Jenneth Orantia25 September 2008, 3:00 PM
As sharp as a fine Armani suit in a crowd of polyester, the Pavilion dv5 matches its distinctive good looks with stellar performance and lots of media features.
Not everyone wants a brightly-coloured laptop. If your tastes run to the conservative but you’d still like a machine that stands out from everyone else’s, the black and silver-attired HP Pavilion dv5 should fit the bill nicely. The glossy black lid and glowing white HP logo are striking (but a fingerprint magnet nonetheless), and the bottom half of the notebook is even more of an eye-catcher, with a silver keyboard and wrist-rest, chrome touchpad and mouse buttons, and touch-sensitive white backlit media keys.
The dv5 forms part of HP’s latest refresh of consumer notebooks that use the new Montevina Centrino 2 processors. It runs the 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo T9400 chip, with 4GB of DDR2 RAM (upgradeable to 8GB) and an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics card with 512MB of memory. This much firepower means it’s no slouch when it comes to performance, and our benchmarks and real-world testing reveal that it’s quite the zippy machine.
PCMark05 returned a score of 5997 (323 points higher than the Dell Studio 17, which runs the last-gen 2.5GHz Penryn chip), and 3DMark06 returned a well-above average score of 4533 – a result that makes it good enough to play some of the latest 3D game titles.
HP doesn’t exaggerate when it calls the dv5 an entertainment PC. Almost everything you’d need in a multimedia-centric machine is on-board, from the combo Blu-ray BD-ROM/Super Multi DVD drive and integrated standard definition TV tuner to the bundled remote control and Altec Lansing stereo speakers.The huge 640GB hard disk – consisting of two 320GB drives – should also be plenty for storing a full library of music, movies and recorded TV shows. Where it comes undone is the 15.4-in screen’s display resolution – a lowly 1280 x 800 pixels – which means that graphics and videos aren’t as sharp and crisp as they could be, especially for Blu-ray movies.
HP includes its own QuickPlay software for managing and playing multimedia, but we found it too slow and difficult to use, and for some reason the touch-sensitive QuickPlay shortcut button above the keyboard didn’t work. The dv5 runs Windows Vista Ultimate, so there’s always the significantly more refined Windows Media Center interface to fall back on, but you’ll still need to use QuickPlay if you want to watch content stored on Blu-ray discs.
The dv5’s main angle may be multimedia, but it’s got the chops to be a serious productivity machine as well. The full-sized keyboard feels great to type on thanks to ample cushioning and bounce on each key, and the touchpad and mouse buttons are a good size – although the fingeprint-prone surface on both is annoying. A fingerprint reader on the bottom right of the notebook’s base lets you sign into Windows, websites and certain applications securely, and we found the sensor to be responsive and accurate.
The left and right-hand sides are crammed with inputs, namely VGA, docking station, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, two USB 2.0 (one of which doubles as an ESATA port), FireWire, five-in-one memory card reader and ExpressCard slot on the left, and modem, TV antenna, another two USB 2.0 ports and optical drive on the right. This is joined by two headphone jacks, a microphone jack and consumer infrared port on the notebook’s lip, and a webcam above on the screen. Internally, you get 802.11n WLAN and Bluetooth.
A carry weight of 2.65kg makes the Pavilion dv5 a viable option for on-the-go computing, but short battery life means you’ll need to bundle the power brick if you want to get a decent stretch of work done. The 6-cell battery produced an hour-and-a-half of run-time using our standard DVD run-down test, and you’d probably be able to stretch this out to over two hours with Wi-Fi switched off.