HP Star Wars Special Edition 15-an001na review - The Force is strong with this one

Star Wars is well and truly back. The Force Awakens reinvigorated the franchise and, with spin-off Rogue One arriving in cinemas later this year, the hype and excitement around Star Wars aren't likely to let up anytime soon. 

It’s especially hard not to get a little caught up, especially as we’re all being inundated with tie-in merchandise, much like this Star Wars Special Edition laptop from HP.

Design

Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is how the chassis has been emblazoned with Star Wars art. It has a ‘Galactic Empire-inspired’ design, which means it has ‘Dark Side’ artwork, from the Death Star background around the keyboard tray to the Stormtrooper on the palm rest and of course Darth Vader on the exterior lid.

If you’re a fan of Star Wars, you’ll probably like the design but I do wish there was a little more effort applied, such as texture or embossing to match the battered and war-weathered lid design. It’s essentially a skin applied to a standard HP Pavilion chassis - though we never felt it was going to peel off or anything like that. This is pretty good effort and HP should be applauded for not simply writing 'Star Wars' on it anywhere.

It may look cool but this is still a rather heavy and clunky 15.6in laptop, weighing 2.09kg with a thickness of 25.2mm. Carry it around and you’ll certainly be feeling the force on your shoulders. No doubt how Luke felt carrying Yoda around.

The Dark Side theme continues to the keyboard that has red-coloured backlighting, which looks ominous against the grey of the Death Star. There’s no brightness adjustment to the backlighting, however, so you’ll need to make do with either on or off.

As for the keys themselves, they’re reasonably comfortable to type on. They’re not overly spongy as is the case with so many mid-range laptops. I would have liked an extra few millimetres of travel but it’s certainly not a bad keyboard to type your Star Wars fan fiction on. There’s a full-size number pad on the right, too.

The touchpad is a whole different matter. It’s decorated with the Death Star’s narrow trench that Luke flew through in order to attack the thermal exhaust port in A New Hope (and if you needed to be told that, this laptop probably isn’t for you).

The touchpad has a slightly coarse and rough texture, which offers a little too much rebel resistance to your swipes. It also has a slightly annoying extra rattle when you tap it. It isn't a MacBook, so there's no 'Force Touch' support here, sorry. The integrated mouse buttons rattle as you click them, too, and also feel incredibly spongy leading to odd misclicks. It could also do with being a little taller to allow for more vertical scrolling space.

Performance and Battery Life

I tested the Star Wars Special Edition 15-an001na, though other specs are available. This one has a dual-core Intel Core i5-6200U processor that has a base clock of 2.3GHz but can turbo boost to 2.8GHz. This is supported by 6GB of RAM provided in 2GB and 4GB memory modules.

The performance was reasonable during our 4K-based benchmarks. The system managed an overall score of 37. Its single-core performance was its strongest aspect, with a score of 66 in the Image Editing component, but it was unsurprisingly its multitasking score that brought the average down considerably, with a score of just 18. The HP 15-an001na is not a system designed for running lots of strenuous tasks simultaneously but as an everyday laptop, it will do its job just fine.

Dedicated graphics are included with this 15-an001na, with an Nvidia GeForce 940M with 2GB of DDR3L memory. However, there’s also a 15-an000na model too, which only uses integrated Intel HD Graphics 520, so be sure of which you’re looking at before you buy.

Even with the Nvidia chip, this model only provided an unplayable 18.9fps in our Dirt Showdown test - set to 1,920x1,080, 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra graphics - so you’re going to need to be willing to tone down the image fidelity considerably to garner playable framerates. Dropping it to High quality resulted in a better but still unimpressive 37.6fps. Ironically, the Star Wars Special Edition isn't great for playing Star Wars Battlefront on but the game will run around 30fps at low detail settings.

In terms of storage you get a 1TB hard disk, but it’s slow at a spindle speed of 5,400RPM. There’s also a DVD-RW optical drive, which is something you’re seeing less frequently these days. A Blu-ray drive would have been nice but you can, at least, pop in a Star Wars DVD to watch. Preferably not the new trilogy if you have any sense of dignity.

In our video playback test, with the screen set to 170cd/m2 brightness and Airplane mode turned on, the 15-an001na lasted 5 hours 3 minutes. It’s not a terrible result and one that will stretch out under more general use.

Star Wars pre-installed content

Besides the obvious emblazoning of Star Wars art on the chassis, the system also comes pre-installed with a number of Star Wars-related content. This includes various wallpapers, which you can obviously change if you want, and Star Wars sound effects. There are also Star Wars digital comics, trailers and galleries.

There’s an R2-D2 desktop companion, too, that loads up maps and blueprints if you click on his main body or projects a holographic Leia when you click his head. It's a novelty at best. 

Overall, the added content is a nice enough inclusion but if you’re a hardcore Star Wars fan there's probably nothing you haven’t seen before. Still, it’s nice to have everything in one place. A digital download code for The Force Awakens wouldn’t have gone amiss, though.

Display

The 15.6in display has a 1,920x1,080 resolution and a matt coating, which means reflections aren’t an issue. The quality of the panel is underwhelming, however. Black levels of 0.33cd/m2 are distinctly average and maximum brightness of 219.8cd/m2 is also lacklustre. Contrast ratio, too, was poor at 650:1. 

Images are left looking washed out, which is a shame if you want to better appreciate the digital Star Wars comics included. Colour accuracy at 57.1% of the sRGB colour gamut continues the disappointing theme. Still, it's about par for the course for a mid-range laptop.

Connections and Speakers

Along the left, you get one USB2, one USB3, a 10/100 Ethernet port, an SD card reader and the DVD-RW drive. The right-hand side houses another USB3 port, an HDMI output, and a headset jack. There’s Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi built in as well. As is typical with HP laptops, the speakers are tuned by Bang & Olufsen. They’re not particularly impressive when blaring out The Imperial March, sounding a little tinny as most laptop speakers do, but they’re reasonably loud.

Conclusion

Whether or not the Star Wars Special Edition is the right laptop for you will likely be decided by how enamoured you are with the design and the added content. The 15-an000na model, sans the dedicated graphics, is available for £439, which might be more enticing if you’re not interested in light gaming. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 940M is far from a top-performer so it’s not necessarily worth an extra £100 for its extra capabilities.

Comparing HP’s similarly-specced models, you’re not actually paying a premium for the Star Wars Special Edition. As paying extra for ‘special edition’ products is pretty much the norm, this is particularly welcome. 

Compared to other similarly-priced laptops, like the Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Series, it’s not bad value when it comes to specifications and performance, coming out on top. However, certain aspects such as its touchpad let it down. Overall, it’s still a very respectable mid-range laptop for the Star Wars fan.

15-an001na