HP Pavilion ZV6000 Review

A good desktop replacement laptop the HP Pavilion ZV6000 delivers a mighty punch with its AMD 64 CPU available and impressive if somewhat expensive docking station. Size and weight make the ZV6000 one to think twice about however if you’re going to be carrying it a lot. The fit and finish of the HP Pavilion ZV6000 is excellent. The ZV6000 feels sturdy and I'm hoping the hinge design is an improvement over my older Dell notebook, on which a hinge broke this year. Another thing that I've notice is how much less bulky the HP ZV6000 notebook is compared to the older ones on my home network. I love the ZV 6000's BrightView wide screen as well.

The HP zv6000 is at the lower end of the price range for HP notebooks, but I feel it is an excellent value for all that is included. It is primarily intended to be a desktop replacement style notebook, but with 3-4 hours of battery life, it will definitely do the job of a portable computer. The processor is an AMD desktop variant, and if you upgrade to the 64-bit AMD Athlon you will get the 939-pin chip! It is built on the 0.13 micron Newcastle core with 512kb of L2 cache which will provide excellent performance. The Pavilion ZV6000 is a hefty beast coming in at 8 pounds (sans power adapter) making this a laptop more suited to your desk than your rucksack, however as desktop replacement is its intended market we can forgive the back strain and instead focus on what is a powerful work horse suitable for most any tasks.

The HP ZV6000 has Altec Lansing speakers located on the front of the computer - in the wrist support area. The sound quality is mediocre, which I find typical for notebooks. There's not much bass and the richness of the sound just doesn't compare to amplified, external speakers. While at home, I use external Yamaha speakers with a subwoofer; traveling, I use headphones. There are a host of options available for the ZV6000 with one of them being the BrightView option ($25) that's HP's version of the contrast-boosting finish seen on other screens like Sony XBrite, Fujitsu Crystal View, and so on. Being only 25 dollars a decent upgrade we feel to make things easier on your eyes if you’re cursed with many hours of screen watching. The screen is a nicely sized 15.4inch and offers a sharp 1,280 by 800 resolution, no dead pixels were seen also which is a nice bonus as while not life threatening, they really do distract some people.

The power behind the screen is ATI's Radeon Xpress 200M integrated-graphics chipset with HyperMemory (ATI's term for using the PCI Express bus to assimilate some system memory for graphics). The Xpress 200M shares the 3D architecture and general performance like the entry-level Radeon X300 chip. It doesn't make the HP Pavilion ZV6000 a threat to hardcore gaming laptops, but does a decent job of handling multimedia apps and playing the odd older generation games.