HP’s Pavilion family of laptops have always been more affordable than their Spectre counterparts, offering a good mix of specs and functional design at affordable prices. But Currys has made the HP Pavilion 14 even cheaper by knocking £300 off its price tag for Black Friday .
Originally priced at £949 by Currys, HP Pavilion 14-ce3520s - to give it its full clunky name - now costs £649. At such a price, you might be thinking that HP has given the Pavilion 14 a rather lacklustre specification to go alongside the low price.
But you’d be mistaken, as the Pavilion 14 has a rather respectable specification. Namely, it comes with Intel’s tenth-generation Core i7-1065G7, a processor built on Intel new 10-nanometre architecture, which promises improved performance as well as increased power efficiency over its laptop-grade predecessors.
However, the processor is just half the story has the Pavilion 14 comes with a dedicated Nvidia GeForce MX250 with 4G of GDDR5 RAM. While it’s no powerhouse graphics accelerator, it has enough power to run a few 3D games with tweaked settings and should be able to handle some video rendering and more intense photo editing than a machine without a dedicated graphics card.
There are also other attractive tech specs, with 8GB of RAM on offer mixed with 32GB of Intel Optane memory to speed up the flow of data to and from the 512GB SSD. As the laptop is using a tenth-generation Intel chip, it also comes with Wi-Fi 6 connectivity built-in, which should provide a faster and more stable wireless connection with your router, providing it also supports Wi-Fi 6 .
The HP Pavilion 14 chooses function over form, so it comes with three USB 3.1 connections and one USB-C port, as well as an HDMI connection and gigabit Ethernet port.
At 17.9mm thick and weighing 1.6kg, it’s not the thinnest or lightest 14-inch laptop around. But it’s still pretty portable and could be the work-meets-play laptop you’ve been looking for, especially when it’s a very reasonable £649.
Buy the Pavilion 14 here
