Ports and Webcam
The HDX 16 has four USB ports, FireWire and eSATA ports, HDMI and VGA output, Ethernet and modem jacks, an infrared receiver, a Kensington lock slot, expansion port, and a microphone and dual headphone ports. Also, an ExpressCard/34/54 slot, a fingerprint reader on the right end of the palm rest, and a 5-in-1 memory card reader line the front.
The VGA webcam delivered sharp photos and ill-lit, poorly colored video (our yellow background looked green). What it lacks in image quality, however, it makes up for in special effects. The CyberLink YouCam software’s robust feature package includes filters, animations, avatars, and distortions. Users can also upload to YouTube from the YouCam console.
HP HDX 16 Performance
The HDX runs on a Centrino 2 platform, complete with a 2.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 CPU and a generous 4GB of RAM. It scored 4,143 on PCMark Vantage, which tests Vista notebooks’ performance. This score is more than a thousand points above average for a mainstream notebook.
The HDX 16’s practical performance ranged from good to excellent. The notebook took 58 seconds to start up, which is right on target for a Vista notebook. It took just 1 second to launch World of Warcraft, but 4 seconds for Adobe Reader to launch. When we tried playing a Blu-ray DVD while defragging the hard drive and running a Norton Internet Security 2008 scan, we didn’t notice a single hiccup in playback.
If you like to store movies digitally, the 5,400-rpm, 250GB hard drive is spacious. Our system’s hard drive delivered above-average performance on our LAPTOP Transfer Test, with a write speed of 17.9 MBps.
Powerful Graphics
In addition to Blu-ray playback, the HDX 16’s brilliant display is well suited for gaming, as is its GPU. Its Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT discrete graphics card scored 12,852 on 3DMark03 and 4,116 on 3DMark06, which simulates performance in more graphically intensive games. The 3DMark03 score is about three times the average score, and the 3DMark06 score is about a thousand points below average for the mainstream category.
Our real world tests, too, show that, although not on a par with a gaming rig, the HDX 16 is more than powerful enough for mainstream gamers. It managed 59 frames per second in World of Warcraft when set to a resolution of 1024 x 768. Set to the same resolution, it notched 77 fps in F.E.A.R. on autodetect, and 22 fps with the resolution set to 1280 x 1024 and effects set to maximum. That means you’ll get high frame rates if you don’t max out the settings, and lower but still playable frame rates if you do.
