A personal record of understanding, deciphering, speculating and predicting the development of modern microarchitecture designs.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

HP DV6z Quad Ed

Got an HP DV6z with AMD A8-3500M (Llano) recently. I'm extremely happy with the 1920x1080 display ($150 upgrade). It is not glossy, but very colorful and bright. If you get an HP DV6z with Llano, BE SURE to spend that $150 for a high resolution display!

dv6z Quad Ed
• steel gray
• Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• AMD Quad-Core A8-3500M Accelerated Processor (2.4GHz/1.5GHz, 4MB L2 Cache)
• AMD Radeon(TM) Discrete-Class Graphics [HDMI, VGA]
• FREE Upgrade to 6GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
• 640GB 7200RPM Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
• 9 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
• 15.6" diagonal Full HD HP Anti-glare LED Display (1920 x 1080)
• FREE Upgrade to Blu-ray player & SuperMulti DVD burner
• HP TrueVision HD Webcam with Integrated Digital Microphone and HP SimplePass Fingerprint Reader
• 802.11b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth(R)

Battery life  (9-cell) is about 5hr heavy use with Linux VM compiling in background. With idle/light use battery life could be up to 7hr. Not terrific but quite good enough for the 15.6" + 1080p screen.

It's relatively heavy, but on the other hand, it is fully loaded. I'd say it'll make a great desktop replacement, easily beating most laptop at comparable price ($800~$1000).

I haven't really optimized the laptop yet but here are few photos:


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does this AMD chipset support IOMMU? I'm interested in Xen virtualization doing PCI and VGA passthrough, and this laptop would be perfect if it can do this.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I was wondering about the virtualization capabilities of this little beast too. Any insight would be great!

abinstein said...

I'm using quite intensively virtualbox and this machine handles it very well. I haven't tried PCI/VGA passthrough. The CPU+chipset should support IOMMU. I'm not sure whether HP's implementation allows it though.

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