Review Now that everyone and their dog has or wants a smartphone or tablet, the recent drop in netbook sales can hardly be a surprise. Yet does this mean there is no space for a small, cheap laptop? Of course not and HP’s recently refreshed Pavilion dm1 is a fine example of why I hope the breed never dies.

Down from a RRP of £549, HP’s on-line store asks for a perfectly reasonably £350 and in return you get a smart little machine with an 11.6in 1366 x 768 screen. It features proper graphics card that can easily handle 1080p video, a spacious and solid if unlit chiclet keyboard, Gigabit Ethernet and an full-sized HDMI port.

Eschewing the wholly plastic construction of many netbooks, HP has gone for a metal banding around the Pavilion dm1 which helps make the body and everything else – the lid, the keyboard, the nicely responsive trackpad – feel reassuringly solid.

At 1.5Kg and 292mm x 215mm, the Pavilion dm1 is petite enough to go into even the smallest rucksack without a problem. Admittedly, 32mm is twice the thickness of some Ultrabooks, but I’ll happily forgo the difference in order to get a decent selection of ports and a profile I can hold onto with a human hand.

Driving everything is the latest version of AMD’s E-series Fusion APU which pairs the E450 1.65GHz dual-core chip with an AMD Radeon HD6320M graphics card. This combo supports 1333MHz rather than just 1066MHz DDR3 memory on the slower and older E350 chip.

It’s a marriage that delivers the sort of performance Intel Atom netbooks can only dream about. For the sake of comparison with Windows Starter-running netbooks, I ran the PCMark05 benchmark test and got a score of 3,320 which is nearly double the best score I have ever seen from an Atom netbook.



Source: http://www.reghardware.com/2012/02/15/review_hp_pavilion_dm1_4125ea_amd_cpu_netbook/
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