. All tests are conducted with screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2 and Power Saver mode turned on.
Web browsing
In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.
Good result – 445 minutes (7 hours and 25 minutes).
Video playback
For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.
The machine lasted even less – 310 minutes (5 hours and 10 minutes).
Gaming
We recently started using F1 2017’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.
The measured 90 minutes (1 hour and 30 minutes) are not a very good result for gaming load but the laptop is not made for that.
CPU – Intel Core i5-7200U
Intel’s Core i5-7200U is part of the 7th Generation Kaby Lake CPUs and it’s the direct successor of the Core i5-5200U (Broadwell) and Core i5-6200U (Skylake). It’s also based on the same architecture as the aforementioned chips with little differences that should bring a small performance increase and a bump in power consumption. However, the new CPU is clocked at 2.5 GHz and its Turbo Boost frequency is 3.1 GHz opposed to the 2.3 – 2.8 GHz clocks on the previous Core i5-6200U.
Anyway, we still have the 2/4 core/thread count, 3MB last level cache, and a TDP of 15W, which includes the iGPU and the dual-channel DDR4 memory controller. Speaking of the former, the chip integrates the newer generation Intel HD Graphics 620 graphics chip clocked at 300 – 1000 MHz.
You can see specs and prices of all available notebooks with Intel Core i5-7200U here: Buy from Amazon.com (#CommissionsEarned)
You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/
Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i5-7200u/
Results are from the Cinebench 20 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)
Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)
Results are from the Fritz chess benchmark (the higher the score, the better)
GPU – Intel HD Graphics 620
Intel’s HD Graphics 620 integrated iGPU can be found in various ULV (ultra-low voltage) processors from the Kaby Lake generation. The GT2 version of the graphics chip uses 24 EUs (Execution Units) that can be clocked up to 1050 MHz and it has a base frequency of 300 MHz but the former can vary depending on the CPU. Since the iGPU doesn’t have a dedicated memory of its own – or eDRAM for that matter – it uses the available RAM on the system which is 2x 64-bit DDR3 or DDR4.
The TDP depends on the CPU model but it’s usually equipped with a SoC rated at 15W including the memory controller.
You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/
Here you will find other useful information and every notebook with this GPU that we’ve tested: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/intel-hd-graphics-620/
Results are from the 3DMark: Fire Strike (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Results are from the Unigine Superposition benchmark (higher the score, the better)
GPU – NVIDIA GeForce 940MX
HP Pavilion x360 is also equipped with a discrete GeForce 940MX manufactured by NVIDIVA. GeForce 940M is a mid-range graphics card used mostly in multimedia and light gaming devices. It is a direct successor to the last year’s 840M. They have a lot in common but 940M is slightly more powerful, it is part of the Maxwell family and uses the GM108 chip.
NVIDIA GeForce 940M is manufactured through a 28nm manufacturing process and features 384 shader cores, 24 texture ones, and 8 ROP cores (64-bit interface). There are modifications with 2GB or 4GB DDR3 memory. The maximum operative power of GeForce 940M is 33W. It supports GPU Boost 2.0, Optimus, PhysX, CUDA and GeForce Experience.
You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/
Here you will find other useful information and every notebook with this GPU that we’ve tested: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/nvidia-geforce-940mx-2gb-ddr3/
Results are from the 3DMark: Fire Strike (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Results are from the Unigine Superposition benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Temperatures
We conducted CPU, GPU, as well as memory stress test as our aim was to see how well the cooling system handles tough workload and evaluate its overall reliability in the long run. You have to keep in mind that there won’t be such workload on all components in real life. During the whole test, the processor kept its maximum operational frequency of 3.1 GHz for the two cores. The temperature reached a maximum of 81 degrees Celsius which in itself is a high temperature but nevertheless, during the entire test CPU throttling didn’t occur.
We also measured the temperatures in various areas on the surface. As you can see from the image below, there is nothing to worry about. We can confirm that the cooling system does a very good job.
Gaming tests
| Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5) | Full HD, Low (Check settings) | Full HD, Medium (Check settings) | Full HD, Very High (Check settings) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average FPS | 49 fps | 20 fps | 12 fps |
| Far Cry Primal | Full HD, Normal (Check settings) | Full HD, High (Check settings) | Full HD, Very High (Check settings) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average FPS | 16 fps | 14 fps | 12 fps |
| Rise of the Tomb Raider (2016) | Full HD, Low (Check settings) | Full HD, Medium (Check settings) | Full HD, Very High (Check settings) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average FPS | 14 fps | 11 fps | 8 fps |
Verdict
To sum things up, we can say that HP Pavilion x360 is a good laptop that combines a high-quality body featuring an aluminum panel, powerful CPU and touch screen display.
Its touch-sensitive IPS display is an essential plus, with good contrast, comfortable viewing angles and modest color range. When combined with our profiles, the color accuracy improves significantly. It also has high-quality stereo sound. The laptop is very comfortable for carrying thanks to its thin profile and light weight. In addition, HP Pavilion x360 (14-inch) sports Corning Gorilla Glass which protects the machine from scratches without interfering with the sleek design of the laptop.
You can check prices and configurations: Buy from Amazon.com (#CommissionsEarned)
Pros
- Good build quality
- Touch screen display which rotates at 360 degrees
- High-quality stereo sound
- Decent keyboard and big touchpad
- Good wireless network
Cons
- The color range is modest
- Not so affordable price
Thank-you for the knowledge.If they only had more choices…right?