*HP dv6z AMD Llano (6XXX series) Owners Lounge*

That gives me a little more hope that mine might actually ship by my delayed date and not get pushed back further . By the way, you have 6/1 and 6/14 in your sig, probably should be 7/1 and 7/14. Again, I really appreciate the update on the delay, was thinking of canceling but it looks like it might ship soon. Do you think it's worth trying to get the 2day shipping out of them because of the delay?

 

Are you talking about on the AMD or Intel systems? I know you can get drivers working through hacks, but I'm not willing to do that except as a last resort-not something I'm going in to a purchase knowing I'd have to do. I demand real support, and the Intel + AMD systems don't have it, though hopefully the all AMD systems do...though I've yet to actually see anyone say they've installed AMD's drivers on there (without hacks or the like).

 

Passmark is one multi-threaded test. It puts the A8-3530mx at 4380 and i3-530 at 2796. (Higher is better.)

PassMark Intel vs AMD CPU Benchmarks - High End

In any case the 6770m (which the xfire should be as good as if not better than) is a far cry from a desktop 5850 that the i3-530 was pitted against. And we can't say for certain until someone actually does some real benchmarks preferably someone from NBR so we can at least get results from benchmarks we'd like and have faith in.

 

I am going to run Passmark and check the clock speeds right when I get mine. The scores really don't make sense even if all 4 cores were running at the turbo speed.

@Wolfpup - I will be sure to update the drivers as well.

 

Argh.

How many times do we have to go through this in a single thread? Those scores make absolutely no sense -- compare the A8-3530MX to the Phenom II X4 970 that is two lines above it. The latter is running at 3.5GHz which is almost 50% higher than the Turbo speed of the A8-3530MX. Even if it can Turbo with all 4 cores, it still should be about a third lower than it is. Passmark is a random number generator which depends on who is willing to hack the scores.

Besides, the entire post you quoted was that the important thing is not perfectly multithreaded performance, but performance in tasks that heavily task a couple of threads and lightly task the rest.

 

So I spoke with HP about getting something for my delay, but it was a no go. Its only the first round. I will try again if it seems its going to be more than a week or so. Overall I have been pretty happy with my 2 previous HP laptops, so I'm not ready to beat them up yet.

 

Awesome! Thanks!

 

I called today and tried to get a discount or 2-day shipping but I wasn't really into it, I didn't get anything. I am not really too upset, though, it is only a few days. If it doesn't ship by or on the 19th I will definitely get at least the upgrade to 2-day shipping, I can guarantee that.

 

Then show me evidence to support your claims? I hear a lot of talk from you (and others) with zero benchmarks or evidence to back it. My whole point is that the CPU won't bottleneck the 6750m. I'm not wishing or hoping or wanting. I'd just like to see hard facts or at least reputable benchmarks from a trustworthy source.

 

So here is a good sampling of people who actually bought the best buy version of the laptop.

HP - Pavilion Laptop / AMD A-Series Processor / 15.6" Display / 6GB Memory / 640GB Hard Drive - Dark Umber - dv6-6135dx


much of the info is incorrect about how fast the cpu actually is in a relative sense, but one thing comes through clear, people are not complaining about low cpu performance. What difference there is, it is not showing up in the real world activities people are doing by and large. And many are incredibly pleased with the graphics performance that is often non existent in retail stores at that pricepoint.

 

Look at the benchmarks from your own post which I was replying to or look at the AnandTech review. I cannot definitively prove to you that the extremely low results are caused by the CPU (we'd need laptops identical except for the CPU for that). But it's clear that Llano is getting much lower performance in several games than you would expect from a 6750M. The reason has to be either broken drivers or the CPU. Given that the 3500M does not actually meet the minimum CPU requirements for those games, I think it is reasonable to assume that the CPU is the culprit.

 

How can you say it doesn't meet the system requirement? You can't go on MHz alone. Until recently specs called out a MHz requirement which referred to Pentium 4, yes Pentium 4 speeds. Pretty much any modern mobile CPU meets that requirement. Crysis calls for a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, recommended is a Core 2 Duo at 2.2GHz. Modern Warfare 2 is a P4 3.2 GHz , Dirt 2 is a single core Pentium, Far Cry 2 is a P4 3.2 / C2D Recommended, Hawx a P4 2.0 / C2D Recommended, Stalker Pripyat is P4 2.2GHz.

Far exceeds any of those system minimums let alone recommended requirements.

Besides back to my point that the A8-35xx series CPU is within the processing limits of an i3-530. I have no doubt drivers are to blame here, which is correctable. But the CPU isn't the culprit.

 

Exactly as I said earlier.

Even the A8-3500m is above the minimum system requirements for all the games tested and close to the recommended. It is not the reason that the FPS are sometimes lower than even the IGP should get.

Edit: I think that the delay problems are solved, at least for now. It now has a build date of August 1st, the same as the dv6t.

 

abaddon4180, hope your machine does ship 7/19! Surprised they wouldn't at least upgrade you to 2-day shipping.

 

No, it is not. The minimum requirements are typically stated in terms of a single or dual-core CPUs (e.g. 2GHz C2D). Llano is superior to these in perfectly multi-threaded scenarios, but games are not like that. The 3500M does not beat a 2GHz C2D if only 2 cores are heavily loaded with a lighter load on a third.

 

My brother just bought the Llano dv6, it is a beast, it is fast and plays League of Legends maxed out at 30 fps. It is a great laptop for 99 percent of the users out there. Don't be afraid to pick one up!

 

Crysis 2 says the minimum system requirements are a C2D or Athlon 64 x2 at 2GHz. The A8-3500m may not beat a C2D with only 2 cores, though I suspect it will be pretty close to the early C2D's like the E4xxx, but it will beat an Athlon 64 x2 at 2GHz.

Many other system requirements, like the ones HT said, are given in P4 or single-core Athlon 64. Even at 1.5GHz Llano beats a 3.2GHz P4 in single-core performance.

Me too but, like I said, I probably could have tried harder. I basically just asked them if they could and when they said no I said okay. I have ordered 5 notebooks from HP, though, and I got 4 of them 2 days after they shipped. The other one took 4 days. Even if it ships the 19th I think I will have it by Saturday.

 

If I get mine next week, I'll be thrilled. I'm currently running a 6+ year old Pentium M centrino laptop, and it's being cooled by a honeywell room fan - something in the graphics subsystem (probably in the cooling) went bad, but at least it's workable with ridiculuous outside cooling blasting at it. My intervening laptop is currently dead due to a mobo failure.....

 

I've already chimed in here in the past, but I'll say it again, the CPU in this laptop has not held my experience back in any real tangible way of typical use...EXCEPT with Civilization 5. I'm not certain the CPU is the cause of this, but is the most likely reason. When a game of Civ5 has progressed to the late stages of the game, and all the AI players have large empires, it seems as though this lags the game a little bit between turns. So after I end my turn, the game seems to lag a bit, then when my turn begins, it's smooth again.

Other than that, I am enjoying the very good battery life from a gaming capable machine. It plays every other game that I've tried pretty decently. Although, I haven't tried Starcraft 2, which is pretty CPU dependant. I only play that game on my desktop anyway, since the laptop isn't suitable for it's competitive nature.

Also, a few posts back, someone mentioned that this processor was based on the Athlon II, which is not true, it's based on the Phenom II architecture. One of the benchmarks on the 3500m that is out there showed that the Llano 3500m @ 1.6 ghz performs almost exactly as a Phenom II clocked at 1.6ghz.

Also, my brother placed an order for a 3530mx based DM6z. I will be very interested to do some comparison testing in real world scenarios.

 

It's not exactly like either the Athlon II or the Phenom II. The Phenom II has L3 cache which Llano doesn't have so the latter is more similar to Athlon II in that sense, but Llano has more L2 cache than Athlon II. Also, its integer and floating point schedulers have more entries than either the Phenom II or Athlon II. The end result is that the performance is somewhere between Athlon II and Phenom II.

 

So what will A8-3500M do when new games come out that recommend at least 2 Ghz C2D?
Plus, all C2D CPU's are the same, they only differ by the manufacturing process (heat and power consumption), L2 cache amount, clock speed, and FSB speed.

 

Nothing.

Games that recommend specs by gigahertz are just hilarious.

 

I would assume that it would say C2D or Athlon X2 64 at 2GHz, unless AMD goes under, and the A8-3500m is going to perform between the two.

 

What if it says C2D or Phenom II at 2Ghz?

 

Who cares. We get it, the processor is not super great.

 

I think by the time the CPU reaches those requirements, the GPU requirements will be higher than what the dv6 has.

 

You can lower the graphics settings in that case, but you can't lower the features of a game engine if it's not running fast enough.

 

I guess I wouldn't worry about it too much. I played Crysis on my Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz and 8600m GT GPU in my Vostro 1500 four years ago. I dropped details down a bit but it wasn't too bad. Plus I can play pretty much any game out there right now on my M11x R1 with GT 335m. I'm certain the A8-3530MX is much more powerful than an SU7300 and 6770 more powerful than the 335m.

 

So you would be running on the lowest settings and resolution at, if it doesn't meet the minimum requirements, likely lower than 30FPS. I would rather not play said game on the laptop at all.

 

Not necessarily. Most games work OK on medium long after the GPU is obsolete. The number of people who regularly upgrade their GPUs is small. If you look at Steam's hardware survey, there is not a single GPU in the top 5 that is from the current generation of either Nvidia or AMD cards and only 1 (the GTX460) in the top 20. The 6770M is actually fairly close in performance to the most popular card (the Nvidia 9800) and definitely better than the 9600/8600.

The game developers know that their bread and butter is in the mid-range and they make their games accordingly: the high end gets some bells and whistles for marketing purposes, but the game is perfectly playable even with an older mid-range card. On the other hand, there is no such restriction with CPUs: 80%+ of the CPUs that are currently out there are significantly faster than Llano in at least dual-threaded performance. Furthermore, the CPUs of the consoles are less obsolete than their GPUs so until the next-gen XBox and PlayStation are released (at least 2 years), the GPU stress will grow slower than the CPU stress simply because that makes it easier to design for their main platforms.

 

When the minimum requirements are higher than the 6770m I doubt turning down the settings is going to make the experience even decent. When developers give the minimum requirements it usually means you need at least that to play on low settings at 20-30FPS. Something being obsolete doesn't mean the same thing as not meeting the requirements.

 

You're not going to get minimum system requirements above a 6770M anytime soon in PC gaming, but current minimum system CPU requirements are already within spitting distance of the A8-3500M. A 2 Ghz C2D, which is 5 years old, is already faster than the A8-3500M in single and dual threaded tasks, and most games do not scale beyond two cores.

 

I'd say most games made in the last year are scaled for quad cores, as they have become increasingly more common in desktops and notebooks.

 

I guess I'd like to know where you are getting this information since I see very little data available on the A8-3530m or 3500 series anywhere.

 

A8-3500M has the per core performance of a Phenom II at 1.6 Ghz with the weaksauce turbo boost, which is slower than the per core performance of a 2Ghz C2D. So the C2D is faster for single and dual threaded tasks.

 

That ain't good, since I guess you guys are saying this CPU is probably worse than my Penryn Core 2 Duo at 2.4Ghz for some games, but still...

 

Hey! The Best Buy model claims it has a Blu Ray drive? That's not right, is it?

Although really, for just $220ish more I can bump the GPU and CPU options to max with 8GB, even if that does include Blu Ray.

 

Yes, it actually does have a blu-ray drive. I have it, and I only own blu-rays

Also, I agree with the statement that recent games and future titles will definitely be scaling to take advantage of quad core processors. It's funny that Supreme Commander was known to get a big boost from Quad Cores and was a very CPU oriented game. I installed SupCom and the game plays great, even on larger maps with tons of units around.

 

Alright. Here's the Anandtech on the A8-3500M + 6630M. It's performance is about on par with an i5-520m. Gaming benchmarks puts it on par with an i7-2630QM and GT 540m. And that's only 3500m not 3530mx, not in crossfire mode or with the 6750m.

 

Were you living under a rock in June? There were extensive reviews of both desktop and laptop versions of Llano, both by professional reviewers and people who bought the laptops in Best Buy. You can find the latter early on in this very thread (first 10 pages or so, I think). The professional ones are on the tech site of your choice; here is AnandTech, but if you prefer other benchmarks, just look at your favorite site (they almost certainly reviewed it).

Also, this is not really a "new" architecture. Sure, they've made a few tweaks here and there (more L2 cache, more schedulers), but it's still K10.5 and the benchmarks confirm that. The big change was not in architecture, it was in power gating.

I think Llano has been benchmarked extensively enough for us to be fairly confident about its per-clock CPU performance. The only part I haven't seen all over the place is the Turbo Core of MX parts. We know it doesn't help much in the 3500M, but for the MX chips, I think there's only that notebookcheck review (it's consistent with the 3500M, but even more bizarre given that they've got a 45W TDP rather than 35W and it doesn't seem to Turbo more).

EDIT: Hey, you edited your post so this one doesn't make as much sense anymore. Anyway, in response to this:

That's only true when you are comparing perfectly threaded tasks (i.e. where 4 Llano cores go up against 2 Arrandale cores). In single-threaded performance, the 520M utterly crushes it. The margin of victory is over 90% (i.e. almost a factor of 2).

 

I said per core performance and if you look at the single threaded benchmarks, you'll see that it's the level of a 1.6-1.7 Ghz Phenom II. All the other benchmarks where it's fast are either perfectly multithreaded or gaming where the GPU's come into play. We see that gaming performance in a slightly CPU dependent game such as SC2 is well behind that of other laptops with a similar GPU and more powerful CPU.

 

SC2 is not "slightly" CPU dependent, for the record. The CPU makes a huge difference, especially on lower settings.

On-topic, I was hoping mine would ship today, because then I would have almost definitely gotten it before the weekend, but I haven't gotten a notification. Hopefully it does ship tomorrow and my previous shipping times hold true. Otherwise I might not get it until Monday or later.

 

Still no shipping notification for me, and I ordered mine on June 29th.....

 

I ordered on 30th and got a shipping delay notification for July 28th...you haven't heard anythign back Novaguy? ...this is ridiculous...

 

Wow...thanks for all that info! Have to say that's really surprising it's got Blu Ray...figured that was a mistake on Best Buy's part....

Wow...that makes this quite a nice deal...I mean a real, fully functional PC for $650 or whatever...

If I'm in a pinch and need something fast...

 

Mine shipped. I haven't gotten an email from HP yet but on my order status it says shipped and the tracking number given is active. The EDD is the 26th, though. I really hope I get it before then.

 

I did get a delay notification - mine was bumped back until the 29th.

But abaddon's was ordered after mine and only bumped back to the 19th, so I am hoping they can get mine done around then as well.

 

I can only hope mine will ship today too . If all goes according to HP's plan and mine ships on the 22nd, I'll be lucky if I see it by the 29th because it will sit the weekend in customs . Anyways, I'm glad at least one of these configurations has finally shipped.

 

Alright, what the hell - I ordered mine before you and I still have the "Order in Production" status.

 

I ordered mine on the 26th .