The HP Pavilion G6 is a very good option for a price of under Rs. 40,000, out-performing some of its more expensive rivals. It ticks all the right boxes - decent specs, pretty powerful graphics and to top it off, good battery life. On a budget, this is
one combination that impresses.
Features & Specifications
Well, being a budget laptop, there were bound to be some cutbacks in terms of what is on offer. Happily though, the Pavilion G6 doesn’t have too many of them on the power package front. The only little hiccup that we can foresee in the long run is the Intel Core i3 processor. The one here is the dual core 2350M clocking at 2.3GHz, with 4GB of RAM to help it along. We will talk more about how good this is, in the performance section.
Well, being a budget laptop, there were bound to be some cutbacks in terms of what is on offer. Happily though, the Pavilion G6 doesn’t have too many of them on the power package front. The only little hiccup that we can foresee in the long run is the Intel Core i3 processor. The one here is the dual core 2350M clocking at 2.3GHz, with 4GB of RAM to help it along. We will talk more about how good this is, in the performance section.
Graphics capability is where the Pavilion G6 really surprises, at least on the spec sheet, with the AMD Radeon HD 7670M (2GB). This is the same graphics chip that we have seen earlier on the more expensive Sony Vaio E-series and the Toshiba Satellite L850 that we had tested sometime back. Technically, the one in this laptop is the older Thames-Pro series with the DDR3 memory. There is a faster version in the market, codenamed Thames-XT, for the higher-end laptops. However, even this older gen graphics chip is more than capable.
The HP Pavilion G6’s 15.6-inch display has a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, and we believe this is doing very well on most fronts. Natively, it has a good amount of brightness to work its way forward from a solid base. Colour reproduction is very good, and surprisingly, there is no visible gradation. However, contrast doesn’t have the necessary punch you would expect on a display that may be used quite a bit for watching movies on. Decent amount of crispness makes readability easy, but if you look very closely, there is a very limited amount of noise around the individual alphabets.
Thanks to the big display size, the HP Pavilion G6’s keyboard does have a lot of real estate to work with as well. The separate number pad does indicate the spread on offer! No quick access keys, but HP smartly uses the function keys by setting them up by default for tasks like brightness change, volume control, Wi-Fi on/off etc. The yey size is good, and the travel is enough to ensure you get used to this rather quickly. The only thing you need to get used to - the left alignment of the alphabet keys, because of the number keys on the right side.
The Pavilion G6 comes with a 500GB hard drive, and Windows 7 preloaded. HP does preload the machine with certain utilities, but the clutter is definitely lesser than what we saw on the previous generation notebooks. We particularly like the software update utility within the larger Support Assistant app.