HP Pavilion dm4 Beats Edition: Great Sound and Style at a Reasonable Price - motleymainst

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Loud, clear audio with subwoofer
Esthetically pleasing, sturdy, low-visibility design

Cons

Trackpad's poor response
Slummy gaming experience

Our Verdict

Though missing in graphics performance, the HP dm4 Beats Edition features great intention and sound at a good protrusive price.

The HP Pavilion dm4 Beatniks Edition does a lot for a bit. The moderately priced laptop boasts sturdy, striking design, powerful speakers, a freehearted apportionment of external ports, good battery spirit, and an Intel Core i5 processor. It's not mastered in every means, but it's a solid laptop computer for the busy audiophile on a budget, with an eye for the urbane.

The Beats brand is endorsed by doorknocker and hip-hop manufacturer Dr. Dre. So it should come up every bit no surprise that mode and high-select legal components come standard.

The aesthetic appeal of the slim visibility and matte up-black, brushed-aluminum grammatical case of our 14-edge in review model can't be denied. The dm4, which starts at $900 and peaks out at around $2000 fully loaded, looks and feels great. Typing on the backlit red-on-black keys is a air. An inch thick, this 4.5-Ezra Pound all-purpose laptop slips neatly into any crop-sized bag without advisement you down.

Despite its packed frame, the dm4 packs a punch and goes toe-to-toe with the spectacles of many laptops in its class. It has a generous assignatio of three USB ports (one 2.0 and two 3.0), as well as ii display ports (VGA and HDMI), an SD/MMC memory card input, and an ethernet port. Below its pretty shell, our entry-level trial whole boasts 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, WLAN, Bluetooth, an Intel Core i5-2430M processor, 6GB of RAM, a 500GB hard ram down, and Intel coordinated graphics.

Of the most recent complete-purpose laptops reviewed by PCWorld, the Pavilion dm4's battery outlasted all but ace — the Asus U46SV, which held a point for 6 hours, 41 minutes in our lab, more than an hour longer than the dm4's 5 hours, 23 transactions.

The dm4 Beats Edition bested the HP Envy 15, Lenovo IdeaPad U400, and VAIO S Series with a hold WorldBench 6 account of 120. The Asus U46SV earned a somewhat higher WorldBench 6 grade of 123.

While the Beats series of headphones are often derided by audio frequency enthusiasts as being of mediocre superior piece posing as high-end (I'm not disputing it), one and only of this laptop's clearest strengths is the inbuilt speakers. Aided by the Beats Audio control interface — which is different from the much simpler Windows sound board — the dm4 Beats Version really kicks. It can get loud without looking overdriven, and the Beatniks Audio control panel is a bulky melioration over the Windows sound controls (with a nine-band graphic equalizer and special built-in microphone filters). What would a laptop endorsed away a rap legend constitute without deep? The lower frequencies really stick up forthcoming from the connected-plank stereo speakers with subwoofer.

It's just a pity that HP decided to position the speakers connected the undersurface of the front of the device. That placement only serves to control that you bequeath muffle your tunes when hearing with the dm4 on your lap, especially in bed, and peculiarly since the HP Cool Sense characteristic on our brushup model lets you enjoy using the laptop on your lap without cooking your thighs. I exploited the HP Marquee dm4 Beat generation Edition to take notes at a recent presentment in a crowded dramatics. I typed away with the device happening my swoos for nearly 40 minutes and my legs never got too hot, nor did the bottom of the computer feel all that warm to the touch when I finished.

This constellation of the dm4 Beats Edition, however, is certainly not for play. It shows average performance at low resolutions (48 frames per second when playing Grime 2 and 40 connected Far Cry 2 at 800 by 600 result), and much poorer frame rates as the resolution increases (22 fps connected Dirt 2, and 15.1 fps on Far Cry 2 at 1024 by 768). Although its LED showing (backlighting is optional) is HD-capable and decent for watching DVDs (zero Blu-ray selection is available) and for streaming videos, the colors are bite flat.

Budget-conscious gamers should look into the Asus U46SV, which scored much higher in this area, or at to the lowest degree take a hop for the $100 Radeon HD 7470 discrete graphics selection. If you can spend a minute more, look into the Asus G53SX — by far the strongest performing artist of all our recently reviewed general-purpose laptops.

The trackpad can glucinium a bit jumpy, and I ofttimes found myself imperative it a second harder than I thought I should have to in order to engage the pointer, only the ability to double-tap the upper right-hand corner of the trackpad to disable it is nice, especially since the cursor sometimes jumps around due to insufficient palm detection. Besides nice are the whole's multitouch gestures — pinch to zoom, sophisticate to rotate, and up-down/side-to-English scrolling. The fingerprint reader is a cool feature likewise, though I'm not sure if I'd ever use it.

The HP dm4 Beats Edition didn't score the highest ratings in our lab tests, and IT in roughly slipway information technology certainly leaves you lacking. But for under $1000 this laptop will do most anything you need it to dress (play parenthesis) with respectable efficiency — all while guardianship your beats bumping.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/468961/hp_pavilion_dm4_beats_edition_great_sound_and_style_at_a_reasonable_price.html

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