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3DMark
Ice Storm: 26,140
Cloud Gate: 2257
Fire Strike: 321
Cinebench R11.5
OpenGL: 12.17
CPU: 1.31
PCMark08
Home Score: 1540
Work score: 2548
Estimated battery life: 5h 21min 22s
x264 HD Benchmark 4.0
Pass-1: 38.18fps
Pass-2: 8.41fps
Bioshock Infinite
Ultra: 5.18fps
Very low: 22.07fps
Given the similar specifications to the Lenovo G505 that we've looked at previously, there's no surprise that the benchmarks from this machine and the G505 are hard to separate. And by that we mean that there's not a lot of power going spare here. In fact there's not enough to do the kind of tasks that you might expect from a modern machine - you'll be waiting for your videos to output, for you photos to get that final layer of polish and for generally anything that takes serious processing power to do their thing.
As we've already pointed out, HP has built the Pavilion 15 around an AMD APU, and as such it boasts a graphics core that will handle the latest DirectX 11 games. Unfortunately this APU lacks the raw silicon to handle the latest games at anything like smooth framerates. At the highest settings you're looking at single-figure framerates at the screen's native resolution, which means they're going to frustrate more than they're going to entertain.
Of course this is a budget machine, so how does it fare when you knock the settings down a little? Not brilliantly. Even with every setting as low as it will go, you're still looking at less than 20fps in the vast majority of titles in our suite of games, with minimum framerates struggling to enter double figures - which again means that games are just that little bit too sluggish to be truly great.
There is one key difference using this machine compared to using the Lenovo G505 though, and that difference is that this machine is a lot more responsive. While we were generally waiting for the Lenovo for every simple operation to complete, the HP Pavilion 15 felt snappier and notably more responsive. We did prefer the keyboard on the Lenovo machine though, as it simply feels more responsive and more comfortable to type on.
There is some good news for the HP Pavilion 15 though, and that is that the battery life is incredible. In testing under PCMark08, which stresses the machine's capabilities in website creation among other things, you're looking at 5 hours and 22 mins of continued use, which is incredible. When you consider that you should see double this when you're out and about, then you're looking at a system that will last a day's commute easily.
