HP Ryzen 5 5500U Laptop (2023) Review:

We’re always looking for the best and cheap laptop in the market, and we might have found the laptop we’ve been looking for. So today, we’re going to review HP’s new budget-friendly laptop with AMD’s latest Ryzen 5000 series processor, and it costs only $399 at the time of this review. In this review, we are going to go over the features, specs, benchmarks, and also do a teardown of this laptop.

We have a HP laptop, 45-watt power adapter, quick start guide, and warranty information.

Specs:

Now let’s look at the specs. The laptop is powered by:

15.6-inch Full HD display

Ryzen 5 5500U processor

8GB RAM

256GB hard drive

AMD Vega 7 graphics

802.11 ac Wi-Fi

Bluetooth

Windows 10 Home edition

And it weighs only 3.75 pounds.

Ports and Webcam:

Now let’s look at the ports. We have:

Two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port

One USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port

One HDMI port

SD card reader

Headphone and audio combo jack

The laptop comes with a 720p resolution camera with dual array microphone. The camera’s picture quality is one of the best we have seen from a budget-friendly laptop. Picture quality was sharp and audio quality was great as well. The overall design is simple and clean, and a smooth plastic body hides fingerprints very well.

Teardown / Upgrade Options:

When it comes to upgradeability, HP allows you to upgrade some of the components, but opening the back cover is really hard, especially when HP is hiding a lot of screws under the rubber strips. And also, opening the back cover is extra hard compared to other manufacturer’s laptops in this category. So you have to be very careful when removing the back cover with proper tools, otherwise you can damage the casing.

Looking at the motherboard, you can replace the existing NVMe hard drive with a bigger or faster hard drive. You can also change the Wi-Fi card to Wi-Fi 6, and you can also upgrade the RAM with max up to 64 GB with available two RAM slots. I would also recommend a dual channel RAM setup, as we know AMD processors’ performance will benefit from dual channel RAM setup.

HP also allows you to configure the laptop with a lot of configuration options that include faster Wi-Fi 6 card, more RAM, and bigger hard drives.

CPU Cooling / Temperatures:

In the CPU cooling, we have a single copper heat pipe with heatsink and single fan. You can hear the fan during general usage, but temperature never crossed 85 degrees Celsius during our test. The CPU fan kicks into higher gear when needed, but enough to keep the laptop temperature under control during gaming or CPU intensive workloads.

Design and Build Quality:

Now let’s talk about design and build quality. Starting at just 3.7 pounds, the laptop is light enough to carry around school or college campus. The laptop offers a clean and modern look. The body is all plastic with good attention to detail. First impressions from visual standpoint are very good. There are some flex in the body around keyboard, but the overall build quality is good for its price point. The construction does not feel cheap, and the body will be able to withstand general day-to-day usage.

Display and Features:

The 15.6-inch Full HD display has thin bezels on the side, but the top and bottom part of the bezels are little thick. There’s a nice black carbon fiber-like textured plastic on the bezels which gives the screen a nice standard look. But the screen needs a little help from another hand when opening the lid up.

The visuals are handled by integrated AMD Vega graphics. Watching YouTube or Netflix content looks really good, producing good color and contrast. And this display works very well in low light conditions. The screen brightness comes in around 250 nits. Also, the viewing angles are good, and I really appreciate very low to no screen glare at all.

Keyboard and Touchpad:

The keyboard is okay for its price point and provides a good tapping experience. The pressure point is not noticeable, provides clicky feedback, and a decent key travel. The key size and arrangements are very good, and there’s no backlight keyboard option here. The touchpad is also regular size and it feels good during general usage. It makes a solid clicking sound and during web browsing, it worked without any problem.

Performance:

Now let’s talk about performance. Our laptop is equipped with AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor. The processor is based on AMD Ryzen 7 nanometer Zen 2 technology with 6 cores and 12 threads, with base clock speed of 2.1 gigahertz and a maximum clock speed of 4 gigahertz. This processor is used in mainstream and 2-in-1 laptops. Its performance is sufficient for everyday general usage, office tasks, and some gaming. It can also handle very well some more demanding tasks such as video editing.

This laptop can run a 4K video file samples at high bitrate flawlessly without any lag or problem.

During our video editing test in Adobe Premiere Pro, we were able to load 4K video clips and while scrubbing around, it was able to handle it without any problem. And it finished the 4K video clip encoding with decent speed. But I would recommend 16GB or more RAM for video editing.

The Ryzen 5 5500U processor scores 7085 points in Cinebench multi-thread CPU performance benchmark and 110 points in single core test running at 2.1 gigahertz, which falls in line with our previous Ryzen 5500U processor test and provides good improvement over previous generation Ryzen 4000 series and much better than comparable Intel CPUs.

And in CPU-Z benchmark, laptop CPU scored 3522 points in multi-thread and 495 points in single thread. The multi-thread score is little lower compared to other similar spec laptops, which is kind of surprising.

Next, in Geekbench CPU benchmark, CPU scored 1110 points in single core and 5134 points in multi-core. Again, multi-core performance is little lower compared to Asus laptop.

Also, in Geekbench GPU benchmark, AMD GPU scored 13,121 points, which is also little less compared to other reviews.

In 3DMark Skydiver benchmark, laptop scored 10,585 points with 51.56 frames per second and 45.75 frames per second in graphic test 1 and 2, and 11,509 in physical score.

Moving on to the hard drive, the 256 GB NVMe laptop hard drive offers great read and write rates. Our unit scored 1929 megabytes per second read and 966 megabytes per second write in SSD benchmark. The fast NVMe SSD makes a tremendous difference in system performance and responsiveness.

Audio and Battery:

Audio: The HP laptop offers top-facing speakers which produce clear sound with good quality. They get loud enough to fill a medium room.

Battery: Looking at the battery, the laptop comes with a 41 watt-hour battery unit which is on the low side, but it provides up to 8 hours of wireless streaming and 7 hours of video playback according to HP, which will be more than enough for students for on-campus projects or taking notes during classes. And laptop comes with a 45-watt power adapter and it is small enough and light enough to carry on the backpack.

Looking at the BIOS, the HP offers standard BIOS options, nothing special to modify like Lenovo. All standard options are optimized for performance so you can leave everything to default.

Final Summary:

Let’s do the final summary. Overall, the HP laptop is a very good budget-friendly machine with no major weak points. The latest AMD Ryzen 5 processor in particular offers better CPU and GPU performance and offers great improvement over its previous generation and much better performance against comparable Intel CPUs. It is also a great budget-friendly gaming machine for casual gamers and powerful enough to handle 4K video editing as well.

From my standpoint, the HP laptop is an excellent buy under $400 and our unit price was $399, which is the best price currently available in the market for this laptop. The overall great performance by AMD processor and NVMe storage provides a super snappy experience. The ability to upgrade the laptop with more RAM and Wi-Fi is also a big plus point and there are plenty of configuration options from HP website.

The only bad part is if you want to upgrade the component, you have to remove the rubber strip in order to access the hidden screws and opening the back panel is really hard. Having said that, I can recommend HP laptop for anyone who’s in the market for a budget-friendly laptop for around $400 which offers excellent performance without breaking the bank.

If you want to buy this laptop, please visit the link below:

https://amzn.to/46Je6fx