HP Pavilion dm1z review

The new graphics chip built into this version of the Fusion platform is the AMD Radeon 6310 (AMD has retired the ATI brand name for GPUs). It played HD video easily, and in our gaming tests it ran Unreal Tournament III at 1,280x768 pixels at 24.9 frames per second and Street Fighter IV at 1,366x768 pixels at 24.1fps. Both game, or others, could be easily tweaked in the setting menus to give better performance. Interestingly, the Intel Sandy Bridge white box laptop we recently tested, which lacked a discrete GPU, but also promised better on-chip graphics performance, ran Street Fighter IV at 1,600x900 pixels at around 27fps, even with a high-end 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-2820QM CPU.

HP Pavilion dm1z	Average watts per hour
Off (60%)	0.71
Sleep (10%)	0.87
Idle (25%)	6.62
Load (05%)	20.99
Raw kWh number	28.19
Annual energy cost	$3.20

Though the performance of the Pavilion dm1z's Fusion platform was solid but uninspiring, its battery life was excellent. The system ran for 5 hours and 19 minutes on our video playback battery drain test, which is better than the 11-inch MacBook Air and every other 11-inch laptop we've tested in recent memory. It may not wake up from a sleep state as quickly as a MacBook, but the long battery life should give you close to all-day computing.

HP includes an industry-standard one-year parts and labor warranty with the system. Upgrading to a two-year plan starts at $119 for mail-in service and goes up from there. Support is accessible through a 24-7 toll-free phone line and a well-maintained online knowledge base and driver downloads.

Find out more about how we test laptops.

System configurations:

HP Pavilion dm1-3005
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.6GHz AMD Fusion E-350 Dual-Core; 3072MB DDR3 SDRAM 667MHz; 384MB (Dedicated) ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6310; 320GB Hitachi 7,200rpm

Lenovo Thinkpad X100e
Windows 7 Professional; 1.6GHz AMD Turion Neo X2 Dual-Core L625; 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 384MB (Shared) ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3200; 250GB Fujitsu 5,400rpm

Toshiba Satellite T215D-S1140RD
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.7GHz AMD Turion II Neo K125; 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM 1066MHz; 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225; 250GB Hitachi 5,400rpm

Apple MacBook Air 11-inch
OS X 10.6.4 Snow Leopard; 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U9400 (ULV); 2GB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 320M; 128GB Apple SSD

Dell Inspiron M101z
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.3GHz AMD Athlon II Neo K325; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz; 384MB (Dedicated) ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225; 320GB Seagate 5,400rpm

Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T-68U118
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.46GHz Intel Core i7-680UM; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 128MB (Dedicated) Intel GMA HD; 500GB Western Digital 5,400rpm