HP has always been synonymous with value for money. When I got my first laptop way back when I was a student, HP was the choice to beat because it was always cheaper for the same specs than Dell and what was then known as IBM laptops (now Lenovo).
But don’t let that fool you into thinking that HP laptops don’t pack a punch. Just one look at the flagship HP Spectre X360 laptops, and you can see for yourself that the cost defies the specifications. When you compare it with the competitors like Dell XPS and Lenovo X1 Carbon, you can see the saved dollars.
Now that we have established the value for money credentials of HP, let’s dive in and see which are the best HP laptops for you!
Top-Rated HP Laptops
Premium Pick
HP Spectre x360
Best For: Business
Excellent for video conferencing, multi-tasking, and presentations
Power-packed processing for business applications
Strong integrated GPU for mid-level gamers
Superfast processing for high-end applications
Boots up in seconds
Price: $$$$
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Display: 8.2mn pixels screen res. With multi-touch (15 inch screen)
Processing Power: 10th Gen Intel i7 Base frequency: 1.8Ghz / Max frequency: 4.9GHz Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce MX250 (1.52 – 1.58 GHz) RAM:16GB DDR4-2666 SDRAM Memory:512GB SSD
In this section, we’ve dissected HP’s massive laptops lineup and highlighted seven of the best laptops they are offering right now. Our HP laptop reviews below are the results of many hours of research, and include new HP laptops for 2021. No matter what your computing needs are or how you primarily use your laptop, you will find an entry just for you.
What good is a business laptop that can’t run your office applications?
The 10th Gen Intel i7 processor on the HP Spectre X360 has a base frequency of 1.8Ghz, but it can go up to 4.9GHz using Intel’s Turbo Boost technology. To understand what this means for your processing capability, you have to know that the processor can do up to 4.9 bn reads/write operations every second! For most office applications, even heavy-duty ones, that is a very good speed.
The 1TB SSD storage is like the cherry on the cake; you get the kind of fast boot-ups and quick read/writes which only the SSD can give.
We live in a world where our teams work across continents and business is operated in the cloud. In this scenario, a business laptop needs to give you the fastest possible internet speed.
The HP X360 Spectre has implemented Wi-Fi 6, Intel’s latest offering, which offers the latest 802.11ax standard. Wi-Fi 6 gives you three times faster data speeds (up to 2.4 Gbps) and four times better performance when you have a heavy-use office environment where multiple users connect to the same Wi-Fi.
Bandwidth is great, but what if your audio and display quality itself is bad? You won’t be able to detect those facial cues that are oh-so-important in a business meeting!
Thankfully, the laptop has a best-in-class 15.6-inch 4K ultra HD display (8.2mn pixels) than standard Hi-def, which is just 2mn pixels). It’s probably the best HP laptop 15 inch you can buy. Coupled with NVIDIA’s GeForce MX330, you get great video and photo editing capabilities as well. And we all know about the capability of the in-built Bang & Olufsen speakers to pick up the faintest of murmurs from your teammates!
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The HP Spectre x360 is one of the best laptops on the market if you are looking for premium features at a reasonable price. With a price band that is at least a few hundred dollars lower than its peers like Dell XPS, the specs are the same and even better in some cases.
The Spectre x360’s 2019 avatar has brought in more computing power to the user with Intel’s latest 10th gen i7 CPUs than the 8th gen CPUs in the 2017 model.
Compared to the 2017 Spectre, the 2019 Spectre is lighter, smaller, and supports better bandwidth (for the 4K HDR 120 Hz output). It has Wi-Fi 6, which provides the best high-speed Wi-Fi bandwidth currently.
The best HP laptop for business or personal use.
HP Spectre x360 is one of the best business laptops out there because of three main reasons: High processing speed and Internet Bandwidth for productivity, superior audio and visual quality for an always on the move, conference call based business environment, and unmatched security features for your office documents.
Pros
Portable, lightweight, easy to carry
4K UHD display with crystal clear pictures
Wi-Fi 6 for superfast internet
4.9Ghz clock speed processor for superfast processing
360-degree flip design for ease of access and use, along with HP smartpen
The parents may not like it much, but Pew research suggests that 70% of all students are involved in gaming, with 65% being regular gamers. So a student laptop is no good if it does not have kick-ass gaming specs.
However, true gaming laptops are usually quite expensive and certainly don’t fit a student’s budget. The HP Envy provides a great compromise.
With its NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card, which uses NVIDIA Turing (one of the best GPU architectures out there), along with a wide 17 inch full HD screen, the gaming experience on this laptop is truly mind-blowing.
A large 17.3-inch touchscreen display is good for two things at once- gaming and streaming movies! With its Anti-glare edge-to-edge glass and excellent connectivity for streaming movies using the 802.11 Wi-Fi and BT 5.0 combination, you can be sure that the picture quality that you get will be awesome. Of course, the Bang and Olufsen speakers add rich audio quality to the movie-watching experience as well.
Well, we already gushed over the combo of Windows 10 Pro on an Intel 10th gen i7 -10510U processor in our review of HP’s x360 Spectre above. So at the risk of repeating ourselves, this laptop will ensure that all your student needs are covered.
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Coming on to the next awesome HP laptop in our lineup – The HP Envy 17T is perfect for the average college-goer, who loves playing games, streaming movies, and of course, studying (nudge nudge wink wink!)
Why do we say so? Well, compared to most gaming laptops, this is certainly a cheaper option. But that doesn’t mean you need to compromise on specs – it has got the RTX 2070 that is a powerful GPU, a pretty nifty 17-inch screen with anti-glare and great speakers that together can give you the best environment for both movies and gaming.
If you compare it with its own previous 2018 avatar, which had an 8th gen core i7, the HP Envy 17T’s latest version has an updated Intel 10th Gen i7-10510U processor maximum clock speed of close to 4.9Ghz. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 with 8GB GDDR6 is a perfect GPU for gaming, much better than the MX150 2GB earlier provided. It’s also about half a pound lighter than the previous version.
Pros
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070, one of the best GPUs for gaming
17.3-inch, wide, glare-free screen and Bang & Olufsen speakers
802.11 Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 5 for connectivity
Powerful Intel i7-10510 processor for multitasking support
Probably the best hp laptop for college
Cons
The keyboard’s up and down arrow keys are tiny, which is a problem, especially if you are a gamer.
Windows 10 S with a free switch to Windows 10 Home
Battery Life
N/A
Weight
3.25 pounds
UPC
850011107829
Top 3 Features
AffordabilityMemoryConnectivity
Affordability is, of course, the buzzword that makes this laptop tick. Coming in at under $500, a business laptop that competes with the HP Pavilion 15 or the Lenovo Ideapad 330 beats them on price by more than a couple of hundred bucks, even though it provides similar specs.
The DDR4 2400 MHz RAM and 128GB SSD combo give you an excellent speed for simple MS-Word and MS-Excel operations. If you are more of a cloud-based company, these specifications are perfect for running even capacity heavy browsers like Chrome.
The laptop has a wide variety of ports, so you can connect to many of your favorite products. An HDMI 4k port lets you connect to a 4K UHD monitor, USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports let you connect your external hard drives and even charge your phone, a dedicated headphone jack for playing music while working, An ethernet port for connecting to the office network, and an SD card reader slot for your micro SDs. It also has Wi-Fi 802.11 and Bluetooth 4.2 for connecting to your wireless hub, phones, activity trackers and other devices.
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Well, business needs are many and varied. Not everybody needs a high-end super-processing capability laptop, especially if your work is related to basic document processing or simple spreadsheets. The HP 14 inch touchscreen laptop with a Ryzen 3-3200U processor is a nice and simple budget laptop at an extremely affordable range.
Now, if you are a tech newbie, you might be scratching your head over how to benchmark Ryzen 3-3200U to other processors. AMD processors have made many strides in recent years and are giving Intel a run for its money.
If I were to benchmark the Ryzen 3-3200U, I would probably compare it to the Intel i5-8250U. The Ryzen has slightly better speed (3.5Ghz for the Ryzen vs. 3.4GHz for the i5), but the i5 has eight cores versus Ryzen’s four cores, making it better multitasking.
That said, this laptop is priced much better and rated and reviewed much more than other Intel core i5 products.
Again, processing power is not the only important thing in a business laptop. The DDR4 2400 MHz RAM and 128GB SSD give you good throughput and speed in memory.
Apart from that, the backlit touchscreen capability, along with an integrated webcam, fast Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and a very light frame weighing in at just 3.25 pounds, make this great choice for business users looking for quality at a reasonable price.
Pros
Quick processing capability with 3.5GHz Ryzen processor
Affordable, value for money product
802.11 Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.2 for connectivity
Super lightweight
Cons
It tends to slow down during multitasking because it has only two cores
The 128GB memory is a sore point, though it can easily be remedied with external hard drives and does provide speed.
This laptop has a bit of everything at a reasonable price, good for a home business, for children’s projects, for a bit of movie watching and gaming, and certainly a lot of shopping on the internet.
The 8th gen Intel i5 quad-core processor packs a wallop in terms of processing capability. The 256GB SSD memory, which offers very quick read/writes, complements the processor to give you a fast experience through and through. The video quality and sound are good for movie watching too.
The 17-inch ultra-bright screen is another great plus point of this laptop. Add to that,the Intel UHD 620 GPU offers an excellent video environment for watching movies and gaming applications.
The laptop has multiple connectivity modes, including HDMI, Wireless, Media reader, and 3 USB ports.
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Just like our HP 14 touchscreen budget business laptop above, the HP 17-BY1053DX is our best home use laptop on a budget.
Now home-use laptops are not easy to design; they need a bit of everything – a bit of gaming, video streaming, good picture quality, good audio, and even a bit of processing power. Everyone from an office goer to a school kid to a homemaker can use it.
HP has taken a great shot at it. The Intel quad-core i5-8265U processor gives solid processing capability, supported by the 256GB SSD hard disk and 8GB RAM. Its 17.3-inch display is bright and presents powerful picture quality.
The Windows 10S operating system is smooth and comfortable for a home user, though it does lack the upgrade to Windows 10 Home, which is a bit of a bummer. Lastly, it is almost similarly priced to competitors such as Lenovo’s Ideapad 3, but has slightly better specs and looks much more sleek and beautiful.
Pros
Affordable laptop with good processing speed
Sharp, clear visuals and a large 17-inch screen
Lots of connectivity options
Cons
The default Windows 10 S operating system does not allow non-Microsoft applications to run on the laptop.
Of course, the best budget laptop on our list also has the lowest price. Under the $500 mark, this is a very good option for a good configuration that can support all basic operations such as surfing, browsing, and a little bit of processing and even streaming.
The 128GB SSD memory with 8GB RAM configuration on the laptop is fast. SSD is much faster than HDD for read/write operations, giving a much better value even though it is more expensive.
At just about 4.3 pounds, this is a very light laptop. You can carry it around with you easily.
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If your heart is dead set on Intel and you don’t want to experiment with the 14-inch touchscreen AMD model that we discussed earlier, this is the best low-budget HP laptop for you.
Coming in at under $500, this basic laptop has all the things you need for day-to-day applications, and in fact, we loved the 128GB SSD Memory and 8GB RAM configuration. I own a similar laptop from Dell, and I find it a great asset to my everyday work, which involves many cloud-based applications, but nothing major running on the laptop itself.
If we were to compare it to its nearest Core i3 Competitors: Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i and the lesser-known ASUS VivoBook, it is perhaps the best value-for-money product.
It has 8GB RAM compared to the 4GB DDR4 option from Lenovo and is a few bucks cheaper. The ASUS VivoBook has better specs, though the Core i3-7100U processor of the HP laptop has a higher base frequency of 2.4GHz than the Core i3-8145U, whose base frequency is 2.1Ghz. However, ASUS fares poorly due to a lack of a strong brand name.
Pros
Affordable
Lightweight
Quick
Cons
Don’t go in expecting nice touches like a backlit keypad and finger recognition. This laptop is on a shoestring budget, and it wears the badge with pride.
The IPS panel display offers zero lightning or trailing when you are using the touchscreen. The touchscreen experience itself is very smooth and comfortable, and the 360-degree flip design makes the whole experience even better.
The Vega 8 GPU offers 11GHz clock speed. It is one of the best low-budget gaming environments when you couple it with DDR4-2400 RAM and 256GB SSD memory. The brilliant touchscreen experience of the 15.6-inch Full HD IPS panel monitor only adds to the experience. The processor is well suited for simpler games such as League of Legends, Quake Champions, Overwatch, and Dota 2.
This laptop is a thin and light device, weighing in at just about 4.5 pounds despite being a 15.6-inch laptop. With the 360-degree flip option and backlit keyboard, along with an immersive display, this is a very stylish product for the aesthetically minded.
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After reviewing some low-budget options from HP, it’s time to move to the next biggest and emerging segment in the market – touchscreen laptops.
Now HP offers a touchscreen on many of its laptops, so you might ask what makes the Envy 360 the best one? The reason is its IPS panel.
IPS panels have many advantages over VA and TN panels. They give you a better response time, you can view the screen from any angle, and the color and contrast of the screen are much better.
However, its major advantage in a touch screen application is that it does not become lighter or show a tail when you press it. IPS makes the touchscreen experience really enriched, almost similar to using your smartphone device.
With a crystal clear 15.6-inch FHD display and amazing touchscreen experience, HP has also included the Vega 8 GPU for an immersive gaming experience.
As far as processing power is concerned, the Envy X 360 uses AMD’s Ryzen 5 2500U, a processor widely considered equivalent to Intel Core i5 8250U (except the Vega 8 GPU, which is much more superior than the UHD 620). Both have a maximum ~3.6GHz clock speed and four cores, supporting eight threads.
If you compare it to its peers like the Lenovo Ideapad 330 or the Dell i5575, the Envy x360 is a few dollars cheaper and has much better touchscreen and gaming capabilities. It has a 360-degree flip design, which makes it even more appealing to the touch screen addict.
Pros
Superb IPS panel monitor that offers excellent touchscreen
Strong gaming capabilities
Stylish looks and lightweight
Windows 10 Home
Cons
The Fan processor vents are at the bottom, which means that you can’t use them for long on your lap. Otherwise, the laptop starts heating up.
Hardware Specifications of HP i5 Touch (2020 Model)
Processor
10th Gen Intel Core i5-1035G1, 1.0GHz – 3.6GHz
RAM
16GB DDR4 SDRAM
Graphics
Intel Graphics coprocessor
Storage
512GB NVMe SSD
Display
15.6 inches HD (1366 x 768) IPS panel
Operating System
Windows 10 Home
Battery Life
7 hours
Weight
4.49 pounds
UPC
190781694120
Top 3 Features
Value for Money Fast BootTouchscreen
The Core i5 processor, when coupled with 16GB DDR4 RAM and half TB SSD memory, gives you superb performance, and for the price range of under $1000, this product is a real steal. If you aren’t into applications that use multi-threading, this laptop is hard to beat in performance per dollar.
I already mentioned the SSD drive, but it bears mentioning once again- the boot-up time of this laptop is less than 10 seconds. As long as you don’t have some super freaky boot-up applications, your laptop will be up and running in the morning before you can take your first sip of coffee.
For the price, it was difficult to find other laptops that offered similar specs and touchscreen support, so it’s worth mentioning here.
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Coming to the last HP laptop on my list, I know that despite the release of Intel’s Core i7 lineup in 2008 and even core i9 in 2017, i5 laptops are still around and very much in demand.
A small appreciation of the humble i5 – even today, when it comes to value for money and high performance, you can find the i5 series to be par with the i7’s for normal applications. The real differences start to kick in when you use applications such as Adobe’s creative suite of online games, which can use the multi-threading capabilities of i7 processors to the fullest extent.
The HP i5 Touch uses a 10th Gen, quad-core i5 processor with a base frequency of 1GHz, going right up to 3.6Ghz using Intel’s Turbo Boost technology. These specs are almost the same as Intel’s Core i7-1065G. Intel released both processors in Q3 of 2019.
The 16GB DDR4 RAM coupled with 512GB SSD memory gives you lightning-fast boot-ups and read/write performance. When you couple it with a 15.6-inch touchscreen display, this laptop is a solid bargain for the price range in which it comes.
As far as competitors are concerned, there were very few laptops that have a similar processor-RAM-Memory configuration. The closest is perhaps the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Series 3593, which offers nearly the same specs, with an additional 1TB HDD thrown in. Both are at a similar price, so it’s your preference.
Pros
Excellent Value for Money
512GB SSD, lots of space, and very fast operations
Cons
The display is nothing to write home about; it’s not a full HD display, neither is it very bright.
There is no dedicated GPU. Gamers won’t find this laptop worth their time.
You want the best deal on a HP laptop, but you don’t want to end up with a low-quality model that’s only going to last you a year. You’ll find the newest HP laptop 2021 can offer. If you’re looking for a laptop that’s built to last, check out the best prices & deals you can get on a Hewlett-Packard laptop by clicking here.
HP Laptops Buyer’s Guide
Selecting a laptop requires a lot of thought and planning. The top HP laptops come with many features, specifications, and accessories. Following are the most important things to look out for in the latest HP laptop for 2021.
Processing Power
The simplest measure of how good a processor is is its clock speed, usually presented in MHz or GHz. The higher this frequency number, the more the number of operations it can do every second, which usually translates to better speed.
Most processors have a base frequency and a maximum frequency. The base frequency is the usual speed at which the processor works, whereas only those built to use multithreading can use the maximum frequency.
The Intel family of processors is the more popular choice even today, despite heavy competition from AMD. The Intel Core i5 is still a good bet for most people among processors, while the Intel Core i7 is considered a more high-end user’s bet, such as gaming and high-end graphics requirements.
AMD has its Ryzen processors that are comparable with Intel’s Core i5 and i7. The A-series is the cheaper version from AMD, which is more akin to the Core i3 and older processors from Intel.
Dimensions
How big a laptop you want to buy depends on your need. If you need something that you can carry along quickly, you should probably opt for a laptop with a form factor between 12 to 14 inches.
Suppose your laptop usually just sits on your desk, and you only need to move it occasionally. In that case, a larger laptop between 15 to 17 inches offers a much better video and gaming experience. Larger laptops are also able to dissipate heat more effectively.
Another thing to consider is how flexible the laptop is. Many laptops such as HP’s Spectre X360 and HP Envy series have a 360-degree movable display, which means you can just fold the laptop when you don’t need the keyboard. Most of these “convertible” laptops also offer touchscreen, so your laptop essentially converts into a large-sized tablet.
RAM
The evolution of Random Access Memory (RAM) has been stunning. Today, you will find anywhere between 4GB to 16GB RAM on most laptops from mere megabytes of data storage.
To give a quick refresher, RAM is like buffer storage (a scratch pad, if you will), where computer programs store their data temporarily while executing operations.
There are two factors to look for in RAM – storage and speed. The storage is in GigaBytes; the larger the storage, the more programs you can run simultaneously.
The type of RAM indicates the second factor. Most laptops use Double Data Rate SDRAM, popularly abbreviated as DDR. The latest and hence fastest version of DDR RAM is DDR4, which offers speeds between 2133 MT/s and 4266 MT/s (MT/s is Million data transfers per second)
From a user perspective, 4GB RAM is sufficient for basic operations, but if you are going to run many programs simultaneously, you should look for 8GB RAM. I would currently recommend a 16GB RAM configuration only to power users and gamers who run significantly heavy programs.
Storage
With the coming of cloud computing and faster bandwidth Wi-Fi, physical storage space on your laptop has become less and less important. However, storage space remains important for faster boot-ups and when running very processing-intensive programs.
There are two main types of Storage: HDD and SSD. HDD uses the same method for data read and write used since the time of the CD (using a spinning magnetic surface and a read/write head to read it). HDD is a legacy technology, and it is much cheaper GB to GB when compared to SSD.
Solid State Drive is a new way to store data, which does not involve moving heads or spinning disks to read data. The lack of moving parts makes it smaller, lighter, and much faster. The only catch is that the SSD is a bit expensive right now, though the gap has been closing.
I always recommend everyone buy an SSD, even if you choose only the bare minimum of 128GB. SSD will give you stunningly better performance. If you are a high-end user, a 256-512GB SSD will make you happy.
Gaming and Audio/Video
These days, most high-end processors come with integrated graphics cards, which are sufficient to run light games and multimedia.
If you are a high-end user, you might consider a laptop that has a dedicated GPU for gaming. However, I don’t recommend the extra cost for a basic user, as GPUs do not benefit normal users.
In my view, the HP Spectre X360 is the best HP laptop today. It would be my personal choice if I had no budget constraints to think about. It has a powerful 10th Gen i7 processor, with 1TB SSD memory and the 4K UHD video support is simply amazing.
If I were constrained for money, though, I would prefer to go with the HP i5 Touch. It gives amazing value for the money you pay; the processor is very capable, you get 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD drive which gives amazing speed. If you aren’t much into gaming like me, that’s the way to go.
Which HP laptop is best and affordable?
Selecting the absolute best is, of course, a tough choice, but I will stick my neck out for the Envy 17T, which has similar specifications as the Spectre X360 but is slightly cheaper.
Is Dell or HP better?
I have made some very specific one-on-one comparisons above for laptops from these two marquee brands heading head to head in the market.
Dell has a bigger brand name, and certainly, their laptops have a lot more configurable options than any other brand out there. Dell also has a broader range of laptops, with a presence in almost every user segment, unlike HP.
But when it comes to value for money, HP is king. Dollar for dollar, the specs that you will get in an HP laptop will always be better than that of a Dell or Lenovo laptop for any given price point.
What should I check before buying a laptop?
Every user has a certain requirement. Before heading on to buy a laptop, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself what your requirements are?
Are you looking for a gaming configuration? You need a killer processor (Intel Core i7+) and GPU (11GHz +), an excellent display screen, and a lot of input and output ports.
If office work is what you need a laptop for, you should look for a balance between processing power, excellent connectivity, and good video conferencing capabilities.
For home use, an i3 or i5 with modest processing power and a 128GB SSD memory for quick boot-up is a nice way to go.
Ultimately, it all depends on what you need. More than asking an expert, this is a question to ask yourself!
Conclusion
HP produces some of the most cost-effective laptops on the market. Whether you are looking for a high-end speed demon like the Spectre X360 or the basic, low-end HP 14-CF0014DX, you will always get the best bang for your buck with these laptops.
HP has one of the most versatile laptop lineups on the market, and we hope this guide has helped you discover some of the hidden gems that offer great value. Whether you’re looking for convertibles, compact laptops, or devices with touchscreen support, our list of the best hp laptops has just the right model for you.
