Review HP Pavilion dv9074cl Notebook
Turion CPU. The HP Pavilion dv9074cl's performance is alright. Because of a high clocked AMD Turion CPU and fast memory chips, its performance is comparable to notebooks with lower clocked Intel processors.
Case
Following review is provided by notebookcheck.pl, our Polish editor team.
Overall, all notebooks of the dv9000 series have a common design. Also the dv9074cl has a piano coating and shows the already known wave pattern.
Generally, the workmanship of the dv9000 series is alright. However, the panel above the keyboard is not at the same level than the surrounding case.
The display cover slightly yields under pressure, but in total it is still rather robust. Tough the hinges are small, they hardly allow any wobbling.
The Pavilion dv9000 series and the dv6000 series mainly differ by their closing mechanism. While the dv6000 notebooks utilize a magnetic locking, the bigger 17 inch dv9000 series provide a standard latch with two bolts.
Because of its design specifics none of the interfaces could be located at the notebook's backside. Besides of the audio ports, the infrared port and the WLan switch, all other interfaces were located left and right of the notebook. Unfortunately, the dv9074cl lacks a HDMI interface. In turn the provided display rates rather good in our test.
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Input Devices
The keyboard of the dv9000 series is basically identical to the one of the Pavilion dv6140ea. It provides a seperate numerical keypad, however the enter key extends only over one row.
Typing features a short travel and an extremely abrupt stop and is a little bit noisy.
The touchpad is not placed in the center, but a little bit moved to the left. This was not uncomfortable for us, but chances are that the touchpad is accidentally activated by the left wrist. However, it can be deactived by a little button, lit by a small blue LED. The touchpad is the same than the one of the smaller dv6000 series. Its sliding properties are not ideal, and the according buttons not really user-friendly.
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Display
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The Pavilion dv9074cl is equipped with a 17 inch display with a resolution of 1440x900 pixels made by Quanta. We measured the maximum brightness of 201.2cd/m² in the lower part of the screen. The illumination is also alright and amounts to 80.5%.
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Information Maximum: 201.2 cd/m²Average: 181.6 cd/m² Brightness Distribution: 80 % Black: 0.9 cd/m² Contrast: 215:1 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
A black value of 0.9cd/m² gives together with the measured maximum brightness a contrast ratio 224:1.
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The stability to the vantage point will satisfy the demands on multimedia notebooks.
Performance
The HP Pavilion dv9074cl is equipped with a dual core AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 1.8GHz CPU. Together with two fast 1GB RAMs by Nanya clocked at 667 MHz this notebook's performance was at least equal to the dv9033cl and even outperformed the dv9033cl in some aspects.
A GeForce Go 7600 is responsible for graphics. All together this equipment is fit for office and internet applications and even for some older not so demanding games.
The reviewed notebook came with two 100GB HDDs by Seagate. Their data transfer rate and access time are pretty good.
Further information about the video card can be found here or in our comparison of mobile video cards. Detailed information about the AMD 64X2 CPU can be found here.
Please also look at our benchmark list of mobile processors or at our benchmark list of mobile video cards, in order to compare this notebook to other configurations.
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Help |
| 3DMark 06 in comparison | |
| Sony Vaio VGN-FS485B (min)
740, Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900 | 54 |
| ... | |
| Lenovo X121e NWS62GE E-300, Radeon HD 6310 | 2211 |
| Fujitsu Stylistic Q702 3427U, HD Graphics 4000 | 2225 |
| HP dv9074cl
TL-56, GeForce Go 7600 | 2230 |
| Packard Bell EasyNote TJ65 T4300, GeForce G 105M | 2232 |
| Lenovo ThinkPad X120e E-350, Radeon HD 6310 | 2250 |
| ... | |
| Alienware M18x R2 (max)
3920XM, Radeon HD 7970M Crossfire | 29496 |
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Help |
| PCMark 04 in comparison | |
| Dialogue Flybook A33i (min)
TM-5800, Mobility Radeon M6 | 963 |
| ... | |
| Toshiba U200-196 T5500, Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950 | 4898 |
| Bullman Aero 5cen T2500, Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950 | 4992 |
| HP dv9074cl
TL-56, GeForce Go 7600 | 5011 |
| Toshiba M100-165 T2300, Mobility Radeon X1400 | 5015 |
| Sony Vaio VGN-FE31B T5500, GeForce Go 7400 | 5146 |
| ... | |
| Samsung X60 Pro Boxxer (max)
T7400, Mobility Radeon X1700 | 7376 |
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| HP Pavilion dv9033cl (Core Duo T2300E) | HP Pavilion dv9074cl (Turion 64 X2 TL-56) | |
|---|---|---|
| Windows XP boot up | 47s | 50s |
| HP QuickPlay boot up | 22s | 26s |
| PCLinuxOS 2007 TR4 boot up | 2min29s | 2min14s |
| SLAX Linux (w/o GUI) boot up | 50s | 36s |
| loading a saved game HoMM V | 21s | 21s |
| MOV to MPEG conversion (on battery, 109MB) | 1min18s | 1min44s |
| MOV to DivX conversion (on PSA, 109MB) | 1min12s | 1min14s |
| installing .NET Framework 2.0 | 2min11s | 2min21s |
| Aquamark benchmark | 60516points | 57197points |
| x3: Reunion benchmark | 29.426fps | 29.271fps |
| WinRAR benchmark | 794KB/s | 817KB/s |
Emissions
Loudness
Under load the fan starts running immediately and reaches a noise level of 38.8dB. With graphic intensive applications the noise level exceeds 41dB.
Also the HDD's head parking is quite audible. The Hitachi-LG DVD drive is generally not too loud. It reaches a noise level of 35.3dB during video playback.
Noise Level
| Idle |
   33.9 / 38.8 / 35 dB(A) | ||||
| HDD |
34.6 dB(A) | ||||
| DVD |
35.3 / dB(A) | ||||
| Load |
/ 41.2 dB(A) | ||||
    
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| 30 dB silent |
40 dB audible |
50 dB loud |
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min: , med: , max: (15 cm distance) | |||||
Temperature
The HP Pavilion dv9074cl too gets quickly hot. The slim case constricts the air flow inside the notebook and, so, leads to higher surface temperature. Furthermore, also the second harddisk contributes to the temperature increase.
Upper side
palmwrist: 43.3°C max: 47.5°C avg: 40.8°C
Bottom side
max: 52.5°C avg: 41.1°C
Speakers
The dv9074cl is equipped with Altec Lansing speakers. Despite of low power consumption, their sound is clear and rich, the maximum volume more or less alright.
Battery Runtime
The Pavilion dv9074cl is equipped with an 8-cell battery with a 4400mAh (63Wh) capacity. In practice you can expect a runtime of about two or three hours. Considering it is a DTR with a quite powerful video card, the battery runtime is very good.
| Idle (without WLAN, min brightness) | | 3h 03min |
| DVD | | 2h 00min |
| Load (maximum brightness) | | 2h 08min |
Current consumption
| Idle | 35 / 39 / 41 Watt |
| Load |
83.8 / 75 Watt |
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Key:
min: ,
med: ,
max: | |
Verdict
Much to our surprise, the Pavilion dv9074 with Turion 64 X2 outperformed the dv9033cl with Intel Core Duo CPU in many aspects.
Furthermore, the dv9074 is quieter, gets less warm, but has a slightly shorter battery run time than the dv9033cl.
Its Quanta display is quite bright, with good illumination and good stability to the vantage point.
Many thanks to our partners of Notebookcheck Polen for this review.
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