Nudging in at just under AU$1000, HP's newest dv6 is quite decent, considering the price point. If you're willing to spend more, it's also available in a swathe of different configurations that offer more storage or power.
The deep-bronze brushed aluminium and subtle curves work well, with the Pavilion looking more like a premium laptop than an entry-level one. This perception is enhanced by the light around the track pad, although sadly the keyboard doesn't light up.
As tends to be the way with budget notebooks, despite the 15.6-inch screen, we're given a rather low 1366x768 resolution to work with. The glossy screen is acceptable, but it doesn't blow us away with vibrancy.
AU$1000 gets you quite a bit of bang for buck these days, with the Pavilion dv6 including a Core i5 2450M at 2.5GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. Graphics are handled by AMD's Radeon HD 7690M XT, and we're happy to report that the battery-saving switch back to Intel graphics is now seamless. It's a good feeling to be able to recommend AMD mobile graphics once more.
Four USB 2.0 ports are offered, along with dual headphone jacks, a microphone jack, gigabit Ethernet, VGA and HDMI out and a DVD+-RW drive. Despite the opportunity afforded by having three 3.5mm jacks available, HP does not allow the user to repurpose them for 5.1-channel sound. It has managed to stake the Beats Audio brand on the laptop, though, but with speakers this small and cheap, there's only so much that the software can do — we'd recommend you stick to headphones for anything more than basic system sounds.
Both touch pad and keyboard are perfectly acceptable, although we found HP's Envy 14 and Pavilion dm1 to have better typing experiences.
Application performance
Choose a benchmark: Handbrake | iTunes | Photoshop | Multimedia
All of the laptops compared in the chart above are under AU$1000, and have 15.6-inch screens.
Handbrake's multi-threaded nature really gives quad-core CPUs a boost, as is witnessed by the Asus N53 in both the Handbrake and multimedia multitasking tests. Photoshop and iTunes, which tend to be more about clock speed than cores, allow the HP to climb the charts into the No. 2 position.
Gaming performance
Choose a benchmark: Metro 2033 | Batman: Arkham Asylum
While budget laptops still aren't equipped for heavy gaming duties, as evidenced by the Metro 2033 scores, they are surprisingly adept at the more forgiving Batman: Arkham Asylum. Only the Toshiba doesn't hit an acceptable average frame rate.
Battery life
Battery is usually where manufacturers skimp when it comes to cheap laptops. Here the Pavilion dv6 does very well indeed, almost managing to match the considerably less power-hungry Acer. It looks like AMD has not only figured out seamless graphics switching, but now also has more power-efficient discrete graphics than Nvidia.
Conclusion
HP has managed to out something that not only comes in at under AU$1000, but also doesn't sacrifice on quality or battery life. The dv6 comes recommended.
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