COMPUTERS

Brief Specs

Core 2 Duo T9300 processor 2.5GHz
2GB RAM

Hewlett-Packard hasn't bothered to change the name of its 20-inch laptop with this new update, but a handful of new features and options make it worth a fresh look. Pushing the physical boundaries of the laptop form, the massive HP Pavilion HDX is still clearly more at home resting on a desk than sitting in your lap. Weighing an amazing 7.2kg and boasting a desktop-size 20-inch LCD, with high-end extras such as a Blu-ray drive (HD-DVD is also available), Nvidia's new GeForce 8800 GPU, and one of Intel's new Penryn Core 2 Duo processors.

Design

The HDX makes an excellent all-in-one entertainment system for the den, dorm room, or CEO's office, and the screen finally displays full 1080p resolution (which you'll want for HD-DVD or Blu-ray). It's still too big to carry and therefore fairly useless as a mobile computing device, although it's a stylish option to replace a full-size desktop computer and monitor. Note that neither the GeForce 8800 nor the Penryn Core 2 Duo processors are available as options on HP's online configurator yet, but they should appear by January 23 in the US. It should be available in Asia sometime in February.

Features

While the new Penryn mobile processor, the Core 2 Duo T9300, boasts a more efficient 45-nanometer manufacturing process, even Intel says not to expect a big performance boost scores outside of applications with SSE4 support such as Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and DivX Pro 6.8. In fact, the previous HP HDX model we looked at had a 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X7800, which easily beats out the newer Penryn CPUs (there's a Core 2 Extreme Penryn CPU as well, the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme X9000, but we haven't seen one in person yet).

Still, the 2.5GHz T9300 is near the top of the laptop CPU heap, and gave us no slowdown or stuttering, even with multiple media players, Web pages, and office documents running at the same time.