HP Pavilion dm1z Review

Pavilion dm1z 

Review Summary:

The HP Pavilion dm1z delivers good value with solid performance and decent battery life for a low price.

Pros

• Best video and gaming performance in the price range
• Nice keyboard
• Good battery life and low price

Cons

• Occasional touchpad glitches
• No USB 3.0 port
• Doesn't deliver "9.5 hours" of battery life in real world use

HP Pavilion dm1z Full Review

 

The new HP Pavilion dm1 (also called the Pavilion dm1z) is an 11-inch notebook that uses the latest AMD Fusion technology to combine a fast dual-core processor and powerful graphics inside a budget-priced netbook alternative. Is this the best new notebook for 2011? Keep reading to find out.

Our HP Pavilion dm1 (dm1z) features the following specifications:

• AMD E-350 with AMD Radeon HD 6310 Graphics (dual-core CPU at 1.6 GHz and dual DX-11 SIMDs at 500 MHz)
• 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 HD glossy display with LED backlighting
• Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
• 3 GB DDR3 memory
• 320 GB, 7200 rpm HDD (Hitachi Travelstar 7K500)
• Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11b/g/n wireless
• Bluetooth 3.0 (Ralink Motorola BC8)
• 6-cell Li-ion battery (51Wh)
• Dimensions: 11.45 (L) x 8.45 (W) x 0.9 - 1.25 (H) inches
• Weight: 3.53 pounds
• MSRP: $449.99

Build and Design
The new HP Pavilion dm1 is an evolutionary update to last year's Pavilion dm1z and the dv2 from 2009. Stylistically, the dm1 has more in common with the dm3. In fact, if you place the new dm1 side by side with last year's dm3, you'll see that this 11-inch notebook is basically a smaller version of the dm3. At first glance it's easy to mistake the dm1z for one of the dozens of HP netbooks that have shown up over the last few years. Fortunately, the Pavilion dm1 has a lot more to offer than those low-performance netbooks.

Build quality is on par with what we've seen from the rest of the HP Pavilion Ultraportable notebooks and HP mini netbooks. The plastics used in the chassis are durable and thick enough to prevent flex or cracking under pressure. The plastic screen lid provides adequate protection for the screen but the middle of the lid does bend inward under firm pressure (be careful jamming this into overhead compartments on your next flight). The lid also features an attractive matte black paint job with black pinstriping done in glossy paint. This makes fingerprint smudges far less visible than what we see on laptop lids with glossy paint jobs.  Opening up the screen, the hinges have enough tension to hold the screen in place when it's motionless but not enough tension to hold the screen in place when you're carrying it around. The rest of the body of the notebook seems to be well designed with minimal chassis flex and no obvious creaks from the plastics.

One area of the design that will probably get a mixed reception is the bottom of the notebook. HP decided to give the new dm1 a clean look with a single massive bottom plate secured by screws that are hidden beneath the foot pads. At first glance there is no expansion bay access panel here and no way to quickly upgrade the RAM or replace the hard drive. Granted, the overwhelming majority of people who buy a $450 laptop will never open it up to make upgrades. However, if you remove the battery, slide the battery release switch again and pull forward on the bottom plate, the entire bottom of the notebook will slide forward giving you access to the RAM, hard drive and wireless cards. I just wish this was a little more obvious for owners who want to upgrade the notebook themselves.

Ports and Features
Port selection on the HP Pavilion dm1z is fairly standard for a modern netbook or 11-inch ultraportable notebook. HP gives you three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI-out, VGA, Gigabit LAN (hidden behind a rubber door), and a single audio jack for headsets, microphones or headphones. It also features a SDHC-card slot for loading images off your camera while traveling or expanding your available storage. The only port that's missing here is a USB 3.0 port. Since we're starting to see USB 3.0 on more consumer notebooks and there are many USB 3.0 external hard drives on the market, we really wish HP had found a way to put at least one USB 3.0 port on this notebook. Also, since USB 3.0 has more voltage than USB 2.0, it would mean that USB accessories and phones could be charged in half the time it takes than to charge over a USB 2.0 port. Here is a quick tour around the new Pavilion dm1:

Front View: Altec Lansing branded speakers

Rear View: Battery and screen hinges

Left Side View: AC power, security lock slot, heat vent, activity lights, HDMI and USB 2.0 port

Right Side View: Media card reader, audio jack, two USB 2.0 ports, VGA and LAN.

Screen and Speakers
The 11.6-inch LED-backlit screen on the HP Pavilion dm1z is like most of the other glossy screens we've seen on 11-inch notebooks and netbook alternatives. The 1366 x 768 resolution is great for browsing the web, editing photos, or even watching 720p HD movies. Color and contrast are average thanks to the glossy surface and LED backlighting. We recorded a real-world contrast ratio of 216:1 in our lab and a maximum screen brightness of 226 nits; bright enough for indoor use under almost any artificial lights and bright enough for outdoor use (as long as the unfiltered sun isn't shining directly on your screen and creating reflections). If you tilt the screen forward or back, the colors start to look dim or very washed out. Horizontal viewing angles were better; staying visible until roughly 60 degrees.

The onboard speakers are located on the front edge of the notebook and push sound forward toward the user. These speakers carry the Altec Lansing brand name with Dolby audio processing. Overall the sound quality is good for a pair of small stereo speakers. The speakers had very little low frequency response to speak of and a reasonable amount of midrange. This is fine for listening to Windows alert sounds or watching a YouTube clip, but isn't the best solution for sharing music or a movie in a small room. The speaker orientation also causes problems if you have the laptop laying on a bed or pressed against thick clothing on your lap. I was able to easily obstruct the speakers on my bed comforter making the audio sound muffled. In short, music and movie lovers would be better off using a nice pair of headphones or connecting the notebook to a stereo through its HDMI-out port.

Keyboard and Touchpad
The nearly full-size keyboard on the Pavilion dm1 is comfortable for typing with the perfect amount of key feedback and quiet, cushioned clicks. HP decided to use a raised Chiclet-style (also called island-style) keyboard with relatively large keys and plenty of space between each key to help prevent typos. The keyboard support structure is simply fantastic with absolutely no flex or "bounce" under heavy typing pressure. The keys themselves have a soft matte finish on top which helps increase fingertip traction but might be prone to collecting skin oils over time.

The touchpad on the new dm1z is a Synaptics model with adequate sensitivity, minimal lag and integrated touchpad buttons located under the bottom left and right corners of the touchpad surface. On one hand, this is the ideal type of touchpad to use on an ultraportable notebook because it allows HP to put the largest possible touchpad surface in a small space without having to sacrifice room for separate touchpad buttons.

On the other hand, we ran into the same problems we've seen on most touchpads with integrated buttons. Namely, if you happen to be one of those laptop users who rests one of your fingers or thumbs on a button while you move the cursor with the other, it's possible that the touchpad will interpret the two fingers on the touchpad surface as a two-finger gesture or quickly move the cursor between the two fingers when you lift one finger off the touchpad surface.

Another potential problem I ran into when testing the dm1 is that the touchpad buttons often won't register a click unless you press the extreme edge of the corner with a good amount of pressure. Sometimes this phenomenom was more problematic than others, so I suspect HP might be able to improve the button sensitivity via a driver update.

Performance and Benchmarks
The HP Pavilion dm1 offers impressive performance despite its entry-level price. Although there are many notebooks on the market with faster processors and superior graphics, our laboratory test results show you will have a hard time finding another notebook with superior real-world performance in every category for as little as $449.

The secret is the new AMD Fusion technology. In this case, HP selected the new AMD "Zacate" E-350 accelerated processing unit (APU) which combines a dual-core CPU with a 1.6 GHz clock speed with a Radeon graphics processing unit (GPU) on a single processor die. Not only does this allow HP to squeeze more computational power into a smaller area, but it means the Pavilion dm1 offers a lot more video and graphics horsepower than a similarly priced netbook with an Intel Atom processor.

The closest competing Intel-based netbook is the ASUS Eee PC 1215N ($499) with a dual-core Intel Atom processor and NVIDIA Ion 2 graphics. While the ASUS netbook generates some impressive numbers in our synthetic benchmark tests, our real-world performance evaluation was less than impressive. The dual-core Atom wasn't as "laggy" as single-core Atom processors found in budget netbooks, but it was still slow in a Windows environment and the Nvidia graphics struggled with newer games even at the lowest settings due to the weakness of the Intel processor.

The Acer Aspire 1830T-68U118 ($899) is a similarly sized 11-inch notebook boasting an Intel Core i7-680 1.46 GHz ultra low voltage processor with Intel Turbo Boost Technology running at speeds of up to 2.53 GHz. The Aspire 1830T was roughly twice as fast as the new 11.6-inch Apple MacBook Air ($999) or the HP Pavilion dm1 according to the wPrime synthetic benchmark, but the Pavilion dm1 substantially out-performed the higher-priced Acer notebook in both synthetic and real-world video/gaming performance tests.

Speaking of gaming the new dm1z provided perfectly adequate frame rates while playing Left 4 Dead 2. While this notebook doesn't deliver the same in-game performance of the Alienware M11x ($799) it did far better than expected for a netbook alternative. We even tested Mass Effect 2 on the new Pavilion dm1 just to see how far we could push it. Mass Effect 2 was "barely" playable on this notebook since frame rates were relatively low, but there were no graphic glitches or crashes during gameplay and you can do it if you don't mind a few dips in the frame rate.

Another strong indication of the video performance of the Pavilion dm1 is that HP sells an optional external Blu-ray drive so you can watch Blu-ray movies using this $450 laptop. I connected the dm1 to an HDTV and didn't have any problem watching stutter-free 1080p movies on the HDTV while also checking a few websites on the notebook's built-in display.

In other words, you've got to spend a lot more than $449 if you want an Intel-based notebook that offers better performance than the HP Pavilion dm1 in the same 11-inch footprint.

There were few surprises when we put this notebook through its paces in our lab. Most of the synthetic and real-world performance tests matched what I saw in the AMD E-350 testbed notebook last year. The only reason that some of the testbed benchmarks surpass the the numbers for the Pavilion dm1 is that the testbed was using an 80 GB solid state drive (SSD) instead of a cheap hard drive.

The 320 GB, 7200 rpm hard drive is fast enough to quickly load most basic applications like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop but it simply doesn't offer the extreme bursts of speed that you get from a SSD or a hybrid hard drive like the Seagate Momentus XT. Sure, HP would have to raise the price of the Pavilion dm1 if they added a SSD (HP currently offers a 128 GB SSD as an upgrade for an additional $290), but it's worth mentioning that this notebook runs even better with a faster drive.

wPrime processor comparison results (lower scores mean better performance):

PCMark05 measures overall system performance (higher scores mean better performance):

PCMark Vantage measures overall system performance (higher scores mean better performance):

3DMark06 measures gaming performance (higher scores mean better performance):

CrystalDiskMark storage drive performance test:

Gaming performance tests:

Heat and Noise
Under stress the low-wattage AMD E-350 APU barely raised the outside case temperature of the HP Pavilion dm1. After 30 minutes with both the CPU and GPU stressed, the bottom of the notebook never even came close to reaching 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Under normal conditions at or near idle, the same spots were about 5-8 degrees cooler. The system fan works harder in this notebook when the graphics are being stressed, but it's similar to the fan volume we heard from the Acer Aspire 1830T and shouldn't be too annoying for most people in a typical school or office environment.

Battery Life
At the time of this writing the HP website makes a particularly bold claim that the new HP Pavilion dm1z delivers "up to 9.5 hours of battery life" from the included 6-cell battery. I don't have the specific testing procedures used to arrive at that number, but I suspect this figure comes from using the MobileMark benchmark with the notebook running at an essentially idle state with the screen set to minimal brightness. We assume most notebook users will set their screens a little brighter for average daily use and will be actively browsing the internet most of the time they are using their notebook.

In our tests with the screen brightness set to 70%, wireless active while refreshing a website on regular 60-second intervals, and Windows 7 set to the Balanced profile, the HP Pavilion dm1 continued running for 6 hours and 49 minutes. I have little doubt that you can extend the battery life past the 7-hour mark if you lower the screen brightness and aren't actively loading pages every 60 seconds. By comparison, the ASUS Eee PC 1215N netbook with dual-core Atom processor and Nvidia ION graphics stayed on for 5 hours and 34 minutes and Apple's new 11.6-inch MacBook Air delivered 6 hours and 15 minutes.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, it's hard not to like the new HP Pavilion dm1z. HP and AMD resolved all of the main complaints that people had with the previous generation of AMD-based ultraportbales: Poor battery life, high temperatures, and only adequate performance.

The new AMD Fusion APU technology really delivers some impressive results in terms of HD video playback, gaming, and even adds some "snappiness" in a basic Windows environment. At the time of this writing (January 2011) consumers will have a hard time finding an Intel-based ultraportable notebook or netbook that delivers better real world performance and battery life across the board for the same price ... and that's saying a lot.

Several other companies announced other notebooks and netbook alternatives at CES 2011 that use the same AMD E-350 APU, so it's hard to say if the HP Pavilion dm1 is the best of the bunch, but it certainly is better than any netbook we've reviewed to date.

Pros:

• Best video and gaming performance in the price range
• Nice keyboard
• Good battery life and low price

Cons:

• Occasional touchpad glitches
• No USB 3.0 port
• Doesn't deliver claimed "9.5 hours" of battery life in real world use

Individual Ratings: *
Software & Support 
Upgrade Capabilities 
Usability 
Design 
Performance 
Features 
Price/Value Rating 

* Ratings averaged to produce final score