HP Pavilion DV6 review

1 of 5

Gallery

Verdict:

It looks great, performs well and its price is spot on; this is a superb laptop

Review Date: 18 Apr 2012

Price when reviewed: £425

Supplier: http://www.amazon.co.uk

Reviewed By: Tom Morgan

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

User Rating

ExpertReviews Award

HP’s Pavilion laptops are some of the best looking machines around if you’re on a budget, and the DV6 is no exception. Its textured lid, silver-effect trim and glowing touchpad bezel make it look like a much more expensive laptop, even though it only costs £450.

Its rounded edges and smooth corners look great, but don’t get in the way of connectivity. The DV6 has a generous complement of four USB ports, audio input and output jacks, a multiformat card reader, a DVD drive and an Ethernet port, all of which should be more than enough for most people.

Its desktop performance is governed by an AMD A6 Llano processor, which is paired with 6GB of RAM. The A6-3430MX is one of the least expensive quad-core mobile processors we’ve ever seen, and although it normally runs at 1.7GHz, it bumps up to 2.4GHz using Turbo Core, providing increased performance in single-threaded applications. Our multimedia benchmarks proved a challenge, with the X53Z managing to score 42 overall. Although this isn’t especially fast, it’s more than enough for everyday tasks and even for more demanding multi-threaded applications.

HP’s paired the processor, which has its own integrated GPU, with a dedicated graphics card so that it can play games in CrossFire mode. The Radeon 7470M might be based on AMD’s older 6490M chip, but when working in tandem the DV6 has the potential to play modern games at high detail settings. The DV6 managed an impressive 42fps overall in our Dirt 3 test, and we still got a playable frame rate when we increased the resolution.

Perhaps even more impressive than its 2D and 3D performance is its battery life. The DV6 managed an incredible seven hours in our light-use test, which is almost unprecedented for a quad-core laptop. If you stick to light tasks, you should be able to last almost a full working day on a single charge.

Prev Next

Get more reviews, tutorials and in-depth advice, every month with Computer Shopper.
Click here to try 3 issues for £1

User Reviews

See more Pavilion DV6 reviews on Reevoo.com

< Previous Reviews : Laptops Next >

Sponsored Links

User comments

Dissapointed Review

Myself and a lot of of other readers are very disapointed with the stated price of this article, as a lot of us were interested in purchasing this laptop to find that Amazon's prices are nowhere near that stated within the article, even though this review only appeared within the JULY 2012 issue, and those poeple who have taken the plunge, have all seemed to suffer build quality issues.

By Barry55555 on 6 Jun 2012

Misleading review

I am another user to have suffered from buying this laptop. My story goes as follows -
My Hp laptop dv6t - Product number Lt070av failed to start on 29th July 2012 , the last day of the warranty. I ran tests and came to know that it's a hard disk failure. I called the HP support care on 29th and complained about this and they said it is out of warranty even it is on the last day of warranty. If the hard disk fails fails in just one year, what is the quality of the product HP is selling?

The thing that irked me the most was I was not even allowed to speak to the so called Level-2 supervisor! I feel completely cheated by this company and I am never ever going to buy an HP product in my life.

I am a student with limited resources and in no way I am going to spend money for their extended warranty. I am cheated and I do not want anybody else to be cheated of their hard earned money.

I am an engineer and I do understand that electronics can fail but the sheer insensitivity of the customer care to acknowledge the problem at their end is what bothers me a lot.

Good bye HP! ( The laptop has issues with beats audio and Webcam)

By Bshetty on 1 Aug 2012