Jun

HP Pavilion Laptop that rocks!

International Consumer Electronics Show (ICES) was held in Las Vegas on January 8-11 2009. One of interesting products was new HP Pavilion Laptop dv2, won the award for the Best Notebook at CES 2009, which was given by Laptop Magazine. This HP Pavilion Laptop is an ultraportable laptop designed from new released AMD Yukon or Athlon Neo processor, offering an alternative netbook laptop but without compromising on performance.

Body design

The new HP Pavilion laptop dv2 has 11.5 in x 9.4 in x 1.3 in size and 3.8 pounds weight. The display is 12.1″ WXGA High Definition HP LED (1200 x 800) display. With AMD Neo platform dv2 has ultrathin body and made it utraportable. The body is smooth with rounded edges and durable plastic imprint finish which is protected well to minor abrasion without scratching. Overall the design is compact but the bezel around the keyboard and screen makes the size almost 13″ laptop. This new HP Pavilion laptop dv2 offers 2 styles design color which are the Espresso black and the Moonlight white.

Performance

The HP Pavilion laptop dv2′s processor AMD Athlon Neo 64-bit is working well to run Windows Vista. It looks like better than Intel’s Atom either Via’s Nano. The AMD Athlon showed multiple benchmarks indicating that the Athlon Neo is anywhere between 50% and 149% faster than the Intel Atom in various tasks.

hp-pavilion-laptop-dv2 The PC Mark 05 scored 2,061 for processor performance. This is better than ASUS N10 (scored 1,851) and ASUS Eee PC 1000HE (scored 1,535). While this HP Pavilion laptop does not designed for gaming laptop, with 3D Mark06 in 1280 x 800 test, the graphics performance scored 1,355. It is better than than some higher class laptop such as Lenovo ThinkPad X200 Tablet (GMA X4500) scored 921, Dell Inspiron 13 (Intel X3100) scored 470. While running game Unreal Tournament III, the dv2 gives 34.3 fps at 1,280 x 800. It means the dv2 very playable 3D game at reasonable frame rates, thanks to 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3140 GPU that also can handle for high definition content.

For battery life this HP Pavilion laptop performed fairly. In normal use and Windows Vista set to power saver while using for internet browsing, the dv2 ran 4 hours and 10 minutes. On high performance mode in Windows Vista the battery life for 2 hours and 25 minutes. The HP Pavilion laptop dv2 ran for 2 hours and 28 minutes when running video playback, included six-cell battery.

Features and Ports

The HP Pavilion laptop dv2 has impressive number of port which are

3 USB 2.0 ports
HDMI 1.3 connector
5-in-1 multi-card reader
Microphone in and headphone/audio out ports
1 RJ -45 (LAN)
1 VGA out
Kensington lock slot

Conclusion

This HP Pavilion laptop has the ability to fill in the gap between netbook and laptop. As the first laptop using AMD Athlon Neo, the dv2 is an ultraportable slim, smart profile delivering reasonable power with affordable price. The price range $679.00 – 799.99.

The HP Pavilion laptop dv2 specs