HP Pavilion dv6-6116tx Review

Finding a budget, multimedia notebook is no easy feat. There are tons of options out there, but among the crowd, only a handful stand out. HP’s dv6 is one of those notebooks as the series has always infused great style and build with good performance to boot. Competitors may offer you the same components for cheaper, but if you look at the overall packaging, the build quality and styling, it’s hard to beat the DV6 line-up. Today, we have one of their mainstream offerings, the dv6-6116tx, which packs in a decent configuration without breaking the bank.

Design and Build
Available in Espresso Black, the dv6 looks stylish and definitely has a premium feel to it. The lattice pattern lid keeps fingerprints away leaving just a single backlit HP logo at the bottom. The build quality is very good, just as we’ve come to expect from this series.

Great design coupled with sturdy build quality

Connectivity is taken care of by four USB 2.0 ports, VGA, HDMI, two headphone-out ports, microphone, LAN and a card reader. The stereo speakers are placed in the front and feature Beats Audio. Inside, you get a full-sized keyboard with chiclet keys making it quite comfortable to use even for extended typing sessions. The edges of the trackpad are lit, lending it a cool look. While it’s smooth to use, the mouse buttons are a bit noisy when pressed. The overall fit and finish of all the components have been done well and don’t feel like they have skimped much on the quality of plastics used.

Features
For a mainstream multimedia notebook, it comes with a pretty decent kit. Powering the dv6 is an Intel Core i3-2310M running at 2.1GHz. This dual-core processor has Hyperthreading support, but not Turbo function. We also have a single 4GB stick of RAM allowing you to add another one. Storage has been taken care of by a 500GB SATA drive running at 5400rpm and an AMD Radeon HD 6490M with 1GB GDDR5 memory. The 15.6-inch screen is LED backlit, but with a lower 1366x768 resolution. This isn’t too much of an issue really as icons and images don’t appear too pixelated

No USB 3.0

The discrete graphics card also features switchable graphics, which automatically shuts down when performing regular tasks and only kicks in, once you start any graphical application. HP also bundles along a ton of features like a Recovery Manager, ProtechSmart, Symantec Norton Internet Security (60-day trial), Evernote, Skype and Office 2010 trial version. The dv6 also features a biometric fingerprint reader for security, but you can also configure it to start up any application that you frequently use.