HP G Series Notebook : G42-415DX

HP G Series Notebook : G42-415DX

Jan 12

If a budget laptop is what you’re looking for, have a quick look at this HP G42-415DX which is available at Best Buy for $529.99. The design of this model is quite appealing thanks to the textured HP Imprint finish, the stem-to-stern tarnished-silver color and a nice triangular pattern running across the lid and the inside.

The bezel of the 14-inch display is glossy black while the standard keyboard has a matte black finish. It is one of the lightest affordable notebooks you’ll find on the market today since it weighs only 4.7 pounds, which is less than the Gateway NV50A02u that tips the scales at $449.99.

Under its hood is an AMD Athlon X2 P340 processor running at 2.20 GHz and comes with 3GB of DDR3 RAM. The hard drive has a capacity of 32GB and it is spinning at 5,400 rpm. It has been configured with integrated video in the form of a rather modest ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 which works with the 14-inch display that has a native resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels (720p HD). Also on board you’ll find a webcam and a microphone which are sitting along the top bezel of the screen.

The HP G52-415DX is shipped with the Home Premium version of Windows 7 and comes bundled with Microsoft Office Starter 2010. Don’t expect any ground-breaking performance from such a low-cost laptop, but it does a good job for the money, on par with what the aforementioned NV50A02u from Gateway is capable of.

If you run benchmarks on both systems you will notice that the differences between these two models are minor and just about the same as the Dell Inspiron IM5030-8743D. If you launch the CineBench R11.5 rendering test, the HP will get 1.16, the Dell 1.22 while the Gateway will accomplish 1.77. In PCMark Vantage the HP will score 3,503, right between the 4,455 of the Gateway and the 3,505 of the Dell.

This HP will also fit in the middle if you run a Photoshop CS5 trial that applies dozens of effects and filters to an image. The HP will finish this test in 9 minutes and 21 seconds, followed by the Gateway which needs three more seconds. The top performer here is the Dell which needs only 8 minutes and 13 seconds.

As far as gaming is concerned, the Gateway would have to be the best of all three, being capable of hitting 8.7 fps in Lost Planet 2, followed by the Dell with 8.1 fps and the HP with only 8 fps. Of course, you won’t be able to run the game on neither these three laptops because the performance is too slow for fluent gameplay.

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