27. MobileMark 2005, Continued

MobileMark 2005 Battery Lifetime And Performance Measurements

In the office productivity performance test the Pavilion dv8000z lands somewhere in the middle of the pack. Because the test files' locations on the disks can't be controlled, it's impossible to say with authority that this machine leads the pack or lags behind it by much. But if you install a second drive and move the Windows swap file to that hard disk, overall performance results improve somewhere in the 5% to 7% percent range. A unit that you purchase in a retail outlet will presumably lag somewhere behind our results, because these units are all stocked with 4,200 rpm drives. Our test machine, on the other hand, included two 5,400 rpm drives and therefore delivered slightly better results of about 2%.

Whether or not you would notice the difference in response time between the fastest and slowest systems in everyday use is arguable. At the end of the day, the HP Pavilion dv8000z may not be geared for FPS gaming, but it is a fast and worthy notebook PC.

The results are different for battery-life results, which run counter to the commonly-held assumption that a big notebook means poor battery life: This unit runs up to three hours and 40 minutes on a single battery charge.

We must forgo reporting the results of the DVD playback test, because technical problems prevented us from completing this test. But because we conducted that test on a prototype rather than a production model, we can't in good conscience make too much of a fuss over our lack of results.

However, it's clear that the Pavilion dv8000z demonstrates once again that the combination of an AMD Turion 64 2 GHz ML-37 together with ATI's Radeon Xpress 200M chipset produces a high-performance, energy efficient and completely competitive mobile computing platform.