HP Pavillion dm3 Notebook

Far cooler than my MacBook Pro which gets up to 70 C for no reason.

 

I previously had an HDX16 and it never even got up to 70C.....that's surprisingly high to me for a MBP. I always figured MBP ran cool, or should run cool at least. It usually topped out at 60C for me.

 

Wow, those temps bring tears to my eyes. The HDD at 31C? HAHA.

Those are some really really good temps. I don't know what others talking about the bottom left, but with temps like these.... who cares.

Oh by the way, were these temps taken at idle or....?

 

Yeah the MB and MBP lines can get up from 60*C to 81*C max temps .

The screenshot posted is taken while web browsing, so I'm guessing idle.

 

Well, my MacBook Pro is from late-2006. Maybe I'm pushing it past it's prime? Still, even my brother's mid-2007 MacBook Pro cannot be placed on your lap without feeling uncomfortable.

 

My guess is that they were probably taken soon after the computer was started... so I would be curious about the temps after about 1 hour or so...

Like I said though, the Intel version was much hotter when I compared the two of them (the dm3z at BB and dm3t at Micro Center). I used the dm3z at BB for about 45 minutes (I kinda hogged it for a while... lol). The touch pad is mediocre but everything else about it was great. The dm3z certainly was not "hot" but only barely "warm" on the palm rests and on the bottom near the palm rests.

 

I am currently running a test on the dm3-1030us

IT looks like the cpu lowest speed is 800mhz with 0.800v
At 1600mhz with 0.925v !!!
This is with the L335 processor. It seems like AMD really managed to get the voltage way down.
HT link speed looks like it is 800Mhz with no throttling

At idle on my desk the laptop has these temps: (core temp)
Core 0: 35C
Core 1: 25C

No part of the notebook is hot when idle except you notice the left palm rest is a bit warmer.

With orthos stressing the cpu:
Core 0: 53C
Core 1: 47C

The left palm rest heats up a bit. Feels like a slightly warm cup of coffee. The vent feels like it is blowing out air at a similar temp. There are no hot spots on the bottom. Near the middle and towards the left near the left palm reset on the bottom get a bit warm but not even close to being hot.

The fan noise at maximum has a whoosh sound as well as a fan noise that is medium pitched.

Also BTW there is something called sideport memory which I believe this laptop may have. It is supposed to conserve more battery for the notebook. I will investigate the gpu information futher.
Example of RS780 chipset http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1126430

It looks like the cpu supports up to SSE3 but cpuz says nothing about VT. I wonder if this cpu has it since the bios does have the option to enable.

 

I am showing 0.950v at 1.6Ghz. Wonder why that would be different?
This CPU does support VT.

 

My bad. Got things mixed up. 15W more, meaning the SP9300/G105M combo uses probably double the power than the SU7300/X4500 combo.

 

Standard cpu variation perhaps? I heard thats the case for intel cpus as well.

 

Possible to underclock?

 

yet the 5310m has the same sp9300 and a lower-power 41 whr battery and lasts 6.5 hours, and the dm3 has a higher-power 57 whr battery which would scale to 8 hours. the only question is the graphics card on low use.

 

Yeah... dunno what's with the estimations. Will have to wait for someone to get both versions and have standard battery tests to determine the difference.

 

Question - i'm really considering grabbing a DM3T. I do not game but would like as best battery life i can get. I'd like to be able to play HD clips from the net. Will the integrated Nvidia be the way to go? I sold my Dell M1210 last week.. Also, i had a 1.8 dual core cpu on my XPS, will these ULV's be a little better than the 3 year old 1.8 chip ? I mainly surf the web, do email but i do like to use my digicam (point-shoot Canon) and D/L, manipulate images.. nothing intense. Just wondering if a ULV core2duo w/ integrated graphics would give me at least the cpu power i had with much better battery life. Never had and AMD chip in anything before either. TIA.

 

In answer to your question, the Intel 4500 is the way to go for you.

TO ALL DM3Z FANS--LET'S MOVE TO THE OFFICIAL DM3Z OWNER'S LOUNGE SO WE DON'T HAVE TWO THREADS GOING AT ONCE. IT'S FAR MORE CONFUSING... lol

You can find the Official Dm3z Owner's thread HERE: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5441065#post5441065

Thanks!

 

I just purchased this unit at Office Depot for $550 plus tax before the $50 rebate. This is the unit with the ATI chipset, 4gb of memory, 320 gb drive at 7200 rpm.

Does anybody know if HP has a forum for this unit? So far the best information on this new device seems to be right here.

The unit seems pretty twitchy....about three times I have been typing and then the unit flipped out of this window and lost my typing. I assume there are some tricks or setting I need to learn to stop that from happening.

No input yet on battery life. Seems like a four hour unit to me; not a six hour unit. But we will see.

I have not figured out how to access the utility that lets the user switch on and off the 3200 graphics chip when on battery mode. Anybody got this going yet?

Also, twice now, when waking from sleep the pointer looks like a magnifying glass. I had to restart the machine to get back to a normal cursor. Anybody know much about that?

Some advice...update the audio driver. The factory installed driver sets the built in speakers to mono. The updated driver provides stereo. You made need to go into the control panel to configure the drivers more fully. HP support was hit or miss. They told me to reformat the machine....when a simple driver update would do the trick.

I also updated the bios and video driver. I have no idea if that helped or hurt, but I wanted to you the latest drivers.

Video performance seems pretty good so far. But I have not yet tried any truly hi def material. That will come!

I had to monkey around with installing itunes 64 bit. At first it would not install....but neither would the 32 bit version. Then I downloaded the 64 bit version again, and got everything going.

I did have some problems installing office 2003 from an external drive (not an hp drive). Eventually I loaded the disc onto the hard drive of the machine, and installed from there. That worked.

I had to do this post in pieces. Sorry if the flow is choppy. The unit keyboard/mouse configuration is really confusing me. I keep getting flipped out of where I am typing. Now I think I understand some of the negative comments about the ALPS pad based on my initial experience.

 

Similar problem with mine (same model). I ended up fiddling with the sensitivity of the touchpad and disabling ALL of the multigesture stuff. I never got the hang of it anyways, but might try to re-enable it in the future. It seemed to fix it but I don't really know true cause.

 

I have the same issue. I just tested it and if you leave the machine sleeping for about an hour, when it wakes up the touchpad is in a bad state (Responses to input erratically). I am trying what you suggested to disable all gestures.

It seems nowadays they keep power to the touchpad? I can touch it to wake the machine back up. On other laptops i've seen in the Vista era usually you have to press the power button to wake it back up.

 

I'm having the same issue- after resuming from sleep or hibernate my mouse may or may not work, I'll get a magnifying glass that just won't move. Also- wi-fi seems to work for a bit, then drop it's connection, sometimes making all available networks disappear. Once I even got a blue screen.

I have done a clean install with Windows 7 Pro, done all BIOS and driver updates, including the updated HD 3200 drivers on the AMD site.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

I havent seen those issues other than the mouse issue. I stayed with the default installation.

BTW, if you check this out and you have a desktop at home you can just use RDP to watch HD videos/play games. You can even do this on a netbook.
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/03/16/windows-7-rdp-changes-improve-virtual-desktop-performance

EDIT: Hmm seems like all this new RDP does and send all the commands for the client to render. That wont really help much unless your machine can handle it.

 

Wow! I had to see it to believe it, but sure enough, great video playback over RDP! CoD WaW wouldn't play though... I didn't really expect it to though.

Back to the mouse/wi-fi issues, my girlfriend bought the same model, a day later from a different store, and does not have these issues- also, I had these issues prior to my wipe & re-install party... I thought surely a clean install would fix, but no such luck. Hoping more details/ideas come out in the forums, or HP/Microsoft posts some update that magically fixes this.

At least rebooting is pretty quick.

 

Try disabling all mouse gestures. Seems like the alps 64-bit drivers are not 100%.

As for wifi, that is very strange. There are some power savings settings you may want to tweak. (On battery set Wirless Adapter to Medium Power Saving)

 

http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptop/hp-probook-5310m.aspx?page=4

They say the probook gives 5:30 Hrs battery with the 4-cell and that a 6-cell would give an extra 2-3 Hrs battery life. That's with the SP9300 and integrated graphics. Therefore, I reckon the DM3 with the 6-cell could be looking at 6+ hours with regular use.

 

thanks for the link ... not clear what they had the laptop doing during those 5.5 hours, though, and whether it's comparable to the 4.5 hours reported for the l335 with 3200. the g105 takes a lot more power than the intel integrated crap, though, so it's tough to tell, but it's looking like the su7300 for me if it can handle nulldc ...

 

Does anyone have any performance information about the Intel SP9400 and g 105m chip set? I am definitely interested but want to know if it is powerful enough with good battery life. My wife loves the Sims and would want to play Sims 3 on it. Thanks.

 

Read other bits of this thread and the other dm3. Look up notebookcheck.net for performance on the G105M chip, and the SP9300 version hasn't surfaced as yet.

 

The SP9400/105M will be a beast. No worries there about performance.

Only question is battery life and on that front, nobody knows for sure. But we're expecting a solid 4-5 hours of battery life out of it... if not more. But we won't know for sure till it hits. But performance wise, the SP9400 is a screamer and the 105M is pretty bloody powerful itself.

 

Is the touchpad really as bad as Laptopmag says?
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptop/hp-pavilion-dm3t.aspx?page=2

 

Bets are in:
I'm gonna say 6 hrs with normal use.
I'm hoping for 7

 

Both video cards are capable of running sims 3 on high most likely , just depends on the processor side of things, most likely will run very well with either setup as long as you have the g105m or the 4330.

 

sp9300 and g105m does look pretty nice.
just need to know if the battery life can be over 3 hours with that build with moderate usage and default brightness and wifi.

if it disables the card when on battery, that can be easily done

 

i think it was established already that the intel build with the g105 has no integrated card to switch too. So its hard to say, the neo with the ati 3200 go just above 4 hours under normal internet use

 

Go dm3z and put in a ssd drive , you can easily go 5 hours with that

 

I can't comment on how well it works on the dm3 but it is the same material as my touchpad and I hate it. I find my figures constantly getting stuck and it picks up smudges like crazy. It is not unresponsive, though, once you have used it enough.

 

Its just not an ideal feeling surface. It is responsive though. I think laptopmag exaggerated a bit.

 

I don't think any of the recent touchpads on HP were that great. Obviously, I am used to the DV7, and the HDX series touchpads and I don't love them. Quite often, the touchpad just doesn't seem responsive.

 

I dont think responsiveness is an issue, its just that the mirrored surface can be hard to slide your finger across. Its a flaw in the surface, not the actual touch sensitivity.

 

Well for my own experience, I don't know if it's due to the hot weather so there's some sweat on my fingers or whatnot, but sometimes on my HDX for instance, I'll move my finger up down, left right and it doesn't show any responsiveness whatsoever. It's not about the lack of ability to slide my finger across, since I know it works other times.

 

I think it's cause they use an ALPS branded touchpad, rather than the Synaptics. Terrible move by HP. I might avoid this otherwise great laptop due to this. I use the mousepad a lot, I hate using mice.

 

its hit and miss on the touchpad, it varies between ALPS and Synaptics. The thing I like about the Synaptics is that they are more customizable with the SW utility that they ship with. ALPS pads I have seen do not have these features.

 

As far as dm3 equipped with G105M are concerned, can you tell if the G105M is at least switchable (with IGP) from BIOS? As an example, it is switchable by software in the Asus UX50V ( http://www.hardwarezone.com/ourvoic...In-Design-But-Not-In-Features-And-Performance)

 

I'm 99% sure it's not switchable as there isn't an integrated chip....

 

It seems like the only real downside for this laptop is its touch pad. Also, I'm not a big fan of the 16:9 screen size.

Are those reasons enough not to buy? Thanks.

 

So it is really disappointing. New ASUS UL80vt can switch from IGP (Intel) to newer G210M, is 14' while not much bigger and heavier. So with IGP you have up to 12h battery life (!) and you can switch to a more powerful G210M (compared to the G105M). Looking at those specs, HP dm3 is a no-way for me.

 

You could get an 8 or 12 cell battery for the hp also.

Also just a heads up. Right now you can get the amd verison with switchable 4330 , 3 gigs of ram and a 250 gig hardrive for only $660 before tax with free 2 day shipping.

The asus is $850. Battery life wont be as good , but your saving alot of money and you can get a larger battery.

You can also get the standard amd verison with the hd 3200 only for $523 bucks with 3 gigs of ram and a 250 gig hardrive .

 

There isn't an 8 cell or 12 cell battery option for the DM3.

 

Fixed it for you. Remember laptops came out last week. There will be more battery options either from hp or another company.

 

I can't get any option for an HP dm3. Unhopefully in France the beast is not configurable, and for $1200 (799€) you get the only version of intel/G105M dm3 which comes without bluetooth, without LAN Gigabit, and without wifi n.

For $1050 (699€) I'm not sure the ASUS has bluetooth but it does has wifi n, LAN Gigabit, 4Gbytes RAM etc...

 

That really sucks. I was in france once (after 9/11) and a french dude spit on me. So I think this is karma paying france back for that dude spitting on me.

It sucks that there aren't more options for oyu. In your case the asus might be the way to go.

I personaly didn't go with wireless n cause no one around here uses it and I'm not interested in upgrading my current set up for it. I can allways buy a new card when I'm ready or i might be lookin for a new laptop by then.

 

If they aren't offering it now.. they won't offer it later. Remember, thing is already pushing 9 hours of battery life...

On any account, I wouldn't put too much stock on it if that's your plan.

A company other than HP isn't going to offer a battery for it... especially if HP themselves aren't making it.