HP Pavilion ZV6000 Review

Value for the Masses

They can be custom-configured at the company's Web site, but HP's Pavilion laptops are for the most part aimed at retail shoppers -- consumers who hate to buy a PC sight unseen, who don't feel comfortable ordering a Dell or WinBook (let alone, say, an Averatec). Sitting on a CompUSA or Best Buy shelf, the Pavilion ZV6000 will catch their eyes with its imposing size and glowing blue LEDs. And if they don't recognize a wide-aspect-ratio display when they see one, it says "widescreen" right above the LCD.

OK, we've rolled our eyes at that bit of labeling, but do you know what? HP also labels the side-mounted ports -- headphones, USB, FireWire, and so forth -- with little icons on the adjacent top or keyboard, so you can plug in a cord without craning your neck or lifting the notebook to examine the side. That's kind of nice, and that's the kind of user-friendliness the ZV6000's all about. (Subtract the blue LEDs and some other cosmetics, and the same goes for this system's twin, the Compaq Presario R4000.)

It's certainly not about being a frequent flier, with a briefcase-busting bulk of 11.2 by 14.3 by 1.9 inches -- a fraction over 8 pounds, with the bulky AC adapter adding another couple. No, it's a desktop replacement second in size only to 17-inch-screened super-jumbos (you know, notebooks with room for numeric keypads beside their keyboards).

We're not complaining, because the 15.4-inch-diagonal display offers crisp 1,280 by 800-pixel resolution while keeping the ZV6000 trim enough for at least occasional lap use -- and keeping our test unit's price down to a fairly frugal $1,079 after a mail-in rebate (or, at least temporarily, $1,029 with a free upgrade from 256MB to 512MB of RAM).

Somewhat Vast, Pretty Fast

All but the top two or three of the backlight brightness settings were too dim for our eyes, but otherwise the screen proved bright, sharp, and colorful enough to appreciate the letterboxed form factor for DVD movies -- even without the BrightView option ($25) that's HP's version of the contrast-boosting semigloss black finish seen on other LCDs as Sony XBrite, Fujitsu Crystal View, and so on. We saw no bad pixels among our unit's 1,024,000.

The graphics accelerator behind the screen is ATI's Radeon Xpress 200M integrated-graphics chipset with HyperMemory (ATI's term for using the PCI Express bus to tap some system memory for graphics). The 200M shares the 3D architecture of and generally performs like the entry-level Radeon X300 chip: It doesn't make the ZV6000 a threat to hardcore gaming laptops, but does a respectable job handling multimedia applications and playing the occasional previous-generation game.

Sticking to XGA resolution, we managed 29 frames per second in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and 86 fps in the older, less demanding Quake III Arena; the Pavilion averaged an almost-adequate 13 fps in AquaMark3 and posted Futuremark 3DMark03 and 3DMark05 scores of 1,454 and 674, respectively. But while it rendered complex DirectX 9.0 scenes without a hitch, it took some time to do so -- the Gun Metal 2 benchmark with 4X antialiasing at 1,200 by 800 resolution plodded along at 5 fps.

Skip To Page • 1 Value for the Masses 2 Quite Nimble For Its Size

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