HP Pavilion Laptop 13 I5 1135G7 16 GB RAM

HP has been manufacturing laptops under its Pavilion line-up for many years now, but the HP Pavilion Laptop 13 has some noticeable upgrades that make it one of the best thin and light laptops around. The HP Pavilion Laptop 13 also inherits some premium features from Spectre and Envy series to deliver a good overall package.

HP Pavilion Laptop 13 Performance

The HP Pavilion Laptop 13 is powered by the Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor and the Intel Xe graphics. The laptop also has 16GB of DDR4 RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD. In terms of performance, the HP Pavilion Laptop 13 managed to score well. The Core i5-1135G7 has 8 threads and has a max Turbo frequency of 4.20Ghz on paper.

In PCMark 10's benchmark test, the Pavilion Laptop 13 managed to score 4,704 when we tested its office-centric benchmark tool. The score is higher than Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition that's powered by the Intel Core i7-10710U processor. On Cinebench R20, the HP Pavilion Laptop 13 scored 1599, which is higher than Dell XPS 13's score. The Iris Xe graphics did well in our benchmark testing and we were even able to play some games on this laptop at low settings.

On CrystalDiskMark test, the HP Pavilion Laptop 13's 512GB SSD gave sequential read and write speeds of 2301.58 MB/s and 1066.47 MB/s respectively. It's definitely serviceable for a thin and light mainstream laptop.

HP Pavilion Laptop 13 Display

The HP Pavilion Laptop 13 comes with a 13.3" FHD IPS panel with an aspect ratio of 16:9. There are noticeably thick bezels around the display that makes it look a little cheap. You do, however, get a 720p webcam which goes missing in most other options in this category.

In our testing, the display peaked at a maximum brightness of 269 nits against the 250 nits that HP advertised. The display is highly uncalibrated out of the box with Greyscale and Colorchecker DeltaE values being way above the margin of error. You can check out our full review of the laptop to learn more about this panel and its inconsistencies.

HP Pavilion Laptop 13 Battery Life

The HP Pavilion Laptop 13 packs a 3-cell 43Wh battery inside its relatively small chassis. In the PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery Life test, the HP Pavilion Laptop 13 lasted for 394 minutes, a score that puts it next to some mainstream laptops that we have tested here at Digit. In real-world usage, the Pavilion Laptop 13 was only able to last for about 5 hours on WiFi and peak brightness.

What's good about the battery, however, is that it doesn't take too long to fully charge up. Charging the laptop from a dead state to full capacity takes about 1.5 to 2 hours.

HP Pavilion Laptop 13 Features

The HP Pavilion Laptop 13 comes with a full-sized keyboard with backlit keys. The keys are mushy and shallow but it's not a bad keyboard by any metric. It's very easy to get used to this keyboard and the keycaps match the Silver chassis. The touchpad feels a little cramped on this small chassis, so you might want to consider investing in an external mouse.

The touchpad supports Windows Precision drivers and there's also a fingerprint scanner beside it which is fast and very reliable. You also get a very good selection of ports on the HP Pavilion Laptop 13. There are two USB-A (5Gbps) ports and a USB-C (10 Gbps) port that is compatible with both Power Delivery and DisplayPort. You also get an HDMI 2.0 port and a headphone/microphone combo. You also get a MicroSD reader.

The laptop comes with dual speakers at the bottom of the device that is tuned by B&O. They don't come anywhere close to the speakers on some premium laptops but are enough to fill your ears when you are not using a pair of headphones.

We really enjoyed using the HP Pavilion Laptop 13 because of its build quality. As mentioned earlier, the Pavilion Laptop 13 inherits from premium design features of the Spectre and Envy series and the overall look and feel of the laptop is quite premium.