Blog

In this article, I give you my HP Envy x360 15 Ryzen (2021) review with specs included. This is the HP Envy x360 15 or 15z specifically which means the AMD Ryzen inside. I always like the Envy line because they sit between the Pavilion, which is a pretty low-end line from HP, and the very pricey Spectre line.

This laptop has things like an aluminum-clad chassis, the usual 360-degree hinges, pen support on board, and more.

HP Envy x360 15 Ryzen (2021) model starts around $659 list price on HP’s website and that gets you a Ryzen 5, eight GB of RAM, a 256 GB SSD, and a Full HD touch and pen compatible display. Not too bad really considering this is a pretty classy chassis, nice design, and all that sort of thing.

The model that I have is a little higher in configuration and the list price is about $999. You’ll probably find it for less. It has 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB SSD, a Ryzen 7, and a Full HD brighter version of the display.

There are two versions of the display with the AMD models. One’s 250-nits and the 400-nit display that I have which is like $80 more. Totally worth the spend I would say unless you work in really dark places all the time. Especially because HP displays are very reflective.

Inside we have AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. I have the Ryzen 7 5700U. It gets a little confusing what Ryzen’s doing with the U-series CPUs in 2021.

Anyway, it’s a 5000-series CPU, which is normally the latest, but some of them, like the 5700 and the 5500, are based on a modified Zen 2 architecture, not the latest Zen 3 architecture. That said, it’s still a good enough CPU.

In terms of thermals and battery life, it’s still doing better than Intel and so it’s desirable nonetheless. Even it’s not the ultimate fastest, it’s a great price. I mean, we’re talking about an eight percent difference in performance between this and a Zen 3 architecture. It’s not something you want to worry about if you need to save some money.

Speaking of Intel, there is an Intel model which is the 15T (which is typical for HP lingo with their Z’s for AMD and Ts for Intel). That one is also available with the 4K 400 nit IPS display. All the displays are IPS on this model.

So, if you really have to have a 4K display you’re going to have to go with Intel and spend some more money too. It’s available with Core i5 and Core i7 Intel 11th-gen Tiger Lake U-series CPUs.

Since this is basically a big ultrabook, a 15-inch convertible, which is pretty typical for convertibles, you’re looking at AMD Radeon graphics or if you got the Intel version you’d have Iris Xe graphics. There’s really no room for a dedicated GPU in here. Again, for this one, they’re keeping the price down.

That said, it’s perfectly fine for things like well content consumption anything can handle that these days. And even for things like doing some photoshop, it’s actually perfectly fine for casual everyday sort of use then. A little bit of video editing i personally prefer h series more powerful CPUs that use 45 watts of power if you’re gonna be serious about doing 4k video editing or something like that.

Build quality on this is pretty good. It’s stamped aluminum chassis. Again it’s nice enough looking in that minimalist way that i think ages well and offends no one. Shows some fingerprints but not a lot. It’s got pretty good structural rigidity on board. The weight is pretty reasonable for a convertible of this size.

Ports are pretty good on this in terms of the number and selection you’ve got. Two usb a ports and those are 10 gigabit per second we have one usbc 10 gigabit per second and no thunderbolt because not intel there’s that. Hdmi 2.0 a headphone jack of course and a full-size sd card slot yay that.

So this is aimed toward consumer content creator type. So that’s nice to have the sd card slot on board. Display on this again we have the full hd 400 nit display. I on hp’s website it says it comes with their magnetically attached active pen which is n trig now called Microsoft pen protocol 2.0 with tilt support.

But we didn’t get the pen in the box. But we’ll show you the one that comes with the spectre. Anyway, hopefully you’ll get a pen in the box if you want one. The display on this subjectively is nice looking and hp says that they calibrated for under delta e of 2.0 which is pretty good and in fact it’s true.

You look at it and you say that’s a nice pleasant display most people enjoy watching content on it. It’s obviously not a super wide gamut and again reflections it’s an annoying thing with hp’s consumer laptops they have plenty of reflections. The pen works decently on this.

Entry is not my favorite but it is catching up with Wacom AES and still not as good as Wacom emr or an apple pencil. But certainly is good for note-taking if you’re editing photos which is the idea with this if you’re doing creative kind of stuff and if you want to do some drawing it’ll do the job for you. In terms of performance it is where we expect it to be.

Which is pretty darn good even if it’s not the apex of what ryzen can do right now. And it holds its own certainly versus intel 11th gen if not outperforming it have been a multi-core test. Not on single-core so much. Anyway it’s a good performer.

And the selling point with ryzen is the fact that it runs cooler and uses less power than seven nanometer process. It does we’ll show you the internals it does even have two fans that’s a lot of cooling actually for this. And uh you’ve got a bunch of powerful profiles to choose from for actually. Anything from what’s called quiet so you must never hear the fans all the way to full performance.

And it’s not typically a noisy laptop nor does it get burning hot to the touch. It’s cooler than most spectres for example which tend to be hot customers. Because they’re pushing the performance and the size and the thinness there more than they do with the envy line.

Speaking of battery life it’s a 51 watt-hour battery which is okay. It’s kind of more standard for a 13-inch ultrabook. But hey it’s not bad and given the fact that we have a fairly powerful platform going on. Hp claims up to 13 hours of battery life and manufacturers claims are optimistic.

But we were doing about nine on this with brightness set to 150 hits mix of productivity streaming video a little bit of creative work in photoshop doing that for about half an hour of the time. It comes with a 65 watt fast charger which can go from empty to 50 full in 30 minutes.

And the 50 to 100 is always slower on laptop charging and phone charging as a matter of fact too to increase battery health. There is a fingerprint scanner embedded in the keyboard deck there is no windows hello ir camera for facial recognition login. But for the price that’s totally fair. The webcam is your usual okay webcam and there is a privacy shutter.

The keyboard is backlit in white and i like the tactile feel of this nice and crispy. Key spring back all that sort of thing not mushy at all. Not in deep travel by any means but nonetheless i found it pleasant to type on. And the track pad is spacious certainly and works just fine.

To take off the aluminum bottom cover there are two visible Torx t5 screws and four two here and two here Phillips head screws that are not visible you have to pull off the rubber strips here. Now if you do it carefully you can leave the adhesive intact other than the occasional cat hair that sticks to it so you can put them back on again. That’s pretty annoying.

But it gets worse because there are some very tenacious clips here. Work around the hinge area first lift it up and then work your way around to get this aluminum cover off. They make you work for it folks which is kind of a shame because this is more upgradable than usual for a 15-inch convertible basically ultrabook.

So here yeah i know it looks like a war zone right because I’ve had to pull up some of the thermal tape. But here are the two fans here which is quite a lot of cooling for something with well basically ultrabook CPU and integrated Radeon graphics.

This is the m.2 SSD slot here so you could upgrade that yourself and that’s not too hard to get to obviously. Pretty small speaker drivers flanking in the 51 watt-hour battery. And we have the socketed wi-fi six card with Bluetooth five which is an intel ax 200 card. So you want to know about this cover right.

So this is the special treat you don’t usually see. And that is and believe me this has a lot of clips too this heat shield here two ram slots. So uh-huh you could upgrade this after the fact if you have the patience and care of a saint to take off this bottom cover.

So that’s the hp ndx 360 15-inch for 2021 with ryzen inside. I applaud what you get for the price honestly and envies usually are a good deal. It’s a nice looking aluminum-clad machine 360-degree hinges pen support touch screen and a pretty good keyboard on this.

And the upgradability if you can tolerate trying to get inside this is really unusually good for a 15-inch convertible ultrabook. I mean you got two ram slots. Of course, your m.2 is socketed and your wi-fi too so. It’s serviceable it’s repairable it’s upgradable once you get inside.