HP Pavilion dm1z review: HP Pavilion dm1z

The biggest story in laptops over the past few years has been the incredibly popular Netbook. These 10- and 11-inch (and originally 7- and 9-inch) laptops came out of nowhere to capture the attention of a public tired of paying for too much computing power. After a couple of good years, however, Netbooks are being replaced by new systems that offer a little more performance for a little more money, first in the form of dual-core premium Netbooks and now in systems such as the HP Pavilion dm1z with AMD's new Fusion platform.

8.0

HP Pavilion dm1z

The Good

Nearly mainstream performance at premium Netbook prices; excellent battery life; capable graphics.

The Bad

Plastic look and feel; thick and chunky compared with some 11-inch laptops.

The Bottom Line

The first laptop to offer AMD's power-efficient Fusion platform delivers on much of its promise, combining great battery life, decent performance, and basic graphics for less than $500.

The trade-up makes sense for two reasons. First, Netbooks, though great for specific tasks such as basic Web surfing and e-mail, simply aren't suited to being full-time PCs, which is something many users discovered after buying one. Second, the PC makers who only begrudgingly released many of these Netbooks in the first place knew selling a low-power $299 laptop wasn't exactly a money-making proposition.

AMD has been promising a hybrid platform for years now, combining a workhorse CPU with better-than-integrated graphics in a single package. It's called Fusion, although confusingly, AMD doesn't play up that name or the processor model number, instead choosing to label laptops outfitted with the technology with a sticker that says "AMD Vision."

As the first of these systems to cross our desk, the $450 HP Pavilion dm1z is an interesting test case. It's an 11-inch laptop with a decent design, but one that doesn't hide its budget origins. It's about $100 more than an entry-level Netbook and $50 to $100 less than previous premium Netbooks that had AMD's previous low-end dual-core CPU.

In practice, it gets the job done, and it certainly feels a world away from Atom Netbooks. At the same time, there's no mistaking the experience of this computer for a high-end 11-inch, such as Apple's MacBook Air (except when it comes to battery life, where the Pavilion dm1z was easily one of the best performers we've seen).

The biggest needle-mover may be the AMD graphics, which aren't meant for serious gamers, but still offer a solid alternative to low-end solutions such as Nvidia's underused Ion GPU. We played some basic games and full-screen HD videos with no problems, which is something Netbooks typically can't do.

With Intel lacking a halfway point between its Atom processors and the mainstream Core-i-series (except for the too-expensive and underpowered ultralow voltage Core i3 ULV), there may finally be a spot at the table for AMD, which has been seriously underrepresented in laptops of late. Based on this one initial review unit, AMD-shy shoppers should at least give Fusion laptops such as this one a serious look.

The designs of 11-inch laptops run the gamut from plastic cheapies to brushed aluminum works of art, but the HP Pavilion dm1z is clearly more focused on what's going on under the hood. The body is made of plastic, and looks and feels it, although it has a nicely curved shape and patterned lid that fits in with HP's current design aesthetic. A large battery bump protrudes upward right at the hinge between the chassis and screen, and the entire package is thick and bulky. It isn't actually ugly at all; it just feels a bit unwieldy. But perhaps we've been spoiled by thin ultraportables from Lenovo, Apple, and others.

The available space is put to good use, however, with a large island-style keyboard that goes all the way to the left and right edges of the keyboard tray and an oversize clickpad. The keys are firm and well-spaced, with large Shift keys and no keyboard flex. Some keys, however, get slightly lost in the shuffle. The page-up and page-down keys, for example, are completely unlabeled (they're mapped to the Fn+up-arrow and the Fn+down-arrow).

The touch pad is of the same large clickpad-style seen on many recent HP laptops, and the design has its fans and detractors. We like the large surface area, but the built-in mouse buttons can be tricky to use, and the multitouch gestures don't come close to Apple's, although that's a complaint we can level at every PC maker.

The desktop is crowded with links to bloatware and HP-branded services, from Snapfish to HP's music store. After a few years of reduced screen clutter, it's disappointing to see these icons starting to crowd the display again.

The 11-inch screen has a native resolution of 1,366x768 pixels, exactly what we'd expect for a laptop this size. The display gets bright enough and off-axis viewing is decent, but the glossy screen coating causes a good bit of glare, especially near windows. A thick gray screen bezel adds to the budget look, but at least the speakers are loud enough to make headphone use optional for movie-watching.

There's a basic set of ports and connections here. HP sticks to its single audio jack standard for smaller laptops, and there do not seem to be any mobile broadband options available on HPs Web site right now, although that seems like a natural fit for such a portable system.

The Pavilion dm1z represents our first shot at AMD's new Fusion platform. Launched at CES 2011, the Fusion APU (or "accelerated processing unit") uses a single die to contain, according to AMD, "a multicore CPU, a powerful DirectX 11-capable discrete-level graphics and parallel processing engine, a dedicated high-definition video acceleration block, and a high-speed bus that speeds data across the differing types of processor cores within the design." In plain English, it's a CPU combined with better-than-integrated graphics.

In our CNET Labs benchmark tests, the 1.6GHz AMD E-350 CPU performed well, beating lower-end Intel Atom CPUs, but falling behind high-end 11-inch systems such as the MacBook Air and Acer TimelineX, which have Intel Core 2 Duo and Core i7 ULV processors. The E-350 in the dm1z was slightly slower than AMD's previously comparable (but more expensive) low-end dual-core chip, the Neo X2 L625, as seen in the Lenovo X100.

In practical use, the system felt much more responsive than even high-end Netbooks, and we ran into only occasional slowdown and sluggishness. At the same time, it wasn't as smooth an overall experience as one gets with the 11-inch MacBook Air (which also costs twice as much).

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