HP Laptop 15S - Nuclear Review

Originally published in mid-2024. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video available at youtube.com/@NuclearNotebook.

This is the HP 15S, and if infomercials are to be believed, this is America’s favourite laptop from America’s favourite laptop manufacturer. Um, OK.

Sharing space at the bottom of HP’s range with the oddly-similar and similarly-oddly-named “HP 255” and “HP Laptop 15”, this is a very typical cheap plastic slab equipped with a 15.6” display and a set of low-end components.

This unit we have here includes an AMD Ryzen 5500U, 8GB of RAM, and half a terabyte of SSD storage.

Anyway, more on all of that later.

This is a very typical clamshell laptop design with a drop-hinge, ports around the sides, and convential keyboard and trackpad arrangement.

In this generic silver, it’s not particularly exciting to look at, but you could argue that’s a good thing.

An unusual but greatly appreciated design feature is upward-firing speakers, although this does come at the expense of kicking the keyboard a little too far forward and squashing the trackpad as a result.

The underside of the laptop is very well-designed, with wide rubber feet and absolutely nothing that can dig annoyingly into your lap. Happy days.

Dimensions are decently compact, measuring in pretty much right on average for a 15”-class machine at 240mm x 360mm x 20mm, and it’s pretty lightweight as well with the tiny power brick barely adding anything to the total weight.

That low weight probably isn’t a good sign, but I think you know what to expect.

In The Box

Included in the mostly recyclable packing is the laptop itself, a tiny 45-watt power brick, and a fancy sealed envelope adding a few moments of wholly unnecessary pomp and circumstance to the underwhelming reveal of a small setup guide and warranty information.

When new, this laptop arrived with a non-functional webcam, and sharp little moulding lines on various edges around the casing - dead giveaways of the sort of build quality we’re dealing with here.

External Interface Extravaganza

Connectivity is just about standard for this class of laptop, although thankfully, this one is not infected with any USB 2.0 ports.

Unfortunately HDMI is still 1.4B so it can’t do 4K at 60Hz.

The USB type-A ports are both mounted to a replaceable daughterboard, so if these broke or wore out they’d be easy enough to replace.

The same goes for the audio minijack and SD card reader, and even the DC-in jack is modular.

I do like serviceability, so bonus points for HP here.

Input Devices

The all-plastic clickpad-style trackpad is completely fine to use. It tracks fine, the click feels fine, and the lack of any rattling or other anomalies is fine too.

There is a full-sized keyboard sitting above the trackpad. It exists, has a number pad, and looks nice.

With the positives out of the way, this thing is absolutely horrible to type on.

The long travel is wasted on scissor mechanisms that are disconcertingly unstable, there’s no backlight, and the key markings are completely invisible in some lighting conditions.

It rattles like an absolute bastard during normal use, and the rattliness varies depending on where you’re pressing the keys.

While there is a deliciously shiny metal backplate reinforcing the keyboard deck, the whole assembly is only held in by small, sparse plastic welds, in a way that leaves it feeling loose and, well, rattly.

Special shoutout to the factory employee or angry robot who decided to take out years of frustration on this plastic sheet, though.

The palm rest is backed by plastic with some efforts made from the top and bottom to reinforce the area, with complex mouldings dotting the two plastic assemblies.

These attempts at reinforcement do nothing. This laptop is insanely, comically squishy. It’s like a big silver marshmallow.

Hinges

Display hinges are wound tight enough that it’s not possible to open the lid one-handed, requiring 875 grams or 8.58 newtons of force to lift from fully closed.

The display then requires 380 grams (3.7N) to move from a 90 degree angle, but it’s very floppy when it’s open, which points to at least one structural deficiency somewhere.

Predictable? Yes. Disappointing anyway? Yes.

Having a look from inside, the brackets in the base unit only distribute the load over a relatively small area, and given how thin an floppy the keyboard deck is this isn’t reassuring in the least.

Inside the lid, there’s what actually looks to be a competent setup – fairly wide hinges bolt into the bottom of the lid, and long L-shaped metal brackets reach up beside the LCD panel and screw into the top of the lid to help spread out the load.

Despite HP’s efforts to beef things up a little, the soft materials, use of only 3 screws per side, and loose tolerances still conspire against a potentially decent design here, and this area looks to be the primary source of that display wobble.

It’s worth noting that the LCD is bonded to the plastic lid with double sided tape, and not the friendly pull-tab variety, so you would almost certainly damage the display if you ever needed to replace the lid.

Display

Speaking of that display, aside from the barely-acceptable 1080P resolution, it’s an absolute shitshow.

Things like contrast ratios, the basic sRGB colour gamut, or even just acceptable brightness are concepts yet to be introduced to this display, and being the worst sort of TN LCD panel, viewing angles are so bad that your eyes constantly feel like they’re out of phase with each other.

It’s hard to adequately convey how bad this sort of screen is on camera, but I’m going to assume everybody has encountered one of these before and understands the pain.

Screens of this caliber aren’t just a compromise, they are genuinely difficult to look at for long periods as your eyes constantly struggle to refocus due to the intense instability of the image.

This is not acceptable at any price, and HP should be ashamed of themselves for fitting this garbage to a more-than 700-dollar laptop. They won’t be though, and they’ll probably do it again.

Webcam & Microphones

Mounted above the display is the usual webcam and stereo microphones.

HP doesn’t think you deserve a privacy shutter, but since the webcam doesn’t work anyway, we’ll just assume it’s crap, and move on.

Internal Speakers & Audio Software/Settings

The sound system installed in this machine is the usual 2-channel, 2-speaker setup, and – saints be praised – HP has had the good sense to mount the speakers facing upwards, just under the display. Lovely.

Speaker drivers themselves are nice-looking little units with 15mm Mylar cones and rolled rubber surrounds mounted in reasonably large enclosures.

Responsible for driving these is a Realtek ALC3247 chip which seems to be predominantly used in HP systems.

I was unable to find a datasheet for this one, so rated power output for the headphone and internal speaker amplifiers are anyone’s guess, but – subjectively - while the audio system has very decent sound quality the output volume is a little weak through both the internal speakers and headphone jack.

Not bad, not great.

Wifi

The socketed WiFi chip is a pretty crappy Azurewave dual-band unit which only supports the old WiFi AC standard and Bluetooth 5.0.

Storage

The included storage is an HP-specific Phison half-terabyte PCIE 4 SSD, despite the fact that this laptop only supports PCIE 3.

This unit uses a Phison PS5019-E19 with no DRAM cache, and two Toshiba TLC NAND flash chips.

Read: 3472.97 Write: 2419.95

Peak read and write speeds are pretty much maxing out the PCIE 3 bus the drive is connected to, so that’s something.

There’s no slot for a second SSD and no coldplate or thermal pad applied to the included drive to assist with heat transfer.

Software – Power/Temp controls

HP have sensibly decided to integrate power profiles with Windows, so you might be wondering what exactly the MyHP software does, once you’ve managed to tell the various privacy policy warnings to bugger off enough times on the way in

The answer is absolutely nothing.

That being the case, this pointless potential malware should be deleted, along with all of the other HP-branded junk bundled onto these machines.

On that note, the crapware loadout on this machine is insane. None of this is useful and quite frankly if this were my main machine I’d be nuking the SSD and starting from scratch.

I felt like I was constantly being nagged to buy something while using this machine that I’d already paid for and that’s completely unacceptable, but coming from the company that wants to force everybody to subscribe to a printer, it’s nothing new.

Battery & Power Draw

Power draw on the 15S is very low.

At idle in Balanced mode while plugged in, as measured from the power outlet, the machine uses around 7.5 watts, and when running flat-out with the CPU fully loaded up, this increases to around 31 watts.

The 41 watt-hour battery fitted to this unit is still reporting 41 watt-hours of capacity after calibrating over a few charge cycles. This will gradually drop with use but it’s off to a good start.

With the display set to its very low maximum brightness, and sitting idle on the Windows desktop, the 15S managed an underwhelming 6 hours 53 hours of runtime.

During my usual heavy Internet usage test which is wildly unscientific it quit after 4 hours 50 minutes. Dismal.

Charging from empty, the battery takes 37 minutes to hit 50%, 1 hour to hit 80%, and is full after just over 2 hours (2:03).

When it finally wears out, the battery is a bit of a bitch to get to, as the HP 15S hides 6 screws under the rubber feet on the baseplate, which is also held on by a large number of aggressive clips.

After that, the battery is only held in by six screws, and uses a very nice fixed socket instead of a ribbon cable to connect to the mainboard.

Processor

The good-looking little processor forever trapped in this thing is the misleadingly-named Ryzen 5 5500U.

We were caught off-guard by that name while buying this one and assumed this was a Ryzen 5000-series chip, which would mean Zen 3 architecture. Nope, that’s a lie, so thanks very much for that AMD.

In reality, this is an up-branded Zen 2-based Ryzen 5 4600U, and thankfully that’s not really the end of the world.

This is a 6-core, 12-thread part built on TSMC’s 7-nanometer process and should be extremely power-efficient.

The densely-packed little VRM arrangement providing power to the chip looks to be a 2+1 phase setup which suggests a very low-wattage setup.

Graphics

The integrated GPU is a Radeon RX Vega 7, with 448 shaders running at a maximum of 1.8GHz.

These Vega iGPUs are starting to show their age now but despite only limited support for modern APIs it’s still definitely a highlight of this chip.

Memory

RAM supplied with this unit is boring old DDR4-3200, in this case a single 8GB SODIMM provided by everyone’s favourite brand RAMAXEL, using Samsung memory modules.

This RAM is fully socketed, with one free slot enabling you to double it to 16GB and enable dual-channel mode. Hallelujah.

Cooling System

The system tasked with extracting heat from the SOC is a tiny little single-heatpipe setup with a very small fin arrangement, weighing in at only 26 grams without the fan. Less weight means less thermal mass to absorb heat spikes so this system heavily relies on the fan to dissipate heat even in short workloads.

The copper heat spreader has a reasonably smooth finish & is held down with four screws for good pressure distribution, but there is no contact with the VRM components.

Providing airflow is a tiny little fan built by Delta Electronics. Airflow intake is provided both through vents in the bottom case and from above through the keyboard, via a surprisingly nicely-finished secondary vent.

When it does kick up, that fan is reasonably quiet, so while it’s constantly there it’s at least not too distracting.

Power Delivery, Temperature

Laptops in this class are probably not intended for heavy workloads or gaming but that doesn’t mean we can’t be mean to it to see what happens.

Kicking things off, I’ve subjected it to a 30-minute stress test running Cinebench R23 on a loop while the laptop sits flat on a desk in its highest performance mode.

Since there’s no separate GPU, I haven’t run a GPU test at the same time, so 100% of the power budget will be aimed at the processor cores.

CPU package power starts off boosting to a promising 25 watts but rapidly deflates to 15, which is the lowest sustained power level I’ve ever seen in a laptop this big. HP seems to be REALLY keen on limiting what you can do without giving them more money.

Core temperatures are, unsurprisingly, kept well under control despite the barely-there cooling system. After a brief spike up to a low 80 degrees it settles at just over 60 for the rest of the run.

Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the price for the low power and low temperatures is core frequency. The CPU can only hang onto 2.5GHz even with just the CPU cores themselves fired up, which will drop further when the GPU is loaded at the same time since they dynamically share the same power budget.

Given that we’re dealing with an extremely low-power SOC, you’d probably expect VRM temperatures to remain low, and you’d be right – all of the components stay in the low 50s even after a sustained load.

Likewise, as you’d expect, exterior surface temperatures are kept right under control, with generally negligible temperature increases on both the top and bottom.

None of this is impressive, since a Steam Deck can dissipate 15 watts like it’s nothing, and there are no bonus points just for avoiding failure.

Performance

Interestingly, that aging 6-core Ryzen 5 is capable of outperforming Intel’s 8-core i3-N305 while using 3-5 watts less power.

That’s certainly something, but it still only positions this chip at somewhere around half to a third of the current state-of-the-art in low-power CPUs.

It even gets completely smoked in the usual canned benchmarks by Apple’s now-4-year-old M1, fitted to a MacBook Air that doesn’t even have a fan.

General Use

Nonetheless, in normal use, this system feels surprisingly snappy and responsive, showing none of the offputting lagginess of the i3-N305.

If most of the other parts didn’t suck, it probably wouldn’t be a bad little web browsing machine, but I’d rather stick a fork in my eye than spend any time reading or watching videos on this thing.

Gaming

The integrated Radeon Vega GPU definitely suggests that this machine could handle some gaming, if you actually wanted to on the crap keyboard and horrific display, but the actual performance varies enormously depending on RAM configuration.

AMD’s little old Vega integrated GPUs really do punch above their weight when they’re given enough memory bandwidth, so while modern benchmarks still look like slideshows either way, there’s a little bit of actual gaming performance here with Dying Light almost managing to hit 60FPS with a second RAM chip installed.

Still. You know. Don’t. Yuck.

Conclusion

So what do I think of this as an overall system?

Straight to the point this time: while upgradability & serviceability are acceptable, the HP 15S skimps so severely on two of the most fundamentally important parts – display and keyboard – that using it is an insult to your senses, and hard corners and jagged edges around the palmrest attempt to slice into you during normal use.

Since this laptop has hurt my eyes, skin and feelings, and quality control didn’t even extend to checking if the webcam worked at the factory, I’m rating this one the maximum of 5 sad laptops and giving it the inaugural NuclearNotebook Certified Complete Crap award.

Congratulations.