Review: HP Pavilion dm1z

For the price, the HP Pavilion dm1z seems to fit the bill really well. For $499, you get a pretty good price to get started. The laptop has an 11.6 inch screen and it weighs at 3.5lbs. The processor in use is the AMD E-350 dual core with the Radeon HD 6310 for the GPU. These specs will give you a lot more processing power compared to those with Intel Atom. It is also on par with the graphics processing power of the NVIDA Ion. Of course, any budget notebook like this one will have its good and bad points. It has great overall functionality with the processing and graphics but touch pad and battery power are severely underwhelming.

Now, let us look at some important specs that you need to know. When it comes to specs, the 11.6 inch screen boasts of 1366×768 resolutions. Hard drive is at 320GB and the RAM is 3GB. OS of choice is the Windows 7 home premium and it includes Bluetooth and Wi Fi. The price is at $499 but you might get some coupon deals for 10 % discount. When it comes to the design, it is pretty much a stretched out ad decked up version of the HP Mini 210 with an HDMI port. It has a gray body made of plastic and a chiclet keyboard with a wide touch pad. The great thing about this notebook is that the bottom cover can be removed without the need of a screwdriver. That also means that from top to bottom, it looks like the notebook ha s seamless design.

The notebook has a slim look up front but the back seems quite bulky due to how the battery is sticking out. That is one design issue that should have been addressed well. In terms of performance, sadly, the HP Pavilion dm1z is not the quietest notebook ever. It has a loud fan. From the time you start using here, it would be rare and quite impossible to have a quite fan. The great thing though is that the fan seems to be doing a good job removing the heat out of the device. Also a great thing? HP offers the CoolSense program to adjust the fan to quiet, cool or performance mode. This works best of you are in a very cool place and the laptop does not really need to work that hard to keep cool.

When it comes to performance, you can never go wrong with the E-350 chip. Despite being a low power chip, it performs really well. Of course, it cannot compare to the Sandybeach processors of Intel. What makes this good also is the way it consumes power. Speed is quite good, 3D benchmark is above others and gaming was also quite breezy. When it comes to battery power, it averages at around 5.5 hours which is quite OK but not great since the Intel Atom notebooks offer much longer battery power.

Overall, for under $500, you will find that the HP Pavilion dm1z is quite a great notebook option to have. Brad Linder from Liliputing has made this cool and thorough review video of HP Pavilion dm1z :

HP Pavilion dm1z pictures:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

No related posts.