HP Pavilion dv5t

Entertainment looker flaunts media features




WHO SAYS TRAVEL has to be boring? HP aims to make it as entertaining as possible with the Pavilion dv5t, a notebook built as much for games, music, and movies as for everyday computing.

Glam and glossy, the 5.8-pound dv5t features a shiny black lid with an illuminated purple-and-white HP logo embedded near one corner, an LCD flush with the bezel, a dazzling silver keyboard, and a wrist rest and unusually smooth touch pad painted to match.

Like previous Pavilions, the dv5t sports an LED button strip just above the keyboard, with media controls such as mute, volume, and play/pause, plus wireless on/off and QuickPlay buttons. We found the volume-cntrol bar a bit confusing: It's not immediately clear how you're supposed to interact with it.

HP earns top marks for expansion and connectivity, stocking the dvt with VGA and HDMI 1.3 ports, a 5-in-1 media reader, modem and Ethernet ports, a mini-FireWire port, and four USB ports-one of which doubles as an external Serial ATA (eSATA) port. A slick, 23-button infrared remote is included; when you're not using it, you can store it in the notebook's ExpressCard slot.

That remote will probably get quite a bit of use. There's no TV tuner, but if you're pairing the notebook with an HDTV (the 15.4-inch screen tops out a 1,280x800 pixels), you'll welcome the Blu-ray drive/DVD burner. The discrete 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT graphics card had no trouble cranking out 1080p video to an HDTV.



The dv5T also rocked our benchmark tests, eliciting stellar scores in our productivity benchmarks, though its 3D gaming results were less impressive. It earned a respectable 40 frames per seconds (fps) in our 1,024x768 F.E.A.R test, but barely 20fps in Company of Heroes, and even lower scores at its native resolution.-Rick Broida

Computer Shopper November 2008