HP dv6500t: A "Minivan" Notebook

General Performance

To measure general performance, we're now using SYSmark 2007 as well as PCMark05. Unfortunately, we don't have SYSmark 2007 results for any of the other laptops. That said, we didn't find anything during testing that would give us any cause for concern. We'll start with the results of SYSmark 2007, presented in table form for now.

HP dv6500t SYSmark 2007 Performance
Overall Score	100
E-Learning	112
Video Creation	75
Productivity	102
3D	112

Results from PCMark05 are lower in almost all cases than the other laptops. The problem is that the overall score obfuscates things somewhat, so you don't actually know just by looking at the score whether the problem is your graphics, your hard drive, your processor, or something else. We will also provide a table of the individual results in order to better show this information.

PCMark05 Performance Breakdown
	ABS Z5	ASUS A8JS	ASUS G2P	Dell M1710	HP dv6500t
HDD XP Startup	5.839	6.623	6.183	7.602	4.717
Physics and 3D	186.04	182.38	194	213.42	86.65
2D Transparency	1078.48	733.55	515.72	1263.64	685.63
3D Pixel Shaders	327.74	132.09	93.84	360.76	23.32
Web Page Rendering	3.267	3.27	3.18	3.467	1.625
Decryption	54.602	54.524	54.294	64.148	57.674
2D 64 Line Redraw	2111.47	1129.12	1326.54	2133.45	504.45
HDD General	4.019	4.332	4.127	4.453	3.548
Audio Compression	2133.98	2219.17	2142.88	2351.51	1935.72
Video Encoding	372.19	363.48	373.53	426.06	364.18
Text Editing	137.3	139.57	138.75	159.67	99.63
Image Decompression	28.143	28.277	27.981	32.392	27.208
File Compression	4.831	4.819	4.577	5.597	4.411
File Encryption	26.513	26.512	27.54	31.225	27.799
HDD Virus Scan	32.924	35.32	43.118	37.266	26.171
Memory Latency	8.011	8.207	8.207	8.011	8.797

Looking at the overall score, the dv6500t appears to be terribly slow. Once we drill down into the details, however, the reason for the low score becomes readily apparent. The hard drive certainly isn't as fast as any of the other tested laptops, but the graphics chip is also clearly slower -- in some tests the other laptops are more than twice as fast. Some of the other results appear to be impacted by the use of Windows Vista, for example web page rendering and text editing are both quite a bit slower. In practice, the laptop is plenty fast for any general computer tasks, and while Vista definitely does make things slower in some areas that occurs regardless of what kind of system you're running. Not surprisingly, the Dell M1710 sweeps all of the PCMark05 results, but then it also costs more than twice as much as most of the other laptops.

To complement the SYSmark and PCMark results, we have some of our own benchmarks that test similar areas. Here's a quick look at how the laptops fair in audio/video encoding and 3D rendering






The increased FSB speed helps the T7300 equipped HP notebook outperform the T7200 systems in several of these tests, but also scores at the bottom of the pack on some of the other tests. We also benchmarked with updated versions of iTunes/QuickTime and DivX, and in all cases the performance results were slower with the new versions. Since we do not have results from the new versions for the other laptops, we won't list those, but in future reviews we will be updating our software.