HP HDX16: All-Purpose Multimedia
Prepare to do a double-take with HP's HDX16. The short version: It is a trimmed-down take on HP's HDX18. The HDX16 offers desktop replacement performance and features in an all-purpose notebook--and looks pretty slick in the process. Sure, its screen may be a little smaller, and it comes with a smaller hard drive. But if anything, this machine hits a sweet spot that its bigger brother can't match: A lower price. The HDX16 starts at $1050; our test unit's configuration will run you $1973. A comparable configuration on the HDX18 costs $2300. Otherwise, not much separates these two multimedia machines. How shall I count the ways? Let's start with performance.
The HDX16 has some brawn to match its beauty. In our WorldBench 6 tests, HP's notebook scored a solid 100. It's not quite the fastest we've seen--the Micro Express JFL9290 fared better--but it's more than powerful enough to play some games as well as video. (The HDX18 scored a 102 in WorldBench 6.) A 2.8-GHz Core2 Duo CPU (T9600), 4GB of RAM, and nVidia's 512MB GeForce 9600M GT GPU fuel our review unit. Yep, this has the same exact spec loadout under the hood as the 18.4-inch model. Now, I can spit out frame rates of games like Doom 3 (which achieved a respectable 90 frames per second at 1280-by-1024 resolution), but what matters is that the HDX16 is capable of playing this season's big guns without much of a hitch. I tooled around Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead on the screen's native 1920-by-1080 resolution. Both looked good and ran fairly smoothly.
However, it didn't last quite as long as we would have liked. The HDX16's battery ran only 2 hours, 12 minutes in tests. That's pretty weak and not what one hopes for out of an all-purpose machine. So, if you're planning for a road trip, buy a beefier battery or just make sure that you keep the power brick close by.
The HDX16 has some brawn to match its beauty. In our WorldBench 6 tests, HP's notebook scored a solid 100. It's not quite the fastest we've seen--the Micro Express JFL9290 fared better--but it's more than powerful enough to play some games as well as video. (The HDX18 scored a 102 in WorldBench 6.) A 2.8-GHz Core2 Duo CPU (T9600), 4GB of RAM, and nVidia's 512MB GeForce 9600M GT GPU fuel our review unit. Yep, this has the same exact spec loadout under the hood as the 18.4-inch model. Now, I can spit out frame rates of games like Doom 3 (which achieved a respectable 90 frames per second at 1280-by-1024 resolution), but what matters is that the HDX16 is capable of playing this season's big guns without much of a hitch. I tooled around Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead on the screen's native 1920-by-1080 resolution. Both looked good and ran fairly smoothly.
However, it didn't last quite as long as we would have liked. The HDX16's battery ran only 2 hours, 12 minutes in tests. That's pretty weak and not what one hopes for out of an all-purpose machine. So, if you're planning for a road trip, buy a beefier battery or just make sure that you keep the power brick close by.
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