HP PAVILION DM4-3010TX

The pavilion DM4 looks and feels chic with a 14-inch LED backlit screen and slim form. It weighs 1.9 kg and features a smooth brushed aluminum like finish on the lid and the interiors keeping smudges at bay. It has two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port along with VGA, HMDI, a card reader, DVD burner a webcam and beast audio for the sound processing. The keyboard unfortunately is not backlit but is comfortable to use. The trackpad is smooth but the buttons are stiff. It has a core i5-2450M dual core CPU running at 2.5 GHz that can turbo up to 3.1 GHz when required. The chipset can handle up to 16 GB of RAM but HP has added 6GB. You also get a 640Gb hard drive and AMD radeon HD 7470M discrete graphics with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The dm4 being is able to keep up quite well with the more powerful GE620 but it did struggle a bit with video encoding. We got 27 fps in DX10 mode with the very high preset. The AMD GPU comes with automatic switchable graphics. Depending on the application the driver automatically calls for onboard or discrete GPU. We got a battery life of 1 hour 20 min which can go up to about 3 hours or more. There was no overheating during our tests. If you are shopping around with this budget then we strongly recommend it.