HP Pavilion dm1z Fusion Ultralight Notebook Review
SiSoftware Sandra & Multimedia Benchmarks
We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2011, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks).
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All of the scores reported below were taken with the system running in its stock configuration.
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CPU Arithmetic Test; Click To Enlarge
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CPU Multimedia Test; Click To Enlarge
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Physical Disc Test; Click To Enlarge
Our gauntlet of SiSoftware SANDRA tests show that the E-350 is capable of hanging with some pretty stout competition. There's no Atoms in this list of rivals; the E-350 has the capability to compete with more advanced CPUs, and as we've stated throughout, you can feel the difference. At last, we see a netbook chip that makes the netbook experience one that's enjoyable.
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To test multimedia capabilities, we attempt to play back a 720p WMVHD clip, a 720p H.264 clip and a 1080p clip. We've also included a screenshot of the 1080p clip from the Mini 311 (which uses the first gen NVIDIA Ion GPU) to give you a better idea of CPU utilization from a different type of system.
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Click To Enlarge; 720 H.264 - Pavilion dm1z
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Click To Enlarge; 720p WMVHD - Pavilion dm1z
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Click To Enlarge; 1080p - Pavilion dm1z
Click To Enlarge; 1080p on HP Mini 311 w/ Ion
We assumed the E-350 would be plenty capable of handling 720p and 1080p multi-media playback, and indeed it was up to the task. It actually pegged the system resources a bit higher than we had imagined, but loading the clips was quick and playback was perfectly smooth throughout. AMD may still be working on drivers here a bit, depending on the media player software being used. It may not be the same if you have a lot of encoding or number crunching going on in the background, but so long as you don't treat your dm1z like a mobile workstation, you should enjoy crisp, stutter-free playback. Please note, however, that GPU accelerated Flash video playback is still a work in progress for AMD and will require updated drivers / or plug-ins at some point.
