If you’re on the market to find a new gaming laptop you’ve probably heard about the 2019 Acer predator Helios 300. It’s one of the best laptops that you can buy right now for $1000, but recently we had an opportunity to test the new 2019 HP Pavilion 15 gaming which to our surprise turned out to be an absurdly good, but really strange laptop. Do you wonder which one is the better choice? In this review you will find the answer, so make sure to read it to the end, and find out about all the pros and cons of both laptops.
General Info
| Acer Predator Helios 300 2019 | HP Pavilion Gaming 15 | |
| $ | CHECK PRICE | CHECK PRICE |
| Series | Predator Helios 300 | Pavilion 15-EC |
| Brand | Acer | HP |
| Type | Gaming Laptop | Gaming Laptop |
| Weight | 2.7 Kg | 2.19 kg |
| OS | Windows 10 Home 64 Bit | Windows 10 Home |
| Display | 15.6 Inch | 15.6 Inch |
| Type | Laptop | Laptop |
If it comes to design the HP Pavilion is a pretty clean looking device for a gaming laptop. The lid is made of black plastic with only shiny green HP logo in the middle. The deck is also plastic and i like that there are no any colorful fancy accents. The laptop doesn’t catch the fingerprints so easily as Predator, so it is easier to keep it clean. Above the keyboard you can find up firing speakers covered by a great looking perforated area. The back looks nice as well, but the hinge on the center makes the screen a little bit more flexy.
The Predator is the winner if it comes to build quality. It feels more premium and solid as the lid and deck are made of metal. On the other hand it looks more fancy. On the lid you can find blue accents and the Predator logo that lights up blue. Inside there is blue accenting on the touchpad and on some of the keys. The back of 2019 Predator looks awesome – we love the triangular exhausts with blue heat sinks inside. Despite the matt texture of the deck, fingerprints show very easily, but they are easy to wipe away.
If it comes to dimensions the Predator is slightly smaller, but the HP Pavilion is about 150g lighter thanks to plastic build. we had no problem carrying any of these laptops and both can fit in the regular bag with ease.
Display
| Acer Predator Helios 300 2019 | HP Pavilion Gaming 15 | |
| Display Type | Anti-glare | Anti-glare |
| Display Size | 15.6 Inches | 15.6 Inches |
| Display Resolution | 1920 x 1080 Pixels | 1920 x 1080 Pixels |
| Display Touchscreen | No | No |
| Colour | Abyssal Black | Shadow Black |
If it comes to display unfortunately we had two laptops with different panels. The Predator had a 144Hz display and the Pavilion was 60Hz. we found our 60Hz, 1080p IPS HP Pavilion very good for gaming, but we can also recommend it for content creation. The 60Hz panels usually have very poor color reproduction, but in this case, it’s different. You have 100% of sRGB color gamut, 78% of AdobeRGB, and the brightness is 295 nits. Of course no G-Sync here and we actually found the screen tearing to be more noticeable here than in other 60Hz laptops.
Our Predator has a 1080p 144Hz 3ms response time IPS panel without G-Sync. It’s much smoother than 60Hz, but we were pretty sure that there is no really big difference between Pavilion’s optional 144Hz panel and the Predator that we’ve got here. The colors are very vivid and sharp, and the display has a perfectly balanced cold tone. It can reproduce 97% of the sRGB color gamut, 75% of AdobeRGB, and the brightness is 315 nits. we think that the games look perfect and any kind of color current work can be done on this laptop without a problem. However, there was one thing that was not perfect. we found screen bleeding which was also slightly noticeable during normal use when the content on the screen was black.
Specification
| Helios 300 2019 | HP Pavilion Gaming 15 | |
| Processor Name | Intel Core i7-9750H (9th Gen) | Ryzen 5 Quad Core (AMD) |
| Graphics | NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1660 Ti | NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1650 |
| Dimensions | 390 x 266 x 26.75 mm | 360 x 256 x 23.4 mm |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 RAM | 8 GB |
| Storage | 1 TB / 256 SSD | 1 TB / 128 SSD |
Let’s talk about Predator first. You can get it with the GTX 1660Ti, RTX 2060, or RTX 2070 Max-Q. If it comes to the processor it’s available with 6-core i7-9750H or 4-core i5-9300H. As a default, the 2019 Predator comes with a 144hz display, but we’ve heard about 60hz models too depending on the country. The most popular GTX 1660Ti model is well known for the best price to performance ratio out there, but if that’s not enough it was few times on sale for $999 on Amazon.
The 2019 HP Pavilion has a wider range of configurations if it comes to the budget segment. The GTX 1660Ti Max-Q is actually the strongest option here. For the processor, you can choose between i7-9750H and i5-9300H. Since this is a budget laptop it’s worth mentioning that the GTX 1650 model has a pretty good price that may suit some of you, but the GTX 1660Ti is usually the point where you don’t pay much more money and the performance increases drastically, especially that it’s usually paired with the i7 like in this case.
Performance
| Helios 300 2019 | HP Pavilion Gaming 15 | ||
| Clockspeed | 4.5 Ghz | 2.1 Ghz | |
| Graphic Processor | GeForce | GeForce | |
| Processor | GTX 1660 Ti | GTX 1650 | |
| Graphic Ram | 6 GB | 4 GB |
Multimedia
| Helios 300 2019 | HP Pavilion Gaming 15 | ||
| Web-cam | 720p HD Webcam | HP TrueVision HD Webcam | |
| Speakers | Dual Speakers | Built-in Dual Speakers | |
| Microphone Jack | Yes | Yes | |
| Wireless Lan | IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac | Wi-Fi 5 (2×2) | |
| Bluetooth | v5.0 | v5.0 | |
| Memory Slots | Yes | Yes | |
| HDMI Ports | Yes | Yes | |
| Ethernet Ports | Yes | Yes |
If it comes to sound we find both laptops equal. They have noticeably more bass than many other devices and we were surprised how clear was the sound. In both cases on stock settings, it had a lot of detail and depth without really big distortion on the highest volumes. To equalize the sound in Predator you have Waves MaxxAudio software. Pavilion uses Bang & Olufsen Audio Control.
Battery
| Helios 300 2019 | HP Pavilion Gaming 15 | |
| Battery Cell | 4 Cell | 3 Cell |
| Battery Type | Lithium-Ion Polymer | Lithium-Ion Polymer |
| Power Supply | 180 W AC Adapter | 135 W AC Adapter |
| Battery Life | Upto 7 hours | Upto 3.5 hours |
As for the battery life we managed to use the Predator for up to 6 hours when browsing the web and doing light productivity work. When the gaming battery died after 1.5 hours. The HP was a little bit behind – it ran for up to 5 hours when light work and 1 hour when gaming.
Which is better!
Alright, it seems to be everything that you need to know to wisely choose one of these laptops, but before we finish let us share our closing thoughts. So if it comes to the 2019 Acer Predator Helios 300 we think that the biggest advantage of it is the price. For just over $1000 you’re getting the specs and features that you can find in $400 more expensive laptops. It has a premium metal build, smooth 144Hz 3ms response time display with good color accuracy, and a great cooling system. Compared to HP Pavilion it performs better, it allows you to control the fan speed and overclock the GPU in the software, the keyboard is better and more practical, it’s easier to upgrade and you can buy it with up to RTX 2070 Max-Q.
On the other hand, we have the 2019 HP Pavilion 15 Gaming which thanks to power-efficient GPU and limiting the CPU power is probably the quietest gaming laptop on the market. It runs much cooler than the vast majority of gaming laptops and the trade-off which is the performance is not really big. we think that Pavilion looks cleaner than Predator, it’s a little bit lighter and the plastic build doesn’t feel cheap at all. Considering that it’s a budget brand from HP we have to admit that they didn’t cheap out on the features. The 60Hz version has very good color reproduction and brightness. It was actually as same good as Predator’s 144Hz display if it comes to colors. Pavilion costs slightly less than Predator and it has even cheaper GTX 1650 configurations. However, it usually comes with only 8GB of RAM.
