HP Pavilion x360 14m-dh0003dx: A sturdy 2-in-1 with dependable quad-core performance

This sleek convertible laptop has what it takes in terms of day-to-day performance, although we wish it had a bigger battery.

- BEN PATTERSON

The HP Pavilion x360 14 2-in-1 laptop comes in many flavors, and ours (14m-dh0003dx) should please productivity-minded professionals with its smooth quad-core performance and a keyboard that feels great. Given that it’s $700 from Best Buy (go. pcworld.com/pvbb) before discounts (though we’ve recently spotted it for just $560), we would have liked a bit more battery life, though.

CONFIGURATION

HP offers a dizzying array of Pavilion x360 models in 11-, 14-, and 15-inch sizes, with the 14-inch configurations ranging from 8th-gen dual-core Intel Core i3 systems up to 10th-gen Core i7 quad-core Comet Lake CPUs. Here’s what’s under the hood of our middle-of-the-road 14-inch Pavilion x360 14m-dh0003dx):

CPU: Quad-core Intel Core i5-8265U
RAM: 8GB DDR4
GPU: Integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620
Display: 14-inch 1920 x 1080 IPS touchscreen
Storage: 128GB SSD

At first blush, we’ve got the makings of a solid productivity workhorse here, with a quad-core Core i5 Whiskey Lake CPU that should be able to breeze through most daily computing and Office tasks and tackle some CPU-intensive tasks, such as video processing and database work. The 8GB of RAM, typical for a laptop in this price range, should help smooth out multitasking kinks (although 16GB of RAM would be even better), and the full-HD IPS touchscreen should offer reasonably sharp resolution with solid viewing angles.

The 128GB solid-state drive is on the small side, however, leaving you with only about 90GB of storage once Windows, Office, and other miscellaneous apps and utilities are accounted for. Given the cramped SSD, you’d probably want to lean on cloud storage or an external drive.

A similar Pavilion x360 14 is officially $900 on HP.com (go.pcworld.com/14dh) with 12GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, but only $590 with discounts as of press time.

DESIGN