Recently, I was searching for laptops for creative professionals and I realised that there aren’t a lot of options for someone looking for a slim, lightweight machine that will still let them run graphically intensive applications. Most options are to buy a gaming laptop instead. Of course, there are some options out there, and the HP Envy 15 is one of them. So when I received the HP Envy 15 ep0123tx for review, I was honestly excited to check it out. After all, at ₹1,49,999 the laptop does seem to offer quite a lot. Well, I’ve been using it for over a week now and here’s my review of the HP Envy 15.

Design and Build

The HP Envy 15 carries on the design philosophy of HP’s Envy series. It’s a sleek looking device, with edges that curve aggressively, and a color scheme that looks sophisticated, easy on the eyes, and just generally pleasing.

Once you open up this laptop, things continue looking good. There are thin bezels around the display, and an HP logo on the chin. The dark grey (almost black) bezels contrast perfectly against the silver of the laptop, which, by the way, extends all the way around the bezels and to the keyboard.

The display here is a 15.6-inch Full HD panel and it looks pretty good. It’s rated at 300 nits for brightness, and in my usage it gets pretty bright. Plus, the anti glare coating on the screen means I didn’t have any trouble using the laptop even though I have a light behind my work desk which can easily cause a lot of glare issues.

Coming back to the display though, I have spent hours looking at this screen both while working, and while watching TV shows and movies, and it’s a solid display. The colours look nice, it gets bright when you want it to, and the viewing angles are decent as well. Overall, just a really crisp, bright, and nice display to have on a laptop. I like it.

Under the hood, HP has packed in a 10th-gen Intel Core i7-10750H CPU clocked at 2.6GHz. This is paired with 16GB 2933MHz RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, and GTX 1660Ti GPU. If you’re wondering why the RAM isn’t 3200MHz, that’s because not all 10th-gen processors suport 3200MHz RAM. The highest that the 10750H can support is 2933MHz and that’s what HP has put in here.

Unsurprisingly, the HP Envy 15 performs really well no matter what you’re trying to accomplish with it. I have been using this for work, which includes editing some images on Photoshop, and writing articles. Plus, this laptop has been my go to machine for entertainment, and I even played some games on it. It’s good at everything.

Similarly, in games, the laptop handles everything very well. In PUBG, for example, with graphics set to High, the laptop gets upwards of 70FPS at all times. Even at Ultra, I was getting around 60 FPS throughout my game which is pretty great. For some reason, the laptop defaulted to a custom mix of low graphics, by the way, and at those settings I was getting frame rates around 90FPS.

In Far Cry 5 as well, the HP Envy performs admirably. At 1080p Ultra, the in game benchmark showed an FPS range of 70 to 92FPS with an average of 78FPS. At High, the average FPS increases all the way to 82FPS. So yeah, clearly, the HP Envy 15 can handle gaming.

I also tested out V-Ray and SketchUp Pro on the laptop and things look great there as well. In the V-Ray benchmark, the HP Envy 15 scores 7902 ksamples and 146 mpaths. In SketchUp Pro, I opened a fairly detailed project file and tried zooming in, panning and orbiting around, and also changing the time of day to see lighting and shadows change on the building, and there was absolutely no lag anywhere.

Keyboard

Moving on, the keyboard. I have usually liked HP’s keyboards in recent years and this one is no different. It’s a backlit keyboard, which you can toggle using the F4 key. There’s a single white coloured backlight here, but that’s perfectly fine. In fact, I doubt any other colours would look good with this laptop. You also get two brightness levels for the back light which can be adjusted using the same F4 key, but I usually kept the backlight at maximum because it looks pretty.

Trackpad

The trackpad on the HP Envy 15 is pretty great as well. It’s a Precision touchpad, so you get access to all the nifty Windows gestures that I am slowly getting accustomed to. Plus, it’s quite responsive and it doesn’t feel bad to the touch even when you’ve been using it for hours on end. That’s great.

HP gives plenty of ports on the Envy 15 ep0123tx as well. You get two USB 3 Type-A ports, an HDMI out, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a microSD card reader, and a headphone/ mic combo jack.

I’m glad to have both Type-A and Type-C (Thunderbolt 3) ports here. Thanks to this, you can connect any of your legacy Type-A accessories to the laptop without any dongles, and you get the future proofing from Thunderbolt 3, which also allows you to get even more ports via a dongle, if you need it. Personally, I didn’t find the need to attach a dongle to the laptop, but it’s good to know that if I needed to, the laptop has Thunderbolt 3 ports for it.

As I mentioned while discussing the design of the laptop, it has its speakers on the bottom, even though there are grilles on the sides of the keyboard which may trick you into thinking that’s where the speakers are.

Even though this is a pretty sleek laptop, somehow, HP has managed to stuff in a big 83Wh battery inside this. The company claims 16 hours of battery backup on the laptop, which is a claim that’s amazing if true. Now, I didn’t use the laptop for 16 hours at a stretch without charging it. Let’s be honest, when you have a laptop like this at your disposal, you do tend to play games when you should ideally be working. However, in the couple of hours of continuous work usage that I had, the laptop does handle battery life very well.

I had Photoshop open, along with Microsoft Edge with anywhere between 7 to 10 tabs open at all times, brightness set to 50% and yes, a tab with Apple Music playing my favourite work playlist to my Bluetooth earphones. With all of that, the battery drop seemed to indicate a battery life of around 14 to 15 hours. Obviously, that could change based on what you’re doing with the laptop, and what brightness levels you’re comfortable with. However, it seems safe to say that HP’s claims aren’t off.

So you’re too lazy to read the entire review? Well, lucky for you, we have distilled the pros and cons of the HP Envy 15 ep0123tx here.

  • Beautiful design
  • Excellent performance
  • Great battery life
  • Crisp, bright display

Cons:

HP Envy 15-ep0123tx Review: Should You Buy It?

The HP Envy 15 ep0123tx is an amazing laptop, coming in at a price where it’s hard to beat what HP is offering. It looks premium all around, the performance is top notch, and it brings almost everything you could want from your laptop, including the power to play high end games without breaking a sweat. Those are not easy targets to hit, but HP seems to have done it with the Envy 15.