Back in October, we said the 2022 HP Envy 16 passed its legendary Apple and Dell competitors as our top pick among premium laptops for content creators. But those elite desktop replacements came roaring back, with the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro receiving a perfect five-star rating and Editors' Choice honors in January 2023, thanks to a mighty M2 Max processor (and a ridiculous 96GB of RAM and 4TB of storage that pushed our review unit to $5,299). A $2,499 config of the Dell XPS 15 followed with its own Editors' Choice award in May. Now, HP has put the latest silicon into a refreshed Envy 16 (starts at $999.99; $1,749.99 as tested) that scores high in value as a fine option for productivity, creativity, and moderate gaming. However, the Envy seen here has a relatively low-resolution display and is at least a pound overweight, losing its Editors' Choice laurels to what preceded it this year.
Priced Below Last Year
Prices for the 2023 Envy 16 start at $999.99 at HP.com for a unit with a 13th Generation Intel Core i5 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, Windows 11 Home, and Intel Arc A370M graphics. Three screens are available: a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel IPS non-touch panel; a touch screen with the same pixel count ($40 more); and an OLED touch screen with a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution ($170 more). The last is a step down from the 4K OLED panel offered on last year's model, but all three displays now refresh at 120Hz instead of last year's 60Hz refresh rate. This should visibly improve your after-hours gaming.
The memory and storage ceilings are 32GB and 2TB, respectively, with Core i7 and Core i9 CPUs and an 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU heading the upgrade list. Our test unit was a $1,749.99 Best Buy configuration (model 16-h1023dx) with the beefy Core i9-13900H (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads), the GeForce RTX 4060, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and the 2,560-by-1,600 touch screen.
Measuring 0.78 by 14.1 by 9.9 inches and weighing 5.17 pounds, the Envy 16's Natural Silver aluminum chassis is not much heavier than the big-screened MacBook Pro (4.8 pounds). However, it's a bit portly compared with the 16-inch Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra (0.64 by 13.9 by 9.8 inches; 3.9 pounds) and downright ponderous next to the Acer Swift Edge 16 at only 2.6 pounds.
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The Envy 16 feels sleek and sturdy, with almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. HP's laptop screen bezels are thin on the sides and almost as thin at the top and bottom. (The company claims an 88.7% screen-to-body ratio.) While you'll find no fingerprint reader here, the webcam provides IR face recognition for Windows Hello logins.
A USB 3.2 Type-A port joins an audio jack and microSD card slot on the laptop's left side. On the right are another USB-A port, an HDMI monitor port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and the power connector. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle wireless links.
Looking Sharp for Zoom Calls
This laptop's brightly backlit keyboard forgoes a numeric keypad in favor of top-firing speaker grilles on either side. It suffers from HP's trademark arrangement of the cursor arrow keys in a clumsy row (hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right) instead of the correct inverted T, However, it wins points for providing dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys at the far right instead of making you pair the Fn and arrow keys.
The top-row keys like Escape and Delete are puny, but the keyboard has a snappy (if shallow) typing feel. The laptop's large, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and is plenty big enough for multi-finger gestures, though it has a flat, hollow click.
HP included a 5-megapixel webcam that captures well-lit and colorful images with minimal noise or static. It records in resolutions up to 2,560 by 1,440 pixels (16:9 aspect ratio) or 2,592 by 1,728 pixels (3:2 aspect ratio). Plus, the HP Presence app within the MyHP software suite can blur your background or replace it with an image file of your choice. The app does this in a way that's sharper and more effective than most webcam utilities I've seen. Even more, the app provides backlight and low-light adjustment, and it enables the camera to follow you when moving within the frame if teamed up with an additional USB external camera.
The Envy's sound is surprisingly softer than expected given the top-firing speakers, unable to fill a room even at top volume, though the audio is smooth and clear instead of harsh or tinny. Its bass is modest at best but it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. Bang & Olufsen Audio Control software provides AI noise cancellation for voice calls, as well as music, movie, and voice presets; along with an equalizer with bass, treble, and dialog boosters.
HP's touch glass catches room reflections, but the 16:10 aspect ratio display makes for wide viewing angles and decent contrast. Its colors aren't super vivid but rich and well-saturated, and the white backgrounds are clean instead of grayish or dingy. (However, the screen doesn't tilt back as far as I'd like.) The panel's brightness is fine and details are sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters.
Testing the 2023 HP Envy 16: A Creative Confrontation
For deeper testing, we chose top-shelf laptops for creative apps to run through our benchmark comparisons, led by the 15.6-inch Dell XPS 15 and 16.2-inch Apple MacBook Pro. Two others match the HP's 16-inch screen size but opt for OLED technology: the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra and the lightweight, AMD Ryzen 7-based Acer Swift Edge 16, the only entrant to undercut not only the Envy's weight but its price at $1,499.99.
Productivity and Creation Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
That Core i9 sure packed a punch in these tests. It didn't overpower the muscular M2 Max-equipped MacBook Pro, but the Envy aced these benchmarks, more than doubling the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicates excellent productivity for routine tasks like those of the Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace suites. While the HP Envy 16 topped only one other test in our Cinebench rundown, it proved more than enough strength for photo or video editing.
Graphics, Gaming, and Workstation Tests
We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
Additionally, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, which are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
Though the Envy 16 is neither a mobile workstation nor a gaming laptop, we added one benchmark apiece from our tests for those categories. PugetBench for Premiere Pro runs through a variety of operations in Adobe's popular video editing app; the comparison chart shows creative systems from MSI and Gigabyte and workstations from HP and Lenovo. F1 2021 is a racing simulation game with a built-in 1080p benchmark, run at max image quality with Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing; the chart includes several mid-priced gaming rigs.
Again, the M2 Max's built-in graphics were gargantuan, but the GeForce RTX 4060 is by any measure a potent, game-worthy GPU. The HP proved a near-workstation-class video editing and CGI rendering platform, and it landed somewhere between the entry-level and midrange gaming laptops in our F1 benchmark. These additional tests help demonstrate that the Envy 16 is an excellent all-around desktop replacement, missing a few minor marks that its rivals didn't this year (particularly in screen quality).
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
Additionally, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Of course, Apple's MacBook Pro is in a class of its own as far as battery life is concerned, but the HP Envy 16 showed stamina more appropriate for an ultraportable than a desktop replacement, and its screen is plenty bright. However, the base display tested here was short on both resolution and color depth compared with many rivals (can you say OLED?).
Verdict: One of the Best Bargains, But Not One of the Best Screens
We can't fault the 2023 HP Envy 16 for being behind the silicon times, not with a screaming 13th Gen Intel Core i9 and Nvidia's revved-up GeForce RTX 4060. Plus, the step up to a 120Hz display turns what was already a first-class creative laptop into a credible entry-level gaming rig. But we wish it weighed less, and if we were configuring one we'd step down to a Core i7 CPU and splurge on the optional OLED panel. That, we think, would be a better match for the dominant Dell XPS 15.
High-end features ranging from a world-class webcam to a 120Hz refresh display make the HP Envy 16 a tempting if hefty desktop replacement choice for creative apps and light gaming.
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