Overview
This HP laptop is filled with AMD components instead of the much more prefered Intel CPU/Nvidia GPU, or Intel CPU/Intel GPU combo. There are many who still prefer the higher cores offered by AMD to the more rigid hyper-threading CPU’s which Intel puts out.
Honestly, this laptop does a great job providing you don’t throw something like Skyrim Max settings at it. What I would call low impact gaming, is perfect and thanks to the 4 cores it can handle modern day multi-tasking in all it’s multi-tabbed and multi-application glory.
2 TB of HDD storage is a straight up win and fits the profile of this laptop perfectly. It isn’t a gaming laptop, it’s an anything and everything laptop. Perfect when you know that other junk will be thrown on there as well.
I’m picturing a young professional who initially picks up the laptop for work based purposes, but finds it can also handle a few turns of Total War on medium settings while on the train to and from work. Great for a more casual gamer who’s number one priority is not to splash the cash with the intention of buying a power hungry monster.
Battery Life
Speaking of power, the battery life is pretty decent. Nowadays it’s quite rare to get the full displayed battery life out of a laptop. I’m not entirely sure what HP’s benchmarkers are using when they test battery life, 8 hours. 8 hours of what? Solitaire…? Nethertheless, in tests it ran a reasonable time of just under 6 hours messing around on Diablo 3. Expect this to get worse as time goes on, but that is the case for any laptop.
Screen
The 15-ba047na boasts a 15.6 inch screen which means it still retains portability and it has an anti-glare panel for those who… game outside, in the sun??? It’s a less useful feature than I think HP were hoping for especially for those of us in England where the problem of the sun being bright enough that we can’t see the on screen enemy is a pipedream not based in reality. However, all that being said it’s like the sidearm pistol in every shooter ever made. Practically useless 99% of the time, but there will be that one time you crack it out and you’ll think “YES, THIS!” and feel like an absolute boss.
Limitations
8 GB of RAM is standard affair really ensuring that this will not become your bottleneck which restricts performance. In this machine it is far more likely to be the GPU which holds you back, the integrated AMD Radeon R7 with 512 mb does a decent enough job as stated. However, do not buy this machine expecting it to handle the very latest games at the very max settings. Not going to happen.
Just a small word on the build quality of this device. When picked up and given a rattle, there is… well a rattle. This revelation is tempered somewhat by the fact that you shouldn’t really be picking up your laptop to give it a shake. But the test was inexplicably performed anyway and the findings reported thus.