HP Pavilion dv5t Review Discussion

Do you know what model graphics you had? The 8400-8600 range of Nvidia cards have already been established by Nvidia to contain faulty examples.

To see what graphics you have, right click on the desktop, nvidia control panel, help, system information. With the display tab selected, your card will be listed under the heading 'components' on the left.

 

NVIDIA NBBMGS. That must be the driver I got from device manager. How does this sound? Geoforce 8400 M GS.

 

Yes that sounds correct. The 8000 series chip problems aren't linked just to HP but also Dell, Apple and other companies using 8400 and 8600 chips.

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/10/10/newer-mbps-may-contain-faulty-nvidia-chips/

The dv5 series does not use 8400-8600 chips as far as I know. If heat is going to cause failure with the dv5 it will happen to me thanks to my regular gaming and if it does I’ll post back here.

 

I hope you have good luck with your machine and that your graphics card works out well for you. I've done a lot of checking around all over the internet on that 8400 series card and you are 100 % correct. It's a time bomb waiting to go off, being not a question of if but when. And yes...Dell machines and others have it too. Really liked your review by the way. And I did fiddle with the gamma correction control on the H.P. and got excellent results just as you did.

The H.P. 2626 I own looks great, feels great. It's a real stunner that exhibits a much greater quality look to it than most of its competition. That's bad for me because I know I have a time bomb ticking away in my laptop's guts and yet I really handling the H.P. So what I have done is after the repair shop here in Pattaya soldered a new chip on it and restored the original system settings, I put all my programs back on it and restored my data from an external hard drive backup. I have put the H.P. in my safe and will be using it only for a spare. In the meantime I've bought an Acer model Aspire model 4730 Z from Pattaya2U here in Thailand even before this same shop repaired my H.P. (until the time bomb goes off again) for about half the price I paid for the H.P. in Bangkok just over a year ago. Compared to the H.P. that's now in my safe this Acer is a Plain Jane device. However its processor speed is about the same as the H.P. I've had this shop upgrade the memory to 2 gig, and it has a 250 gig hard drive in it. Running H.P. on it too and although the shop put Thai copy Windows Office everything on it, I took most of those programs off and a few others this shop felt I could not do without, and only put a couple of the Microcrap Office 2007 programs on it.

The Acer came with an ATI graphics chip on it and there does not appear to be the fine tuning controls you showed in your video the Nvidia card has. The H.P. is running Vista. But the Acer is booting up in about half the time the H.P. takes. The H.P. seems slower booting up than before. Vista sucks wong dong. Incidentally, Acer seems to have really taken over here in this part of Thailand. I'm thinking its customer service might have a lot to do with it. My thinking here is that a reputable shop that plans on staying in business over the long haul does not need to have the problems that H.P.'s customer service causes it. In my case from what you have told me and I've found all over the Internet, H.P. is well aware it sent out thousands of these time bombs along with other companies. They were defective pure and simple and H.P. knows it. Two top notch techs here I've dealt with are well aware of exactly what's going on. My warranty with H.P. had gone just 10 days over its expiration date. H.P.'s repair center in Bang Corrupt holds onto my laptop for three weeks before I get it back. Meanwhile it tries to charge me $360 U.S. for a problem it knows all too well is a previously existing illness. It probably would even put an 8400 graphics card on my new system board had I bought into having my laptop repaired by H.P. So I got cheated once and would have most likely been cheated a second time. So if either of the local shops I've been dealing continue to recommend H.P. laptops to potential customers it would have been developing huge customer ill feelings and have to eventually have to pay the ultimate price. I can only surmise that the more reputable shops have much better experience with Acer's customer support and that's why they push Acer products while pursuing their quest for a loyal customer base.

 

I got DV5T and I like everything about HP laptop except 4 things:

1) hot
2) fan runs all the time, which can be disabled in bios but heat is an issue in long term.
3) bad design for heat: harddrive, wifi, North bridge chip, battery are close to each other
4) bad fan-on logic: with "always on" disabled in bios, the fan starts to run at unpredictable temp. it runs for 5 second or less, then stop, then run again. on and off for a very short time. very annoying.

I had a cheap Gateway before and heat was never a concern. its fan starts at 45degree and stop at 30degree. with HP, I had to buy a notebook cooler pad which I rarelly use since it is such a hassel.

my spec: P7350, Intel 4 Series GPU, 4GB RAM, 360GB HHD. I chose Intel GPU and P7350 to have the least heat and power consumption but it is still hot. if I disable fan "always on", cpu temp is about 60 degree at idle. if I leave "always on" enabled, cpu temp is about 45 degree at idle. the fan is now running all the time but fortunatelly it is not loud at all.

one bad design with dv5 is that the Hard drive and wifi card are installed at the same spot. and both are close to North bridge chip. all three are heat generators. most traditional laptop have harddrive located in front far away from cpu, north bridge chip, and wifi.

another bad design is that the harddrive is close to the battery. battery life is shortened faster by heat generated from the harddrive.

 

How do i do this>? As my score dropt from 5.0 to 4.8?

Thanks!

 

WEI is a very unreliable and sporadic benchmark - don't worry about your scores 'dropping'.

That said, it is very much worth it to do a clean install. A guide can be found here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

 

Great review, just one quick question how did you get the graphic's card that you got with you're pc. The only one I can find that it available for this laptop ( http://www.shopping.hp.com/series/c...umpid=in_r329_personalization/browse2/SDP_SDP ) is a Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD graphics card.

Is this a bad graphics card? (Thats just what i heard)

 

HP has discontinued the dv5t. The only available model is the dv5t Special Edition, which only comes with Intel integrated graphics (the one you selected). Integrated graphics will severely limit what games you can play, and you will not be able to even run most modern games.

 

Here is the latest on how dellcomputer and Hewlett Packard have been screwing its customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars by putting in Nvidea graphics cards the two companies knew were defective heat generators and then cheated thousands of customers by their failure to support their defective products often when their one year warranties were just weeks past their expiration. In my case, my system board fried five days after the warranty expired and when I told H.P. customer service that I knew their 8400 series Nvidea chips caused their laptops to fail with regularity, that H.P. knew it had sold me a defective computer and that I had read many internet sources describing the several hundred million dollar problem in detail H.P. customer service offered to knock off 10 % of the price of 13600 baht ($400) it wanted out of me for a new system board. That was months ago. The laptop is still junk in my safe. I'll soon take out certain parts I might have use for, then I'll destroy it and put the video up for viewing. It is a gorgeous notebook but it's totally worthless and so it Hewlett Packard.

Here's the article a good friend email me today that describes the magnitude of the Nvidea graphics card overheating problem and how both H.P. and Dellcomputer have sold out thousands of their customers who went to customer service after their system boards fried. http://windowssecrets.com/2009/04/09/01-Dell-and-HP-balk-at-replacing-bad-Nvidia-chip

 

I just happen to own the same laptop. It's the best laptop I've ever owned. I purchased it at the end of November 2008. Of course mine differs from the one Chaz has just a bit. I have the following specs:

- Onyx
- Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 2 (64-bit)
- Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo Processor P8600 (2.4 GHz)
- 15.4" diagonal WSXGA+ High-Definition HP BrightView Infinity Display (1680 x 1050)
- 4GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm)
- 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
- 320GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
- [For BrightView Infinity Display] Webcam + Fingerprint Reader
- HP Color Matching Keyboard
- Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N Mini-card with Bluetooth
- No Modem
- LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-RW with Double Layer Support
- HP Integrated HDTV Hybrid Tuner
- High Capacity 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
- Microsoft(R) Office Pro 2007
- Computrace LoJack for Notebooks, One Year
- System Recovery DVD with Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium (64-bit)
- HP Home & Home Office Store in-box envelope
- 2-year Accidental Damage Protection Extended Service Plan
- Misc: 1 HDMI Port, 1 Firewire Port, 4 USB Ports, 2 remote controls (1 travel)

The thing has a sweet design. I can't wait to put Windows 7 on it!

 

where can i still purchase one of these?
there no longer available through the hp website store.

 

HP discontinued the dv5t some time ago, I doubt there are any more available. Check Best Buy or another retail store.