The HP Pavilion g6z is a budget home laptop offered via HP.com. The g6z is equipped with an AMD Fusion processor as opposed to the similar g6x and g6t laptops equipped with Intel processors. The particular g6z we have under review has the budget friendly AMD A4 processor inside. With the AMD A4-3305M processor the g6z starts at a price of $449.99 on HP.com before any coupons or discounts. However, as we all know there are always HP coupons available to knock the price down, so make sure to check out coupon codes before buying.
Below is a 6 minute video review of the HP Pavilion g6z:
We’ll have a more in depth written review to follow, but for those that just need a quick look and tour of the laptop the video might be enough to convince you this either is or isn’t the laptop for your needs.
The g6z is what HP classifies as an “Everyday Computing” laptop, which is to say it gets the job done but won’t allow you to get your gaming on and the design won’t turn any heads on the fashion catwalk. The g6z is built with a plastic casing, no fancy aluminum or metal like you get with higher priced laptops. The case is quite strong despite the use of plastic, the palm rests and other important structural areas are firm with no flex.
When configuring the g6z on HP.com you get a choice of colors: charcoal grey, sonoma red, pacific blue, pewter, or sweet purple. The default color is charcoal grey and what you see in the pictures and video here. Any other color is a $25 upgrade. There are no fancy design touches, it’s pretty much just a glossy plastic finish in whichever color you pick all over with a black rim around the edges. It’s a minimalistic type of design that certainly won’t offend anyone yet won’t stun anyone either.
The performance of the g6z of course varies based upon how you configure it. You get a choice of the following AMD Fusion processors:
- AMD Dual-Core A4-3305M Accelerated Processor (2.5GHz/1.9GHz, 1MB L2 Cache)
- AMD Dual-Core A4-3320M Accelerated Processor (2.6GHz/2.0GHz, 2MB L2 Cache)
- AMD Quad-Core A6-3420M Accelerated Processor (2.4GHz/1.5GHz, 4MB L2 Cache)
- AMD Quad-Core A8-3520M Accelerated Processor (2.5GHz/1.6GHz, 4MB L2 Cache)
Our review model has the base level A4-3305M processor. The performance boost from the A8 quad core processor would be significant, but it costs $105 more. If you want a laptop for everyday tasks such as web surfing, editing office word processor or spreadsheet documents, watching online video, video chat or even outputting 720p video to your TV then the AMD A4 processor is just fine. Since the HP g6z is intended as a laptop for basic home or school use most people will not pay to upgrade the processor.
Though there’s nothing particularly outstanding about the HP g6z, the one thing we did find outstanding was the low amount of heat and fan noise. The g6z was very quiet in operation and simply did not get hot. Even when running benchmarks the laptop didn’t break a sweat.
We’ll have a more in depth written review to come, but for those that have arrived here and are looking to buy now it’s suffice to say that the HP g6z is a reasonable budget laptop that can serve well for users that are not overly demanding and want a simple laptop for web surfing, video watching and chat and basic productivity tasks.
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