HP Pavilion Power 15 vs HP OMEN 17.3" laptop

Mobile Tech Laptops & Netbooks
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I am choosing between two laptops and I have a tough choice of picking between two laptops. The price is similar with the OMEN being a bit more expensive.

Neither come with an SSD (I will add one anyways since not even I can resist SSD speeds). They both have the same CPU (i7 7700 HQ) and the same, odd RAM config (12 GB, WTF, I can change that anyways if I feel that is an issue once RAM prices drop)

HP Pavilion Power is slimmer and weighs about half as much weight (at 4.4 lbs), I actually felt the build quality on this laptop and it was impressive compared to what I expected. Even the keyboard felt decent. The GPU though isn’t particularly powerful, an RX 550 isn’t very powerful at all, I mean it’s a lot better than Intel HD graphics, but RX 550 is probably going to be surpassed by a top tier Raven Ridge APU. Plus only 2 GB of VRAM. As for I/O, not that impressive but it has the bare minimums I need. Laptop I found is around $850 right now.

HP OMEN that I am looking at is only $1080 for a laptop with an RX 580, which is kind of a beast for a laptop to be quite frank (Yes GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 are bigger beasts in performance but that’s beyond the scope of what I can afford, not to mention probably overkill even). The I/O is a bit nuts, I mean a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port even. Has room for an optical drive or another storage drive. I have no idea about the build quality but I am guessing it’s even better than the other laptop. Laptop has programmable buttons and a better touchpad. Downside is that the laptop is more like a portable desktop, as cool as that is, it means battery life is most likely absymal and drains hard with that GPU and CPU. It probably runs hot too even with that aggressive ventilation. And the laptop weighs 8.2 lbs and is extra THICC (1.3"), that is kind of big even by my standards.

I will be using my laptop mostly for regular daily tasks with some occasional gaming maybe, but I will have to run a VM with hardware passthrough to do it since I will be maining Linux, the VM part is kind of why I chose an AMD dGPU, otherwise there would be a bunch more laptops to pick from.

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They are laptops intended for different audiances - and with this comparison you need to decide; are you a gamer or not? I can’t imagine gaming on the Pavilion will bring much joy, it will just feel like too much of a compriomise unless you library is older games or light-weight indy titles. If you buy that and install Linux, why even bother with a pass-thru VM?

I think however that you do have more choice than you think - it is possible to pass-thru nvidia GPU’s when using KVM as the hyper-visor although I don’t believe sucess is guarenteed. You could of course buck against the trend and simply run your Linux workloads in a VM on Windows… I know, I know…

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Depends if the motherboard supports it, while the cpu might support vt-d only vt-x might be available

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Wouldn’t this also be true for both GPU vendors, not just NVidia?

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I do play games, but the games I have played were at very low settings on Intel HD graphics but I still managed to pull 30 FPS barely in most of them. I imagine even though the RX 550 ain’t great that the GPU would perform much better still than Intel HD graphics or even R7/Iris graphics.

I think battery life might be more important of a metric than performance mayhaps although for VMs I gotta have some threads so the CPU is pretty much good where it’s at considering.

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It sounds like the pavillion meets your requirements. The 7700HQ is fine for running some VM’s. It performs as well as older desktop i7’s and under-volts well (I have mine with a -0.165v) which means it doesn’t break 70 degress C.

Does the pavillion have TB3? That would allow expansion with an eGPU, or extra storage etc. in future if needed.

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I am almost certain that it does not have Thunderbolt 3, while not required for me, it’s a shame because Thunderbolt 3 is blazing fast. Even USB 3.0 these days for storage speed isn’t very fast when I am backing up hundreds of gigabytes.