HP Pavilion Gaming 15 (15-ec0000) has a very decent cooling solution

The HP Pavilion Gaming 15 (15-ec0000) is a decently-priced laptop that can be configured with powerful hardware and efficient Zen+ processors. In our case, we had our hands on a notebook that is configured with a fast AMD Ryzen 7 3750H (with a 35W TDP) and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q.

The laptop also has good upgradability (including NVMe and SATA slots, and a possibility for up to 32GB DDR4 memory), a nice keyboard, and capable, fast 144Hz panel that is PWM-free and color-accurate at the same time. By the way, you can check the performance of the CPU versus some fast Whiskey Lake processors and the GPU compared to a full-blown RTX 2060.

A lot of people are making one small mistake when buying a new laptop that can ruin the whole experience after the purchase – they underestimate the quality of the cooling solution that is inside of the machine. Essentially, its job is to cool down the internals (CPU and GPU mainly). If these components aren’t well-cooled you can expect decreased performance since their frequencies will throttle down because of the high temperatures (decreasing the clocks leads to lower temperatures and to lower performance as well).

Let’s say that you can buy a laptop with a Ryzen 7 3750H that performs like a Ryzen 5 3550H (it’s just an example) or a 1660 Ti that can show GTX 1650-level fps because of the bad thermals. This is a real-life situation – you can have a laptop with top-end hardware that performs like a mid-range machine which is a lot cheaper.

There are notebooks with good cooling that can extract everything from the hardware, which ultimately results in higher frequencies, fps, and overall performance. Just like the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 (15-ec0000). First of all, if you want to have a look at the cooling or you just want to upgrade the laptop you’ll find that it’s not a hard job to open the bottom panel – you just have to unscrew 7 Phillips screws and that’s it -easy peasy. For more detailed look you can check out our disassembly video:

Let’s check the cooling itself after the panel is already removed. It’s a simple but yet effective one – there are two thick heat pipes that cool the processor and video card, and two fans that blow fresh air straight to the heat sink. The “interior” of the laptop is tidy- everything is in place and looks clean and spacious.

Now, let’s check what a good cooling solution like this one is capable of. As you can see, this is the best performing AMD Ryzen 7 3750H that we have tested up to date. The most important thing here is its ability to maintain 3.53GHz at just  67°C for a long time under load, which is an unbeatable result in our chart. If you tend to play a lot of games you can be sure that the CPU will not throttle down its frequencies significantly during long hours of gameplay.

Max CPU load

In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering. Sure, the ASUS TUF FX505 has the same temperatures during heavy loads but the CPU clock is 150 MHz down compared to HP Pavilion Gaming 15. This laptop is able to squeeze every bit of performance from the 3750H.

Average core frequency (base frequency + X); CPU temp.

AMD Ryzen 7 3750H (35W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
HP Pavilion Gaming 15 (15-ec0000)3.73 GHz (B+62%) @ 72°C3.63 GHz (B+58%) @ 71°C3.53 GHz (B+53%) @ 67°C
ASUS ROG Zephyrus GA5023.83 GHz (B+67%) @ 75°C3.77 GHz (B+64%) @ 78°C2.84 GHz (B+23%) @ 81°C
ASUS TUF FX5053.67 GHz (B+60%) @ 71°C3.58 GHz (B+56%) @ 70°C3.38 GHz (B+47%) @ 67°C
ASUS TUF FX7053.72 GHz (B+62%) @ 74°C3.62 GHz (B+57%) @ 73°C3.43 GHz (B+49%) @ 70°C

Real-life gaming

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-QGPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min)GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min)
HP Pavilion Gaming 15 (15-ec0000)1511 MHz @ 66°C1493 MHz @ 68°C
ASUS ROG Zephyrus GA5021396 MHz @ 78°C1432 MHz @ 81°C
HP Pavilion Gaming 15 20191400 MHz @ 66°C1365 MHz @ 71°C
HP Pavilion Gaming 17 20191334 MHz @ 67°C1282 MHz @ 75°C

The same story with the GPU – the battery-friendly GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q is having a hard time inside of the ASUS ROG Zephyrus GA502 with 81°C core temparature or it throttles hard in HP Pavilion Gaming 17 2019 (just 1282 MHz core frequency). With HP Pavilion Gaming 15 (15-ec0000) the GPU core remains rather cool at just 68°C and it boost up to 1493 MHz – again, the best performing GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q that we have ever tested in a laptop.

With HP Pavilion Gaming 15 (15-ec0000) you can enjoy a max performance with both CPU and GPU at the same time – money well spent.

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