HP Pavilion x360 11 (2021)  Laptop Review

The HP Pavilion x360 is a small, compact laptop with a fairly basic design. It has a plastic chassis with a brushed silver finish, thick bezels, and downward-firing speakers. It's a fanless device with no airflow vents.

The HP Pavilion x360 has decent build quality. It's entirely plastic except for the metal hinges, with a finish that scratches easily, though not from fingernails. There's some flex in the display, but very little on the keyboard deck, and almost none when the laptop is closed.

The hinge is excellent. It feels smooth, and its 360-degree range lets you flip the display all the way around for use in tablet mode. However, the screen wobbles a bit when typing aggressively or using the laptop on an uneven surface.

The HP Pavilion x360 2-in-1 laptop is a very compact device that's easy to carry around. The power adapter is also small and fits easily into most bags.

The HP Pavilion x360's serviceability is passable. To access the internals, you need to remove the four feet, the screws beneath them, and two additional screws before prying the panel open with a pick. They're all Philips screws, but the ones beneath the feet are slightly different, so it's important to keep them organized. The feet come off easily and stick back on without any issue. The laptop comes with a SATA 3 M.2 drive, but it supports PCIe NVMe SSDs, which are typically faster. Unfortunately, the memory is soldered onto the motherboard and isn't user-replaceable.

• HP Pavilion x360 11 laptop
• 45W power adapter and cord
• Documentation

The HP Pavilion x360 convertible is only available with a 720p IPS panel. Although the resolution seems low, it still looks reasonably sharp because the screen is small. The downside is that you don't get much room for multitasking. The thick bezels are a bit distracting, but that's typical for a laptop in its class. The HP Pavilion x360 14 (2021) is the larger version of this laptop with more screen real estate if you intend to have multiple windows open while multitasking.

The HP Pavilion x360 is only available with a 60Hz display, typical for a low-end productivity-focused laptop. The display's slow response time causes noticeable ghosting, which isn't ideal for gaming or viewing fast-moving content.

The contrast ratio is decent and within the typical range of most IPS panels, but it's still relatively low compared to VA and OLED panels. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings.

The screen brightness is mediocre. It doesn't get bright enough to overcome glare, so it's best suited for a moderately lit room. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness setting, though, which provides a better viewing experience in the dark because it causes less eye strain.

The reflection handling is okay. Its glossy finish does a good job of reducing glare from indirect reflections, but direct reflections like bright light sources are visible and distracting, even with the screen at maximum brightness.

The HP Pavilion x360 has poor black uniformity. There's backlight bleed along the top edge, as well as some IPS glow at the bottom left and top right corners.

The HP Pavilion x360 has an acceptable horizontal viewing angle. The image looks dimmer and more washed out when viewing from the side, but it's still good enough for sharing the screen with someone else as long as perfect accuracy isn't needed.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. The image remains accurate from slightly above or below, so you have some leeway to tilt the screen to your preference before the image quality degrades.

The HP Pavilion x360 2-in-1 has poor color accuracy out of the box. Most colors are inaccurate due to the panel's narrow color gamut, and it also displays colors outside of the sRGB color space, like pure green. The white balance is off, especially at higher brightness levels, and the color temperature is warm, giving the whole image a slight reddish tint. The gamma is not bad and follows the sRGB curve for the most part, although dark scenes are over-darkened.

The HP Pavilion x360 has a poor color gamut. It doesn't even have full coverage of the commonly-used sRGB color space, so most content looks washed out. It also has very limited coverage of the wider color spaces like Adobe RGB, DCI P3, and Rec. 2020, making it unsuitable for color-critical work or viewing HDR content.

The backlight is only flicker-free when the screen is set to maximum brightness. However, the flickering below maximum brightness is extremely high and isn't be visible to most people.

The keyboard is sub-par. It provides a decent typing experience as the keys are stable, have a good amount of travel, and don't require much force to actuate. However, it takes a while to get used to the tight spacing. There's also no backlighting, making it hard to use in dim settings.

The touchpad is okay. It feels smooth even though it's plastic, and it tracks accurately throughout, even around the edges. It's on the small side, though, making any action over long distances like dragging and dropping somewhat annoying.

The speakers are good. They get pretty loud with very little dynamic compression at max volume; however, they're treble-heavy because they have almost no bass. They're good for spoken content, but not for music or movies where you'd expect a deep, thumping sound.

The HP Pavilion x360 has a decent webcam. The image is good, with decent color reproduction, but it looks soft and overexposed. Voices sound clear though slightly nasal over the microphone, with very little background noise.

The HP Pavilion x360 2-in-1 has a decent port selection. The two USB-A ports support the USB 3.2 Gen 1 (up to 5Gbps data transfer rate) standard. The USB-C is also USB 3.2 Gen 1, and you can only use it for data transfer, meaning you can't use it to charge the laptop or for video output.

The wireless adapter is a Realtek RTL8821CE.

The HP Pavilion x360 11 is only available with an Intel Pentium Silver N5030 CPU, a low-power 4-core, 4-thread processor designed for thin and light laptops. It can provide a relatively smooth experience when performing simple tasks like web browsing and video playback, but don't expect to do anything remotely demanding like gaming, video editing, or 3D rendering.

Intel UHD Graphics 605 is an integrated GPU on the Intel Pentium Silver N5030 chip. Like most integrated graphics, it's only powerful enough for light productivity tasks. You can likely play some easy-to-run puzzle games from the Windows Store, but not modern AAA titles.

You can only get the HP Pavilion x360 11 with 4GB of RAM. This is only enough for a light workload, so you have to be fairly conservative in the number of apps you have running simultaneously. Unfortunately, the memory is soldered onto the motherboard and isn't user-upgradeable.

You can only configure the HP Pavilion x360 convertible with a 128GB M.2 SATA 3 SSD. However, the storage drive is user-replaceable, and you can also increase storage space with a microSD card.

The HP Pavilion x360 performs poorly in Geekbench 5. Its low single-thread, multi-thread, and GPU compute scores mean it can only handle light tasks like web browsing, video playback, and text formatting. Depending on your workload, you might even experience some stutters or freezes if you have too many programs running simultaneously.

The Intel Pentium Silver N5030 performs badly in Cinebench R23, scoring very low in the single and multi-thread tests. It isn't ideal for any rendering or other related tasks.

The Intel Pentium Silver N5030 performs awfully in Blender, taking far too long to render the simple bmw27 scene to be helpful for any practical purposes. Blender doesn't support the integrated GPU; however, it'll likely take longer than the CPU to complete the same scene.

The Basemark GPU score is terrible. You can only play some simple puzzle-like games, and even then, you'll likely have to play at the lowest graphical settings.

The HP Pavilion x360's storage drive performs well. It's fast enough to make the system boot up quickly and feel responsive, but its somewhat slow sequential write speed means it can take a while to copy large files or install a big program. If you want better storage drive performance to transfer large files or make the system feel more responsive, the M.2 slot supports PCIe NVMe SSDs, which are typically much faster than the SATA 3 SSD that comes with the laptop.

The HP Pavilion x360 has mediocre battery life. It doesn't quite last a full eight hours of light productivity, so you likely have to plug it in at some point. Video playback consumes more power, but you can still comfortably get through two or three full-length movies. Battery life is even shorter when gaming, although it's still better than most laptops. Battery life varies greatly depending on usage.

Borderlands 3 doesn't run on the HP Pavilion x360. The game crashes on startup on DirectX 11 and 12.

Civilization VI doesn't run at high graphical settings, and it only works in DirectX 11 because the game crashes on DirectX 12. It isn't playable with the graphics settings at minimum because the average frame rate is too low.

CS:GO runs terribly on the HP Pavilion x360. The average frame rate is in the single digits whether at high or low graphical settings, far too choppy for an FPS game that requires precise aiming.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs at high graphical settings, but it's so laggy that even navigating the main menu is hard. Also, we had to run the game in DirectX 11 because it kept crashing in DirectX 12. The average frame rate at the lowest graphical setting is also far too low to be playable.

The HP Pavilion x360 has excellent thermal and noise handling. There's no fan noise because this is a fanless laptop, and the keyboard deck only gets slightly warm, although the hot spot isn't in the best position as it's close to where most people rest their left hand.

The HP Pavilion x360's performance over time is disappointing. The CPU and GPU throttle even though their temperatures are relatively low. Most processors can run at a much higher temperature without the risk of damage, so this is likely to keep the keyboard deck at a reasonable temperature.

The HP Pavilion x360 11 has Windows 11 in S mode pre-installed. S mode is a stripped-down version of Windows that typically runs smoother on low-end hardware because it requires fewer system resources, but you can only install apps from the Windows Store. You can opt-out of S mode free of charge, but you can't go back to it once you've activated the full version of the operating system.

The HP Pavilion x360 11 comes with many pre-installed applications, including:

• Amazon: App for Amazon.com marketplace.
• B&O Audio Control: Lets you customize the internal speakers' sound profile.
• Booking.com: App for travel booking service.
• Dropbox: App for cloud storage service.
• HP Documentation: Contains warranty information, regulatory, safety, and environmental notices, and the user guide.
• HP Enhanced Lighting: Lets you adjust the light emitted from the laptop's display to improve image quality during video calls.
• HP Privacy Settings: Lets you choose the type of information you share with HP.
• HP QuickDrop: Lets you transfer files wirelessly between your PC and mobile device.
• HP Smart: Companion app for HP printers.
• HP Support Assistant: Helps with system updates and troubleshooting of common issues. Connects user with HP Virtual Agent for further troubleshooting.
• HP System Event Utility: Allows users to program special function keys or shortcuts, like turning the wireless on and off and adjusting the screen brightness.
• HP Impreza Pen: Support app for the HP Tilt Pen.
• LastPass: Password manager.
• McAfee Personal Security: Antivirus/Anti-malware software application.
• Minecraft Education Edition: Special edition of Minecraft designed for classroom use.
• myHP: Online store for HP products.
• Microsoft Office: 30-day trial of Microsoft's Office Suite. Some models include a 1-year subscription.

Although there's a large number of pre-installed applications, they don't use up much system resources in the background and are removable.