HP 250 G7 – budget notebook that satisfies

Extremely budget friendly, a lot of options and potentially powerful – this is what we can extract when seeing the HP 250 G7, knowing its configuration options. Or at least, that’s what HP is trying to tell. What is it going to be in reality? We are here to find out. Of course, we should keep in mind the price of this device, so there is no point of being too harsh on this device.

This laptop is available with a wide variety of CPUs, coming from Celerons to Pentiums, 7th Gen Core i3-7020U, and the newest Whiskey Lake offerings (by the time of writing the review) – Core i5-8265U and Core i7-8565U. Additionally, it is currently available only with the integrated graphics. However, interestingly (for a budget device), it has an M.2 slot. Take the 250 G7 train with us to see what did HP have to give up in order to achieve a super low price tag.

You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/hp-250-g7/

Contents


Specs Sheet

HP 250 G7 technical specifications table

Acer
Not available
Display
15.6”, Full HD (1920 x 1080), TN
HDD/SSD
256GB SSD NVMe
M.2 Slot
1x 2280 PCIe NVMe 3.0 See photo
RAM
8GB DDR4, 2400 MHz
Dimensions
376 x 246 x 22.5 mm (14.80" x 9.69" x 0.89")
Weight
1.78 kg (3.9 lbs)
Ports and connectivity
  • 2x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
  • 1x USB Type-A 2.0
  • HDMI 1.4b
  • Card reader SD, SDHC, SDXC
  • Ethernet lan
  • Wi-Fi 802.11ac
  • Bluetooth 4.2
  • Audio jack combo audio / microphone jack
Features
  • Fingerprint reader
  • Web camera HD
  • Backlit keyboard
  • Microphone
  • Speakers
  • Optical drive
  • Security Lock slot

What’s in the box?

Its box contains just the laptop itself, some useless paper manuals and a 45Wh charging adapter.


Design and construction

Expectedly, at this price point, the HP 250 G7 has an entirely plastic body. It looks pretty nice now, but it is super susceptible to scratches and wear to the material, so you can imagine how it’s going to look like when it ages. At least, however, it is not going to grow heavier. Which is good since it weighs only 1.78 kg and has a profile of 22.5mm.

After you open the lid, using your two hands, you’ll see that HP hasn’t gone for the latest trend in laptop design – narrow bezels. In fact, the design is very similar to its predecessor – the 250 G6.

This translates to the interior as well. HP has retained the same keyboard, that has tactile audible feedback and rather long travel. We’re happy to see an update in the printed symbols, which now are bigger and look more… modern?! Although the base bends a little when you are more angry with your inputs and the material of use is not the best, we have to forgive it because of the price tag. Sadly, the touchpad is also the same as its predecessor – clumsy and once again – very susceptible to bends.

Despite that, pay attention, we are happy with the base of the device since it houses the speakers! A good improvement over the predecessor, where they were facing downwards and when you watch a movie on your bed, for example, the sound comes out muffled.

Additionally, hot air is now coming out of the back, rather than the left side, which is good for left-handed people with dry hands. Yep, a pretty tight group of people, but they are now going to love HP.

Ports

On the left you’ll see the charging plug, an RJ-45 and an HDMI 1.4b connectors, two USB Type-A 3.1 (Gen. 1) ports and an audio jack, while the right houses a DVD optical drive, a USB Type-A 2.0 and an SD card reader.


Disassembly and upgrade options

Once again HP has decided to play the hide-the-screws game with us. Similarly to what they did with the HP Spectre x360 15 (15-df0000). However, they weren’t that successful in doing so, because they made the “mistake” of putting stronger feet, hence we were easily able to remove them as well as the screws they hide. There are a total of 11 Phillips-head screws, with one of them (the one in the middle) securing the optical drive in place. In fact, this is the first thing you need to remove before you begin prying the bottom plate up.

In order to cool the processor, HP uses a single heat pipe that leads to a heatsink, attached to a fan – pretty standard.

Interestingly for a device of this class, there are two RAM DIMMS, which can hold up to 32GB of RAM (with the Core i5-8265U and the Core i7-8565U versions).

As of the storage components, there is an M.2 PCIe slot, and a SATA connector. In a case in which you didn’t order the laptop with an HDD preinstalled there is little that helps the little PCB in place, which means you have to be careful when disassembling the device.

On the image below you can see the 41 Wh battery pack that uses connector attached to the body of the battery itself.


Display quality

HP 250 G7’s display is equipped with Full HD TN panel bearing a model number BOE NT156FHM-N41 (BOE0687). Its diagonal is 15.6″ (39.62 cm), and the resolution 1920 х 1080 pixels. The screen ratio is 16:9, and we are looking at a pixel density of – 142 ppi, and a pitch of 0.18 х 0.18 mm. The screen turns into Retina when viewed at distance equal to or greater than 60cm (24″) (from this distance one’s eye stops differentiating the separate pixels, and it is normal for looking at a laptop).

Expectedly, viewing angles are terrible. We offer images at 45° to evaluate image quality.

We measured a maximum brightness of 206 nits in the middle of the screen and 200 nits as an average for the whole area, with a maximum deviation of 8%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen is 6700K – just a little colder than the optimal for the sRGB standard of 6500K. The average color temperature through the grey scale before profiling is 12000K – cold, bluish light, corrected by our profiles.
In the illustration below you can see how the display performs from a uniformity perspective. In other words, the leakage of light from the light source.

Values of dE2000 over 4.0 should not occur, and this parameter is one of the first you should check if you intend to use the laptop for color sensitive work. The contrast ratio is bad – 290:1.

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to 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.

The yellow dotted line shows HP 250 G7’s color gamut coverage.

Its display covers only 50% of the sRGB/ITU-R BT.709 (web/HDTV standard) in CIE1976.

Our “Design and Gaming” profile delivers optimal color temperature (6500K) at 140 cd/m2 luminance and sRGB gamma 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.

Below you can compare the scores of HP 250 G7 with the default settings (left), and with the “Gaming and Web design” profile (right).

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 (Gaming capabilities)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and vice versa.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 10 ms – the panel is very fast.


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 situation with HP 250 G7’s display is rather different. It uses PWM, but in certain brightness levels above 50 nits, while they don’t start from 0. Thankfully, the flickers have a very high frequency – 28 kHz, thus making the screen comfortable for extended periods of use in this aspect.

Blue light emissions

Installing 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.

Conclusion

HP 250 G7’s display has a Full HD panel with quick reaction time and relatively comfortable panel if we take PWM usage into mind. However, it has poor viewing angles, mediocre contrast ratio, and narrow color coverage.

Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for HP 250 G7 configurations with 15.6″ FHD TN BOE NT156FHM-N41 (BOE0687).

*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 250 G7 has a relatively good quality sound. There are no obvious deviations of the frequencies, although the high tones have an upsurge.


Drivers

All of the drivers and utilities for the HP 250 G7 can be found here: https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-250-g7-notebook-pc/24381316

Battery

Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. HP 250 G7 has a 3-cell 41 Wh battery pack.

Despite the rather small battery, we extracted 7 hours and 20 minutes of web browsing and an hour less during video playback.


CPU options

Starting from lowest to highest, you can get the HP 250 G7 with Celeron 3060 or 4000, which are both dual-core/dual-thread CPUs. Next, there is the two-core/four-thread Core i3-7020U processor, which doesn’t feature Turbo at all, but supports more memory – 32GB to 8GB of the Celeron duo. Then there is the four-core/four-thread Pentium Silver N5000, which works at a significantly lower TDP than the Core i3-7020U, but should offer similar performance (however, it also supports only up to 8GB of RAM). And at the top of the mountain, you can see the quad-core/octa-thread Core i5-8265U, and Core i7-8565U.

HP 250 G7 / 255 G7 CPU variants

Here you can see an approximate comparison between the CPUs that can be found in the HP 250 G7 / 255 G7 models on the market. This way you can decide for yourself which HP 250 G7 / 255 G7 model is the best bang for your buck.

Note: The chart shows the cheapest different CPU configurations so you should check what the other specifications of these laptops are by clicking on the laptop’s name / CPU.

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 options

Currently, the 250 G7 can be bought only with the integrated GPU they offer – which means Intel HD Graphics 400 (Celeron N3060), Intel UHD Graphics 600 (Celeron N4000), Intel UHD Graphics 605 (Pentium Silver N5000), Intel HD Graphics 620 (Core i3-7020U) and Intel UHD Graphics 620 (Core i5-8265U and Core i7-8565U).

HP 250 G7 / 255 G7 GPU variants

Here you can see an approximate comparison between the GPUs that can be found in the HP 250 G7 / 255 G7 models on the market. This way you can decide for yourself which HP 250 G7 / 255 G7 model is the best bang for your buck.

Note: The chart shows the cheapest different GPU configurations so you should check what the other specifications of these laptops are by clicking on the laptop’s name / GPU.

Results are from the 3DMark: Time Spy (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)

Results are from the 3DMark: Fire Strike (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)


Gaming tests

cs-go-benchmarks

CS:GOHD 1080p, Low (Check settings)HD 1080p, Medium (Check settings)HD 1080p, MAX (Check settings)
Average FPS37 fps24 fps– fps

DOTA 2HD 1080p, Low (Check settings)HD 1080p, Normal (Check settings)HD 1080p, High (Check settings)
Average FPS56 fps28 fps15 fps

GTA-V-benchmarks

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5)HD 768p, Normal (Check settings)HD 768p, High (Check settings)HD 768p, Very High (Check settings)
Average FPS26 fps– fps– fps

Temperatures and comfort

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.

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

Intel Core i5-8265U (15W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
HP 250 G72.32 GHz (B+45%)@ 68°C2.32 GHz (B+45%)@ 77°C1.89 GHz (B+18%)@ 71°C
Dell Inspiron 15 55842.92 GHz (B+83%)@ 89°C2.30 GHz (B+44%)@ 84°C1.83 GHz (B+14%)@ 64°C
HP ProBook 450 G62.69 GHz (B+59%)@ 64°C2.53 GHz (B+60%)@ 68°C2.09 GHz (B+31%)@ 71°C
ASUS VivoBook S15 S5302.99 GHz (B+87%) @ 77°C2.99 GHz (B+87%) @ 87°C2.29 GHz (B+62%) @ 71°C

HP has opted for a super conservative approach with the 250 G7. Here, the Core i5-8265U was only able to reach 2.32 GHz in contrast to the ProBook 450 G6 (which is also set up conservatively), goest 360 MHz above it with 4C lower temperature. Thankfully, the difference is smaller at the end with the HP 250 G7 settling at 1.89 GHz, the ProBook 450 G6 at 2.09 GHz more and the ASUS VivoBook S15 S530 at further 200 MHz more, with all working at the same temperature.

Gaming comfort

We should note that the device was working barely audible, while the most heat was generated on the left side of the machine. We measured the hottest point to be just beneath the “F” key and it reached 39.7C – not exactly cold, but it is not hot either.


Verdict

In some regions of the world, the market in which the HP 250 G7 broads is very intensive. There will always be people who don’t want to spend too much on a laptop, hence there is always going to be a clientele for this type of devices. Recently we informed you about some Chinese manufacturers with strong and cheap laptops, however, if we look at the big companies, this is what to expect. Honestly, the HP 250 G7 has some inevitable flaws.

Some of them are the build quality, mostly because of the materials HP uses for this one, the lack of an IPS display option (the top end TN option (BOE NT156FHM-N41 (BOE0687)) has a pretty low maximum brightness) and the flimsy touchpad. However, when put in the entire frame one could easily close its eyes for them.

There are far better things to be considered when buying such a device – first, it has an above average battery life – how often does a sub $500 laptop offer you above 7 hours of screen on time. And bear in mind that this was achieved with the 15W Core i5-8265U – imagine if you have the Pentium Silver N5000 that has a TDP of just 6W. Yet, here is where the TN panel actually comes as a plus, rather than a con.

Additionally, it has a very good keyboard – long keystroke, clicky and tactile feedback, NumPad section. Yes, it lacks a backlight but its foolish to expect it to feature one. Moreover, the laptop remains pretty quiet even during a heavy load and the PWM it uses has a very high frequency which makes it safe in this aspect.

At the end of the day, we would certainly recommend this laptop over the Dell Inspiron 3576 for example and had it had an IPS option we would gladly award it with an Editor’s Choice label.

Pros

  • Very good price
  • One of the best keyboards for the price
  • Relatively long battery life
  • We didn’t detect a conventional use of PWM so it’s practically safe to use for long periods of time (BOE NT156FHM-N41 (BOE0687))
  • It’s offered with Whiskey Lake CPUs


Cons

  • Poor build materials choice
  • Lack of IPS options (top TN choice has poor contrast and maximum brightness) (BOE NT156FHM-N41 (BOE0687))
  • Clumsy touchpad

You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/hp-250-g7/

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kristjan
kristjan
4 years ago

Is TN any different then the SVA panel, because on all of HPs websites I see it having SVA panel not TN. Is meaning the same?

Janet
4 years ago

It seems like a great laptop for $300 – $400 range. Thank you@

Richard
Richard
3 years ago

I bought one a few months ago to replace my very expensive Fujitsu that died. This matches the Fujitsu in every way yet cost 60% less! It’s fast, very smooth and almost silent. The article knocks the build quality but I can’t find anything about it that isn’t “top -notch” Such good value it’s worth having another for back-up.