HP Pavilion dm1z Fusion Ultralight Notebook Review

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2011, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant.  We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks).

Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2011 Synthetic Benchmarks

All of the scores reported below were taken with the system running in its stock configuration.

Our gauntlet of SiSoftware SANDRA tests show that the E-350 is capable of hanging with some pretty stout competition. There's no Atoms in this list of rivals; the E-350 has the capability to compete with more advanced CPUs, and as we've stated throughout, you can feel the difference. At last, we see a netbook chip that makes the netbook experience one that's enjoyable.

HD Video Playback Testing Multimedia Stress Tests

To test multimedia capabilities, we attempt to play back a 720p WMVHD clip, a 720p H.264 clip and a 1080p clip. We've also included a screenshot of the 1080p clip from the Mini 311 (which uses the first gen NVIDIA Ion GPU) to give you a better idea of CPU utilization from a different type of system.


We assumed the E-350 would be plenty capable of handling 720p and 1080p multi-media playback, and indeed it was up to the task. It actually pegged the system resources a bit higher than we had imagined, but loading the clips was quick and playback was perfectly smooth throughout. AMD may still be working on drivers here a bit, depending on the media player software being used.  It may not be the same if you have a lot of encoding or number crunching going on in the background, but so long as you don't treat your dm1z like a mobile workstation, you should enjoy crisp, stutter-free playback. Please note, however, that GPU accelerated Flash video playback is still a work in progress for AMD and will require updated drivers / or plug-ins at some point.