HP 14-bp020nd Review – Entry level with ips and i3
The HP 14-bp020nd does a lot of good for a five hundred euro laptop; it has an ssd, a full hd ips screen and a core i3 processor. The SSD and processor aren’t the fastest, and the screen isn’t the brightest, but you shouldn’t expect that for this money. We find the sturdiness of the housing disappointing and it is downright bad that there is room for an extra hard disk, but that the connector to connect it is missing. The battery life is fine at seven hours when browsing and watching video, and considering the price, the HP 14-bp is not a bad investment.
Pros
- Matte Full HD IPS screen
- Core i3 + ssd
- Memory upgradeable
Cons
- Moderate housing rigidity
- No room for extra HDD
It is matte black, with a diamond plate motif and a shiny edge at the bottom of the screen for a luxurious look. We are not talking about an ultrabook or gaming laptop here, but about the HP 14bp020nd, which costs only five hundred euros. HP’s 14 series is an ‘entry-level’ and is still below the Pavilion line in the ranking. For five hundred euros, the HP 14-bp020nd does not only offer a sleek appearance; the laptop is equipped with a 128GB SSD, a full HD IPS screen and a Core i3-6006U processor. On paper a nice hardware combination for the undemanding user, but what about the quality of the laptop in practice? We started with the HP 14.
Tastes differ, but we think the HP 14 is quite a nice laptop. It has a no-frills housing and the whole weighs 1490 grams, which makes the system very portable. Unfortunately, a no-frills case doesn’t mean it’s sturdy. The plastic wants to move quite easily if you handle the laptop roughly. You probably wouldn’t normally do that, but the fact that the housing is already moving with a copy that has just come out of the box does not give much confidence in its long-term sturdiness.
The housing has all its connections on the left and right side, and they basically provide everything you need. On the left are the two USB 3.0 connections, next to the SD card reader, while on the right are a gigabit Ethernet connection and HDMI. A USB-C connection has also been placed on the same side, but as with many other cheaper laptops, the functionality of the port is limited; you can only connect USB devices to it, but not external screens, and you cannot charge the laptop via USB-C either. Fortunately, the USB connections all work at the USB 3.0 speed of 5Gbit / s and HP has not, like some competitors, smuggled in one or two USB 2.0 connections in between.
Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard of the HP 14 has black, flat keys that have little travel. If you don’t have a too heavy touch, the keys will stay in place, but when typing hard they want to bounce with the rest of that not so sturdy housing.
The touchpad is quite large, but it also shows that we are not dealing with a high-end laptop. The surface is made of plastic, where more expensive laptops use glass, and if you press the bottom left touchpad all the way down, the top right corner pops up. However, multi-touch gestures up to four fingers are nicely supported and recognized, so there’s nothing wrong with it functionally.
benchmarking
The HP 14 is equipped with a Core i3 processor and, given the price of five hundred euros, that is the highest achievable if you also set requirements for the rest of the hardware. There are a number of laptops that come with a Core i5 processor for five hundred euros, but then you sacrifice image quality, because those laptops come with a poorer TN screen or a lower resolution.
A Core i3 processor is therefore the highest achievable for this money, but the i3-6006U is unfortunately an oldie. It is still of the Skylake generation, which hardly differs from Kaby Lake in terms of architecture, but is clocked lower. The i3-6006U has to make do with a clock of 2GHz, while the slowest Kaby Lake i3, the 7100U, is already 400MHz faster. The benchmarks in Cinebench and PCMark therefore show that a Core i3-7100U is a lot faster and that the difference with the Pentium 4405U, which is also of the Skylake generation, is not big. We should also note that the mutual differences in the above graph are greatly magnified and that in practice it is questionable whether you will really notice the difference between an i3-6006U and an i3-7100U.
A plus of the HP is the presence of an SSD. Although the majority of laptops in this price category are equipped with flash memory, there are also models with a slow hard disk or emmc flash, which is slower than a real SSD. The SSD in the HP 14 is a fairly standard model from Sandisk, with a capacity of 128GB. PCMark’s benchmark shows that it is not a speed miracle, but compared to a normal hard disk it is a lot faster.
If you don’t find the available SSD fast or large enough, you can always upgrade it. If you remove the bottom of the laptop, you’ll see the SSD right next to the RAM. That working memory consists of a 4GB DDR4 module, with a free slot next to it, so you can easily expand. Next to the working memory is a recess in which a 2.5″ disk would fit, if HP had placed a sata connector, but it is missing. We recently saw that with the Acer Aspire 5 . The wireless network card is one from Intel, the Dual Band Wireless-AC 3168. The card has support for 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, and Bluetooth 4.2, but is limited to the use of one antenna and a maximum transfer rate of 433Mbit/s.
Screen
Another important point of cheap laptops is the screen. Laptops up to five hundred euros often don’t have the best screens. Logically, cheaper panels are used than with high-end laptops and then the manufacturer often chooses a screen with a low resolution or TN panel. Fortunately, HP has opted for a screen with full HD resolution and an IPS panel. The icing on the cake is that the screen has a matte finish, which makes it much less reflective than glossy screens.
The fact that HP has opted for a fairly high resolution and an IPS panel does not mean that the screen is perfect. We, of course, measured it with our SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and CalMAN 5 software. The brightness, for example, is disappointing compared to more expensive laptops, and you notice that especially when there is a lot of ambient light. We measured a contrast of just over 1100:1, which is common for IPS panels. The calibration can even be called pretty good, because the three color components are neatly balanced. Only the most saturated colors are displayed with a significant deviation. We don’t expect perfect color reproduction from a laptop of this caliber.
Finally, the battery life: just like the rest of the laptop, it is fine for a laptop of five hundred euros. There are of course laptops that last more than ten hours on a battery charge, but they often cost a euro or a thousand and for half that money, the HP will do just fine with about seven hours. If you load the hardware a bit more, the battery life will be about five hours.
Conclusion
The HP 14 in the bp020nd version meets the expectations that the specifications and the corresponding price had aroused in us. For example, the SSD is faster than a hard disk, the screen has fine viewing angles and good contrast, and the processor is faster than the Pentium and Celeron processors based on the Atom architecture. For five hundred euros that is not a crazy deal. The main competitors often have a TN screen at the same resolution, such as Medion’s S series, but also HP’s own 15-bs series and the Acer Aspire ES1.
However, the fact that it is a good deal does not mean that we have no criticism of the HP 14. We find it ridiculous that a few euros have been saved for a SATA connection, so that you cannot install an extra hard drive. We find the sturdiness disappointing and is something to keep an eye on if you often move or take your laptop with you. Another thing to keep in mind is that this laptop, despite its good specifications, remains an entry-level model for the money. The SSD is not the fastest, the wireless network card has only one antenna and the i3 processor is faster than an Atom processor, but it remains a dual core without turbo. So a slip-on, but a nice slip-on for the money.