Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

HP DV6Z Laptop

Posted by Jon Peddie on May 14th 2009 | Comments Closed
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: hp laptop thumbsup

My big bad HP Pavilion DV9700 notebook died. Actually it didn’t completely die, it just went blind, or maybe I did because I couldn’t see the screen anymore. It was kinda exciting to watch as it turned itself off, the screen flashed brilliant lines, rippled up down like a snake shivering, then got black bars with color highlights and then—flat line, except there wasn’t even a line.

My first thought was, no problem, just connect an external monitor—that’s like flying to the sun at night so you don’t burn up—HUH? Obviously if the Nvidia GPU has fried itself there’s no external drive either, and no USB display either—I was dead. And I couldn’t get access to my disk either because the machine shut down and needed to be seen to know when and where to enter the password.

While whining to my friends at HP and AMD about how unfair life was and how my life sucked they decided the only way they were going to get me to shut was to loan me a laptop to use until mine got repaired.

So I went through an anxious week waving at the FedEx and UPS drivers and finally it came, one of the nicest looking laptops I’ve seen in a while, an HP Pavilion DV6Z—with an AMD processor and ATI discrete graphics—what more could anyone want?

A look at the specs:

• Windows Vista Business with Service Pack 1 (32-bit).
• AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor ZM-84 (2.3GHz).
• 3GB DDR2 System Memory (2 DIMM).
• 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650.
• 16.0” diagonal High Definition HP Brightview Display (1366x768).
• Blu-ray ROM with SuperMulti DVD+/-R/RW Double Layer.
• 320GB 5400 RPM SATA hard drive.
• Wireless-G Card.
• 12 Cell Lithium Ion Battery.
• $1,388.

HP’s Pavilion DV6Z aka – black beauty

The next step after admiring the machine’s good looks was to run some tests on it.

Battery life.

It came with an extended 12-cell battery. HP offers two batteries, a 6-cell that fits flush with unit, and a 12-cell that gives the machine a little lift in the back.

AMD has come up with the idea of using 3DMark06 in looping demo mode to stress-test a notebook’s battery. They built a little log program that keeps time until the battery runs down and you can retrieve the file to get them length of time.

We ran the test on three notebooks, an HP 2140 mininote with 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor and G945 IGP (and extended battery), a HP Pavilion DV9700 with a 2GHz Intel Core2 Duo and Nvidia GeForce 8600M (the chip that died, standard battery, and the HP Pavilion DV6Z with a 2.3 GHz AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650. The results are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Play time for three notebooks. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Figure 4: Performance comparison of HP Pavilion DV6Z to DV9700 (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Time and money permitting, it would have been interesting to see if using a standard battery on the Mininote and the DV6Z would scale—most likely it would, so the battery times would be basically cut in half with standard batteries, which would put the DV6Z on par with the bigger DV9700. And considering that the DV9700 has a 17-inch 1680 x 1050 screen (as compared to the 16-inch 1366 x 768 DV6Z screen) the DV6Z isn’t very impressive when it comes to battery life.

Performance

We ran Vantage and 3DMark 06 benchmarks and compared the DV6Z to the DV9700. Figure 4 shows the results.

The notebook weighs 2.52kg (89 ounces) and the battery adds an additional 0.332 kg (11.7 oz.) for an arm stretching total of 6.29 pounds, still, that’s less than the 8.2 pounds of the DV9700.

What do we think?

The HP Pavilion DV6Z is a lot of computer for a reasonable price. We give it high grades for its performance and feature set. There are SD/Memstick sockets in the side, a PCIe slot, plus all the usual USB, VGA, HDMI, and audio ports, as well as a mysterious “Expansion port connector which is for a docking
station.

HP notebooks have the best keyboard of any keyboard I’ve used. Solid, quiet, fast, and moisture-proof, helpful when you drink coffee while working.

The screen is physically large enough (16-inch) but disappointing with regard to the resolution, only 1366 by 768—not even enough to run the Vantage benchmark (requires you to hook up a higher resolution monitor with at least 1024 lines). So, no watching 1080p on the screen—but you can drive 1080p via HDMI or the VGA connector. The built-in Blu-ray DVD player and DVD writer is a plus, and did I mention it looks good—especially after you peel off the AMD, Microsoft, and other logo stickers.