14 DAY TRIAL // In case you lack the funds to buy a seriously beefy gaming laptop but want to enjoy playing games backed by some decent computing performance, HP has got you covered. Welcome to the sub-$1000 new Pavilion gaming laptop sitting at $630.
The new Pavilion comes with very budget-friendly GTX 950M and a relatively limited 720p screen, but if you really need those extra 1080p pixels, you can upgrade your laptop for some extra bucks.
However, HP decided to give up any extra screen resolution at request only to make sure that internal specs are the latest generation. Inside the laptop you'll find one of the latest Skylake chips, 1TB of a hybrid drive (half SSD, half HDD) storage and DRAM slots that can go up to 16GB RAM.
To be honest, the GTX 950M isn't really the fastest GPU available but can play flawlessly games like League of Legends, World of Warcraft or DOTA 2 so in case you need some portable computing device that can play these incredibly popular games, you can easily settle on the new Pavilion.
HP's under $900 Pavilion might do the trick for low-budget gamers
However, if you want a more potent gaming machine from HP, you can check out the company's Omen gaming laptop which not only looks a lot sleeker but also comes with a 4K screen and a GTX 960M which is definitely better than the GTX 950M. However, if you think that your budget can't let go of some $1,500, then the GTX 950M at under $1,000 will do just fine.
In our review of the desktop-based GTX 950, we mentioned that the newest graphics adapter from NVIDIA is powerful enough to run the latest games on medium-high settings in 1080p resolutions with decent framerates, offering much better performance overall than the previous NVIDIA 700 generation graphics card champion, the GTX 760.
The new Pavilion will start selling at $630 (€558) in the US starting in November.
