Hey, hope everyone is safe and well? Intel released the power efficient i5-1035G1 processor for laptops at the backend of 2019. Today we have the HP 15s-fq1003na, aimed at the affordable, working from home customer base. Does it hit the sweet spot as a general purpose laptop? Let’s find out.
Design
The HP 15s has a natural silver colour chassis broken by the black display bezel. The sides are nicely narrow to give a compact look and feel. The material is mainly plastic around the bezels and keyboard. Strengthened by metal around the edges, top and bottom.
At this price point, the finish is surprisingly good, little flex on the display and hardly any movement on the keyboard deck. It tips the scales at 1.69 kg or 3.73 pounds and 1.79cm thick. Light enough to easily take between classes or office to boardroom.
To access the internals, peel off the two rubber strips used as feet to reveal the 6 screws. Undo these screws along with the two side screws to open the bottom maintenance cover. Excellent upgrade options include two ram slots and a M.2 SSD for storage. The 41Wh battery is also removable.
Display
The 15.6 inch IPS display has good viewing angles and contrast is excellent resulting in deep blacks. The single hinge goes back 140 degrees allowing you to find your optimum viewing angle while working on the laptop.
Brightness is rated at 250 nits. Fine for indoor use but you will struggle in bright outdoor lighting. Color gamut is 45% NTSC leaving colours slightly washed out. Not a laptop for colour accurate work.
Connectivity
On the left we have AC power, and two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports. On the right we have a HDMI 1.4b, a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C™ (Data Transfer Only, 5 Gb/s), one headphone/microphone combo, and a multi-format SD media card reader.
Wireless communication is provided by the Realtek RTL8821CE 802.11ac (1×1) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® 4.2 Combo card.
Wi-Fi speeds were fine but limited by the 1×1 antenna. Grab a faster external wireless adapter if you need to constantly transfer files between the laptop and say a NAS. Bluetooth coverage was reliable with an external mouse during testing.
Keyboard & Touchpad
The HP 15s has a full-size, island-style, keyboard with numeric keypad. It has a good typing action, although a little spongy in feedback when pressing the keys. There’s no backlit keys but that’s expected at this price range.
The clickpad with multi-touch gesture support is precise and easy to glide on its wide surface area. The integrated buttons are not too noisy either.
Audio & Webcam
The dual speakers provide good audio to cover most media consumption needs although it needs more depth and bass. Volume is good if you need to hear your Zoom conference call.
The HP TrueVision HD Camera with integrated dual array digital microphone is poor, even for the majority of 720P webcams I have tested. If you need decent video quality for your daily Teams meeting or home schooling the kids, buy an external webcam if you can.
Performance
The silicon found inside the HP 15s is the power efficient Ice Lake Intel® Core™ i5-1035G1 with four cores running at a base clock of 1.0GHz, with boost to 3.6GHz heavily dependent on the cooling. TDP is rated at 15 watts.
This review model has a single 8GB stick of DDR4 memory and a 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD. In everyday use, the HP 15s runs smoothly with applications starting rapidly and files opening with no waiting time. Even heavier applications like Adobe Photoshop 2020 and Premiere Pro are possible, but I would recommend upgrading the memory to 16GB.
For benchmark fans, the i5-1035G1 shows a decent performance increase over the older i5-8265U and i7-10710U in user benchmark scores. The same can be said in Geekbench and 3DMark benchmarks, holding its own against the likes of the AMD Ryzen 3500U and i5-10210U.
Even against the mighty AMD Ryzen 5 4500U, the i5-1035G1 keeps up a respectable score behind the AMD processor considering it has two more cores to play with.
The fan stays quiet the majority of the time. Under load, the fan comes on but it’s not enough to be a distraction making it possible to use in a noise sensitive environment.
The 15s never get too warm even under load thanks to thermal management reducing the clock speed down to 1GHz. The warmest spot is to the right of the laptop, at the top and bottom.
Graphics
Graphics is handled by the Intel® UHD G1 Graphics with 32 cores compared to the 24 cores on the older workhorse, UHD 620. GPU benchmark places the UHD Graphics G1 below the AMD Radeon RX Vega 8 in the Ryzen 5 3500U. This GPU is purely for general day to day use and low demands.
Gaming
The UHD Graphics G1 is suitable only for light games and possibly for playing some heavier games on the lowest graphics detail settings. However games like Apex Legends and Grounded struggle even in low settings. Minecraft, CS Go and Overwatch will play happily on the HP 15s.
Battery life
Battery life on the 3-cell, 41 Wh battery is about 6 hours general usage thanks to the efficient processor. Under heavy load and max brightness expect around 2 hours.
The HP 15s supports fast charge with the 45 W smart AC power adapter. Top up from zero to 50% in around 45 minutes.
Top 3 Pros and Cons before buying the HP 15s-fq1003na
Useful Storage – It’s actually difficult to find a laptop at this price point with more than 256GB in a SSD. As its a consumer laptop, this is quite tight storage space. Therefore its good to know the 15s is generous at 512GB.
Good Build Quality – The 15s is relatively lightweight at 1.69 kg but at this price it is surprisingly well built. No rattles or flexing in the right places.
Affordable – With the pandemic it has been difficult to find an affordable laptop that ticks most boxes. The 15s covers this with a useful processor, 8GB of memory, 512GB storage and an IPS display.
GPU Gripes – The UHD Graphics G1 is not up to snuff when it comes to playing newer games. The 15s is designed for casual light gaming.
Power Button LED – A little annoyance in the design of the power button, is why the HP engineers didn’t include a light notification when you turn it on? Probably would have cost pennies to include this.
More Ports Please? – Another small gripe with the 15s is the inclusion of a fourth USB port. Plus why are the two USB Type-A ports so close together, making it difficult for bigger USB sticks to used together.
Competition
If you were in the market for a 15.6” inch general budget laptop, what other laptops would you be looking at? In no particular order, here are some to consider.
HP 255 G7 Ryzen 5
Asus M509DA Ryzen 7
Lenovo V15 Core i5
HONOR MagicBook 15
Dell Inspiron 15 3000
Summary
In the midst of a global IT shortage, it’s hard to find a decent, value for money laptop especially with 512GB of SSD storage. The HP 15s covers all the main points with a useful processor in the i5-1035G1, 8GB of memory to run Windows 10 smoothly, good battery life, IPS display panel and of course a pleasant 512GB SSD drive. The lightweight laptop is surprisingly rigid and robustly screwed together. OK, there are a few niggles, like the poor colour accuracy and questionable throttling of the thermal management. But overall if you are after a decent laptop for home working or light office use, the HP 15s is excellent value for money.
What do you guys think? Leave your comments and discuss below.
If you need to order this laptop, contact us at www.dovecomputers.com. Watch our YouTube video review on our Channel. Remember to subscribe!