HP nx6125 review - one year after

Where did the comrades from HP make a mistake?

Part of my job is supporting our company’s products at customer sites scattered all over the world. To help me carry all the needed stuff with me, my company decided it's time to go mobile and equip me with a notebook. I could choose between the following two models:

Dell Latitude D510 - Celeron M 350 with 512MB RAM, i855 chipset and 1024×768 15"
HP nx6125 - Turion ML-34 with 1024MB RAM, ATI Xpress 200 chipset and 1400×1050 15"

Although the D510 has much cheaper components than the HP, to my surprise the price was almost the same. So I chose the HP. I had no experience with AMD powered computers since I replaced my good old 386DX/40 so many years ago. Centrino technology rules the mobile market since its introduction, some people love it (including me), some people hate it, so I was obviously curious if there is finally some competition to Intel.

How well does the HP serve me and what are my opinions about it? Read on…

The good

The looks
nx6125 series of notebooks is targeted to business customers, and HP chose to go the conservative way (it reminds me about Big Blue’s ThinkPads). And it was right decision. No fancy looking cover that looks nice until you actually start to use the notebook and it gets scratched. No extra lights and silly stickers covering the body of the notebook below the keyboard. Simple, slim design using one light black color.
The top cover however could have been from harder material since even a little pressure leaves temporary round marks on the display. On the good side, unlike with Acer’s creations, the keyboard doesn‘t imprint itself on the display when the lid is closed.

The weight
For daily usage, even when equipped with high resolution display, the weight of the notebook including battery is less than 2.8 kg. Of course there are much lighter pieces, but in this price category anything less than 3 kilos is success.

The display
The display rocks. Great resolution, bright and clear even when exposed to sun, and with good view angles. The only complaint I would have is the inability to ‘shrink’ the displayed image to its original resolution, but this is fault of BIOS, not the display. It can be enabled in the display driver using Catalyst Center, but it doesn’t always work properly.

The keyboard
Well laid out and comfortable to use, there is hardly anything to complain about. It feels ‘soft’ when pressed and doesn’t produce any weird sounds, just a soft silent ‘click’. Unlike in Dell only touchpad is supplied, the buttons feel hard at first but with a time they become softer. I personally prefer Track Point over touchpad, but regular mouse is still the best.

The bad

The hard drive
The biggest disaster. The specification says the notebook comes with 80GB hard drive, but on purpose HP doesn’t mention that it is one of the worst possible – Seagate Momentus 4200 ST9808210A. No wonder it cannot be found on Seagate’s website - it is nothing to be proud of. The actual spin speed is 5400 rpm, but it has 4200rpm class performance. I immediately replaced it with my own Hitachi 7K100 drive and used the original Seagate disk inside 2.5” external USB enclosure as a high capacity flash drive, and it serves in this role well. The difference between these two drives is like switching from Fokker Dr.I to F-14.

The battery
The nx6125 is equipped with 6-cell Li-Ion battery promising 4800mAh (71000 mWh). After a year the maximum reachable capacity is a far cry from this value – 29000mWh, which is about 40%. To my surprise Hp technician told me that this is completely normal and correct, since the battery is designed only for 300 cycles. Arghhhh… no wonder the warranty for battery is only 6 months! When you find out its losing so much capacity, it is already late…
I was also told that if I use the notebook plugged in AC for longer period of time, I shall remove the battery completely. It doesn’t make sense to me, since the cause of losing capacity is not overcharging the battery but actually switching between battery and AC power.

The ugly

The CPU
The heart of the notebook is AMD’s first true mobile CPU, Turion 64. Running at 1800MHz, equipped with 1MB L2 cache, supporting Cool & Quiet power saving technology and AMD64 extensions, it promises quite a lot. Unfortunately this expectations are spoiled and brought down by couple of flaws.
HP chose the ML-34 model instead of more power efficient MT-34 – it has TDP of 35W (MT variants are rated 25W) – almost as twice as much as Intel’s Dothan cores (21W). The price difference between ML and MT models was according to AMD’s pricelist at the time of purchase only $3 (yes, THREE DOLLARS) per piece (wholesale of 1000 processors). Why oh why did HP choose the worse?
Second, hard to say if it is ‘feature’ of only my piece or the whole Turion family, but any attempt to lower the default voltage of the CPU to keep it cooler results in lockups and freezes. Even at the slowest 800MHz speed the CPU asks for 0.988V, if running at full speed 1.35V. In comparison, Pentium M 735 (1.7MHz) in NEC Versa FM340 notebook can run at 600MHz@0.7V and at full speed with only 1.068V – and it is rock stable.

The chipset
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M chipset – even with the M (as in Mobility??) is anything than mobile. With integrated graphics core based on crippled X300 GPU (that in default configuration eats 128MB of system memory!) it gets so hot even in desktop machines and requires either very large passive heat sink or active cooling. And imagine putting this silicon chip inside a small notebook case without proper ventilation.

The cooling and battery life
As in all recent notebooks, the cooling system is based on heat pipe technology. Where are the good old days of IBM’s ThinkPad 560 that used the metal bottom of the keyboard for passive cooling The nx6125 has one heat pipe transferring the heat from CPU and the chipset to a very small heat sink. The fan that is supposed to blow the hot air out of the notebook has no air intake, so it needs to be spinning very fast and very noisy to be able to keep the CPU from overheating. When idle and running at the 800MHz, the CPU’s core temperature is about 45 degrees, under heavy load it goes up to scary 75 degrees. The chipset, lacking any power saving capabilities, also adds quite a lot of heat.
Only once I dared to use this machine as a ‘laptop’ – after few minutes I had to place it on a desk since my legs and lap were about to catch a fire. The bottom side of the notebook gets really hot even during little use.

This all has drastic effects on battery life – when the notebook was new, it could last slightly more than 2 hours, now at 40% of original capacity, it is less than 30 minutes.

The x64 support
This is another sad story from HP – although they equip the notebook with 64-bit CPU and components, looking for drivers for ANY other operating systems than 32-bit Windows on HP website is waste of time. I managed to collect all the drivers from various places on the internet – either AMD’s website (CPU driver), ATI (chipset and graphics driver), Broadcom (LAN and wireless) and Planet AMD64 (audio, modem and others).
Successfully installed Windows XP Professional x64 edition, but the stability on the notebook was terrible – hibernation caused BSOD, sound worked only sometimes and network was acting up as well. Maybe that’s why HP pretends this OS doesn’t exist!

So to summarize – there is more bad and ugly things than the good ones, but still – I’m using the notebook and it serves me well. I kind of got used to it and learn how to live with it, and it is like a marriage – in health or sickness, for better or worse, till death does us apart