Product Listing

The HP Pavilion dv3000 (Intel Santa Rosa)

By Aloysius Low - 25 Apr 2008

Inside Out

Inside Out

The dv3000 is no slouch when it comes to performance; featuring an Intel Core 2 Duo T9500 (2.6 GHz) processor which uses the latest 45-nm Wolfdale core (a dual-core variant of the Penryn) and 4GB RAM, which means that our review unit came loaded with almost the highest configuration available for the model. Of course, this would mean that our results would be skewed somewhat, as the standard configuration of a T8100 (2.1 GHz) processor is slower and has much less RAM, 2GB compared to the 4GB of the 'upgraded' review unit. It's definitely not an ideal situation for performance benchmarking and relating the model to readers who would mostly encounter much tamer specs of the standard configuration; we've highlighted this back to HP for future consideration though. Thankfully, the other components remain pretty similar to the base standard configuration such as the GeForce Go 8400M graphics processor, and the 160GB HDD, so we had no issues there. In any case, notebooks generally come in various configurations, so you should treat this as the top of the line edition of the dv3000 series for your own analysis.

A very neatly designed under carriage.

The hard disk drive and the RAM modules are easily accessible for upgrading. To get to the innards of this laptop however, you'll have to dig further.

Battery Performance

As per usual, our DVD tests consisted of looping a DVD movie on the dv3000 at settings of 50% brightness and volume. Battery performance was pretty decent on our DVD tests and lasted for around 128 minutes. This means that there's plenty of time to watch a DVD or get some work done and is pretty much comparable to the Dell XPS M1330 which is also using a similar 6-cell battery.

Portability Index

As you know, our portability test is something we've come up with to determine the actual portability of a device. As you can see, the HP dv3000 has pretty similar results to the Dell XPS M1330, though it's no way near any of the more ultra-portable laptops. At 2.27kg, the dv3000 remains highly portable and its weight can be further reduced to 2k by using the weight saver option (removable DVD drive) and using a 4-cell battery. This is something to bear in mind, especially with all the performance that you'll be getting.

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