Compaq Presario R3240 or HP Pavilion zx5180?

Hoping someone with experience with either of these machines can point me in the right direction. I've been searching for a notebook PC and I've narrowed my choices to these 2 models - mainly because of attractive price of refurbs at hpshopping.com and the no interest financing at same.

I am a pro photographer, so I do a great deal of work with large image files in Photoshop. My desktop PC is an ABS M5-64 (Athlon 64 3400+, 1 Gig RAM)...a great PC from a great company. Unfortunately, I can't afford ABS' Mayhem notebook - and it's a bit of a monster.

I'm doing some traveling, so I would like to do relatively fast image editing on my notebook and I'm tinkering with some amateur level video as well, which I would like to be able to edit on the notebook and burn to DVD.

The specs for the Presario R3240 & HP Pavilion zx5180 are almost identical. The big difference being an Athlon 64 3200+ in the Presario R3240 and a Pentium® 4 processor with HT Technology 3.00GHz, 800MHz FSB and 512KB L2 Cache in the HP zx5180. The R3240 is about $100 less, but the HP comes with a 12 cell battery, where the Presario R3240 comes with an 8 cell battery.

The Presario R3240 comes with an NVIDIA® GeForce™ 4 440 Go with 64MB DDR (dedicated) graphics card, and the HP zx5180 comes with an ATI® MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9200 with 64MB DDR (dedicated).

Question: Which of these 2 CPU / Graphics card combos / notebooks will work best for my photo editing needs and some video as well?

Thank you!

 

Get the Presario. Better/cooler/faster CPU, and while the graphics chip is a little weaker you won't notice on 2D work like image and video editing (3D work is where you'd notice). I play HDTV on my zv5000z (same CPU and graphics chip as the Presario) without trouble. Battery life should be about the same, the grossly inefficient P4 in the Pavilion eliminating the advantage of its 12 cell battery.

 

I am also purchasing the R3240. Brian, how do you use HDTV. I am a filmmaker and my camera dealer just told me that laptops do not support HDTV..

Please help

 

See here. Sasem USB HDTV tuner. I'm recording "24" right now (dumps the raw 20Mbps bitstream to disc, to my Linux server over my LAN since the notebook doesn't have the required 18GB of free space for the 2 hour show available). Suffice it to say that HDTV *ROCKS* on my zv5000z's 1680x1050 res widescreen (close enough to HDTV's 1920x1080). If HP builds a nice 17" widescreen Athlon 64 notebook with nVidia GPU (Linux needs nVidia), I'm upgrading [ ].

 

Thanks Brian,

I am not familiar with that equipment...what does it due. Sorry i AM a newb but i really wanna be able to record live tv and play HDTV homeade movies on my R3240...is this a good computer for this??

Thanks in advance for your help,

Greg Robertson

 

The Sasem box will record live TV and record via composite and S-Video inputs. Your HDTV homemade movies... I assume you have a HD camcorder with FireWire (IEEE1394) port? You should be able to transfer those to any modern computer and play them back, though there might be issues with finding the right codec/etc that I'm not aware of. The over-the-air HDTV datastream is decompressed and played back in software, with some hardware assistance from the nVidia GeForce 440 Go GPU. The Sasem hardware doesn't do anything to the datastream.

 

Thanks for your help!

The notebook only comes with a 64MB standalone graphics card

My friend says he can install an upgrade but i dont know how expensive that could be. I am wondering what this will do to the video quality of HDTV alone not to mention gaming and DVD's

Thanks for your help.

Greg

 

The video card is not upgradable (soldered to the motherboard). You might want to look at Sager's 17" widescreen Athlon 64 notebooks, those have 128MB Radeon 9700 video cards (much better). Eventually HP will have new models out, I'd guess around March since the current zv5000z/R3000z series came out in March of last year, hopefully they won't decide to wait for the release of 64-bit WinXP before shipping new Athlon 64 designs.

However, it sounds like you're only doing 2D work, so the GeForce 440 Go is more than adequate. You'll only get into trouble if you're seriously into modern 3D games like Doom 3.

 

im not into doom3, but i am into counter strike source. how would the geforce 4 440go with a amd athlon 64 3700+ processor, 512 ram run on a game like cs 1.6, source, dod, hl2?

 

The exact video card specs on the comp i am looking into is 64MB NVIDIA GeFORCE 4MX 440...

I dont know if that is what you mean or how bad that is...i am also into CS Source and HL2.

Thanks