opinions on the hp tx2500z

Hey I'm curious about how the screen is on the hp tx2500z, how does it run, how good is the battery life, does it heat up like crazy, and how durable is it??? I'll be using this for school work (I'm a sophomore), and I'll be using it to watch movies, go on the internet, play some games, so basically I'll be using it for everything and I should be getting it within the next 3 months

 

See the NBR review

 

Battery: 4 - 4.5hrs with the 8 cell depending on your usage. The 6 cell should last 3 - 3.5hrs depending on your usage.

Heat & fan noise: Read my explanation here...
http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/showthread.php?p=120755#post120755

The screen is not too great for watching movies. You can probably watch if you are the only one. But if you want more than 2 people watching then you would probably want to hook it up to an external monitor/TV because the viewing angles are not too great and the presence of the passive touchscreen makes it a bit grainy.

As far as the others are concerned, it shouldnt be an issue. The HD3200 is good IGP but still if you are expecting to notch gaming experience then you probably need to look at a different notebook. Build quality is also good for a $1000 notebook. No creaks or squeaks but there are still some weak spots which is quite common for a plastic notebook.

 

It's probably fine for light-duty work (email, surfing, dvd/movie watching, note-taking, etc.), but I wouldn't recommend it for anything that pushes the CPU (e.g., FPS games). It just gets too nasty hot (I believe that the temps appear to bump up against the max CPU temp limit). CPU core temp of 55C (131F) is "cool", and it's not unusual for the temps to be in the 70C-80+C (158F-176+F) range. Pushing the CPU, people have gotten temps in the 95C-100+C range. (This is being written on a tx2500z, and the current average CPU temps are in the 55C-60C range, but I'm in an air-conditioned room.) See this long thread for details:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=263085

If you get a tx2500z, I'd recommend buying the longest additional warranty you can afford (directly from HP, not from some brick-and-mortar store).

As for durability: it's probably about as durable as most laptops these days -- OK as long as you don't drop it or bang it around. There's a lot of plastic, and I don't think most laptops can survive any kind of serious drop these days. If you take care of it, and don't drop it, it'll probably be fine.

 

hey thanks for the opinions and I won't be doing too much gaming like maybe online gaming but i dont think that should push the cpu to hard at all cause even my 3 yr old compaq desktop computer can handle it and it has integrated graphics. But it sounds like a great laptop to me

 

i think that laptop is perfect for you because it sounds like your in the same situation as me except when i ordered the tx2000z before, the grainy screen was too much for me to handle so I returned it

 

The problem is not that it can't handle the game; the tx2500z has a decent amount of CPU and graphics power.

The concern is that the CPU cores often get HOT if you run anything that pushes the CPUs, and the temperatures might get hot enough to cause the CPU to fail prematurely. This includes many (most?) games, including online ones.

 

Set the cpu power management to anything less than 100%. This shoul d pretty much bring the temps under control. Currently according to HWMonitor the cpu temp ranges from 41C to 60C which is not too bad for the tx. Ambient room temperature is around 25C. Of course with this setting you do loose some performance but I just change to a different power setting with 100% performance when necessary.

Also, I doubt the max thermal limits have remained the same from the previous generation Turions. I havent seen the cpu downclock in such circumstances which leads me to believe that the max temps might be in the 105C range.