Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
[Honest Review] HP P028TX Laptop Review [Core i3 1.9Ghz, 4GB ram, 1TB HDD, Nvidia 830M 2GB, Beats Audio]
Hello Friends,
I am pleased to present a short review of Budget Gaming Laptop from HP.
Overview-
I am using this as my primary Laptop since 4 months. The Machine is a great one for its price. Especially, With the looks, it appears much more premium than it is.
Design and Looks-
This laptop continues along the lines of my earlier reviewed HP G009AX or G002AX.
HP is making some of the worst designs I've ever seen recently and this laptop is no exception.
>The power and HDD LEDs are off to side rather than upfront.
>There is no Basic LED indicator for Num Lock!!
>NO VGA PORT!
>Whole laptop is made like single piece and Upgrading the HDD , RAM or even CMOS battery needs one to Rip out the Keyboard, Back cover, Top cover, then Motherboard and what not!! Yuk!
>Only one Combo Headphone/Mic port. So those using old fashioned headsets will need to buy new ones.
Really HP?Why did you do this?
Fit and Finish-
Laptop is slimmer than you'd expect. The top of laptop has Rubberized, White Milky finish. Looks very unique. It does not get any Fingerprints either. Open the lid, and you shall be greeted with a very large Touchpad. The keys are finished in White and Rest of the bezel is Matte Aluminum. The display bezel is simple matte Black. Overall the Fit and Finish is Far more better than my previous G009AX.
The Caps lock key has a small indicator built onto the key itself. My Samsung and Acer both missed these. A small LED near charging port is also present (yellow when charging, White when charged). Unfortunately, The LEDs are much to small to clearly be seen in Daylight.
There are a row of function keys with the Fn key combo and also include Media player controls and volume. These keys work directly without pressing FN by default. There is a Card reader upfront.
The touchpad is extra large and supports gestures which actually work. However, The Touch pad is extra sensitive and causes issues when typing. Just one mistaken hit and you will end up typing somewhere else!. Even after 4 months, I have not learned how to type without disturbing the touch pad. Another gripe is uni-piece touch pad without regular Clicky buttons. It is very weird to precisely click or drag with this behavior. Forget trying to Crop Pictures or make other adjustments with this one. It always shifts the “Aim” a few inches off.
Display-
Oh How bored I am with these 1336x768 screens! Even my Rs.16k cellphone now has FULL HD display with IPS quality. The Display is glossy and generic quality.
However keeping in Mind the low price and Low end graphics chips, Half HD display should be OK OK. There’s a 720p webcam (with indicator LED) and Mic above the display for those Skype calls.
Luckily, I have the laptop Hooked to a 24 Inch, FULL HD LED TV set. The HDMI output works wonders, even the sound is carried over the same cable. You get an Option to set TV speakers or Laptop speakers as primary Output source; However you Can't run Both at once.
The Sound form TV speakers is excellent, So is the Display quality. There is a stark difference between the overall color Gamut, Viewing angle, Contrast ratio of Inbuilt display and the LG LED display. The LG LED TV is vastly better than regular laptop displays!
Performance-
Performance is Snappy and boot-up is fast. Running multiple applications alongside poses no problems at all. I am running a dual screen configuration and I can surf and play on both screens no problem.
The RAM is only 4 GB in reality which maybe limiting in the future. Worst part its, RAM is non-Upgradeable so you're stuck for a lifetime. There is only one RAM slot. The Supplied RAM is DDR3-L or Low Voltage type. Thats another hurdle.
However the GPU Nvidia 830m has its dedicated 2GB RAM so its atleast not eating away the Main RAM. However the Inbuilt Intel 4400 seems to be eating about 1GB of main ram. There are no settings to change this.
CPU-
The CPU included here is Intel i3 4030u. Now “U” means its a More of Net-book style ULV processor with TDP of around 15w. The CPU has 2 Cores running at 1.88 GHZ (Advertised 1.9 Ghz). Each core supports HyperThreading so OS appears to notice 4 cores. The cores constantly adjust speeds from 1.1Ghz all the way to 1.88 depending on power and load.
In regular tasks, The CPU feels just as fast as my Earlier AMD A8 Beema 6410 which is a 2Ghz true Quad Core counterpart. And that is not slow at all. In certain Technical Benchmarks, The AMD A8 shows a slightly Higher score, But there is no difference in Practical use.
Gaming-
The star of the show here is Nvidia 830m. Which is a relatively High-end graphics solution for the price. The 830m Takes a very serious jump from its Junior, Having a full 256 Shader cores with turbo support. On the other hand, The Nvidia 820m in most of the competition only Supports 96 Shaders at a Much lower performance.
No Doubt about it, The 830m will zoom past Nvida 820m, 630m, 740m, AMD 8570M and AMD R5 230M based graphics solutions with no sweat!
Most of the Modern games can be enjoyed at highest settings on 720p resolution-
Crysis 2
COD 4, COD MW2, COD MW3, COD black ops
Split second
battlefield bad company 2
Battlefield 3
Left 4 dead 1 & 2
Sniper ghost warrior
NEED for speed (All series)
Accessories-
There are no accessories supplied. Not even a Driver CD. Everything needs to be downloaded (over 1.5 GB) from the HP website (3G rates have just increased) and even then there can be issues. I remember when buying a new laptop 5 years ago means a box or two, full of accessories and over a dozen CDs! Look how the companies are cutting corners. A CD costs what today? 10 rupees?
However, I got a cool looking and very Functional back-pack alongwith.
Ports & Ergonomics-
The laptop comes with the usual bandwagon of HDMI, and USB ports. There are No E-Sata or Express card slots. NO VGA PORT. There are only 3 usb ports out of which , Thankfully, The Left 2 are USB 3.0 Speeds. I would have expected all ports to be 3.0 Speeds for such a large notebook. The USB 3.0 Copy speeds are 65~70 MB/s
For the good things, We have full size keypad with numeric inputs (these are the norm anyways), But arrow keys are too small.
Speakers actually had me stunned. These are among the best speakers in laptop. Total Thumbs up!
HEAT-
Thanks to the Low power 15W Intel ULV CPU, During surfing, the laptop stays cool at about 31~45.C.
After half Hour of COD MW3, I saw temperatures of 72.C on Pirifom Speccy. There is a single fan at the bottom for cooling. I will Strictly suggest going for a Laptop Stand (with fans) when gaming. I am using Zebronics ZEB-1000 With oversized fan for the laptop.
I am pleased to note that overall Temps are about 10.C lower than my AMD based- A8 6410 Laptop. Especially, The Nvidia 830m GPU runs much cooler than AMD 8570m Counterpart, despite the 830m's Superior Performance.
Battery-
The laptop comes with only 4 cell battery which is a tad small for large laptop. Usual 6 cell would have done better. However due to low Consumption Intel ULV 15w CPU, it still gets about 3 hours. Another cost cutting by HP.
I also Miss the settings named AMD power play, that allows you to set your CPU max speed anywhere from 1 Ghz to 2 Ghz on battery mode. It really works and saves battery on My HP G009AX
Software-
The First Time I booted the laptop, It Pissed me with the usual Pre-loaded windows 8.1, Loads of Bloatware and stuff. I took a bold step and simply wiped the HDD Clean of everything. The Factory HDD was Formatted in GPT, which I brought back to MBR and NTFS. After Disabling UFEI from Bios, I was able to “UPGRADE” this beast to windows 7.
BOOM !!
And Boy! I am impressed. If you are running your laptops in Win 8.1, Please do a favor and check performance in Windows 7. Its not only much easy to use, its also much faster. Win 7 was able to install most of the drivers by itself (If Windows update is enabled). Few drivers I was able to get from the laptop retailer (WIFi and BT)
Pricing-
I got the laptop Offline, From a HP Retailer for 38.5k. It may appear that online shops are offering cheaper rates, but there is no support and there are horror stories about HP denying warranty etc on those. Buy from an Authorized store and stay in peace.
Driver Download-
http://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP-Pavilion-15-Notebook-PC-series/6936226/model/7132723/drivers/
Specs at a Glance-
Product Name HP Pavilion 15-p028tx Notebook PC
Product Number J2C47PA
Microprocessor 1.9 GHz Intel Core i3-4030U with Intel HD Graphics 4400
Microprocessor Cache 3 MB cache
Memory 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3L SDRAM (1 x 4 GB)
Video Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 830M (2 GB DDR3 dedicated)
Display 15.6" diagonal HD BrightView LED-backlit (1366 x 768)
Hard Drive 1 TB 5400 rpm SATA
Multimedia Drive SuperMulti DVD burner
Network Card Integrated 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet LAN
Wireless Connectivity 802.11b/g/n (1x1) and Bluetooth 4.0 combo
Sound Beats Audio with 2 speakers
Keyboard Full-size textured island-style with numeric keypad
Pointing Device HP Imagepad with multi-touch gesture support
PC Card Slots 1 multi-format SD media card reader
External Ports 2 USB 3.0
1 HDMI
1 RJ-45
1 headphone/microphone combo
Dimensions 38.45 x 26.02 x 2.39 cm
Weight Starting at 2.27 kg
Power 65 W AC power adapter
4-cell (41 WHr) Li-ion
What's In The Box HP TrueVision HD Webcam (front-facing) with integrated dual array digital microphone
-
Attached Files:
-
-
-
Great review overall, and I can vouch for most of these opinions in my long term experience with this frankly amazing-for-its-price laptop. From a gamer's POV, it runs nearly every game I've thrown at it (at some level of detail and with some AA) and I think the only game it didn't run at all was Fallout 4, and I might try to run GTA V, Arkham Knight or Quantum Break in a few weeks.
Just a few observations and opinions:
- Please try to get your laptop cleaned ( to keep it cool) and upgraded by HP techs before your warranty runs out, because unless you're really comfortable disassembling the laptop and not clumsy like me, pretty much the only thing you can replace on your own is the optical drive with a caddy (I'll update this reply with a link as soon as I can find it in my order history from 3 years ago, it fits perfectly and you can't see any difference when you re-attach the bezel thing from the DVD drive). PS: I miss my older laptops that could be upgraded with just a screwdriver, not a house call from hp.
- I've added an SSD in my HDD slot and moved the HDD to the caddy that I added, and the DVD drive is in an external USB enclosure, which works because I hardly need to use any optical media these days. The SSD has noticeable benefit in boot time and game loading times. but otherwise its just something I wanted to try out, just to see if it's possible.
- With the right care, the laptop stays no more than 15 (in any Battery saving power plan) to 20 (in the HP Recommended power plan) degrees above room temperature when not gaming or watching videos. If anyone has got better results, I'd love to know how you did it
and thanks in advance.
- Till I upgraded RAM*, I had to do a lot of tinkering with Razer Cortex and PrecisionX to run some games better than the laptop is supposed to be able to do. The framerate limiter on PrecisionX is great to keep the laptop running cool if you can survive on a 40 fps limit
- Like the reviewer, I cannot stress enough the importance of laptop cooling pads. I'm currently using a DeepCool WindWheel for decent cooling (lowers temps by about 5 degrees), a good price and great portability (foldable and height-adjustable kickstands). A good cooling pad is among the few things you can re-use for years if you've switched to laptop gaming. Please try to turn the fans off (or unplug the cooling pad) when not gaming or watching videos because if your house isn't dust-proof (most houses are not), you're not just blowing cooler air into the intake vents, you're also blowing in dust faster than the laptop would have otherwise collected dust, and to get hp to look at your laptop after the warranty has expired, hp loves to make you wish you had a new laptop instead. Good for business
The p028tx (I can't speak for the p027tx and p029tx even though they're identical in every way except color) has TWO RAM slots, and one of them has a 4 GB DDR3L module by default, thus it IS upgradeable. It's understandable why there is confusion regarding this, because hp has made the laptop very difficult to open up to the RAM slots, the website has no relevant information about upgrading, and an hp tech support person actually offered me DDR3 RAM for the upgrade even though the person didn't know if the laptop had an extra slot, or if DDR3 RAM could be used in a DDR3L slot (afaik, it can't be).
The reviewer is right about one aspect - this RAM is hard to find because the world has moved on to DDR4, and you can't just stick in any 4 GB DDR3L module. For optimum performance, you need another module of the exact same model. Use CPU-Z to find out what it is (mine was a Samsung RAM model), and you can search for it online. I was lucky and found one on ebay after more than a year of searching. So. Yes, RAM is upgradeable. Not just gaming, but my Chrome tabs thank me for it everyday.
Screenshots :
http://imgur.com/IWuJfV4
http://imgur.com/wqNaiYn
[Sorry, can't insert the images for some reason] - Please try to get your laptop cleaned ( to keep it cool) and upgraded by HP techs before your warranty runs out, because unless you're really comfortable disassembling the laptop and not clumsy like me, pretty much the only thing you can replace on your own is the optical drive with a caddy (I'll update this reply with a link as soon as I can find it in my order history from 3 years ago, it fits perfectly and you can't see any difference when you re-attach the bezel thing from the DVD drive). PS: I miss my older laptops that could be upgraded with just a screwdriver, not a house call from hp.
[Honest Review] HP P028TX Laptop Review [Core i3 1.9Ghz, 4GB ram, 1TB HDD, Nvidia 830M 2GB, Beats]
Discussion in 'HP' started by bhvm, Sep 5, 2015.
