General purpose/light gaming laptop

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ScrewySqrl

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1. What is your budget?

$400-700

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?

14"-17"

3. What screen resolution do you want?

1600x900 preferably, though a lot of what I've been looking at is 1366x768

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?

portability, but not at too much expense of performance, or extra cost.

5. How much battery life do you need?

4-6 hours

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?

yes. mostly middle-weight stuff. MMOs like CoX, Second Life, STO, World of Tanks, APB, and single player stuff like Civ 5, steam indie games, and rpgs like Fallout and Dragon Age etc. Medium settings preferred. MAYBE skyrim, since I have it on steam, but I have a desktop for most games, so this would be for 'fun on the go', rather than a heavy duty this is my primary gaming machine setup

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)

internet browsing, streaming video (watching), email, etc. Games are the heaviest stuff. I do like to lie in bed with a laptop and read web pages before going to sleep and when I first wake up in the morning, so low operating temps when not gaming/video watching is a big plus.

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?

320GB minimum, more always better. Optionally a way to have two internal drives so I can add an SSD as a boot drive at some point

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.

anywhere is fine, as long as they are reliable.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?

2 years, 3 at the outside

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?

DVD is fine...barely even use THAT anymore

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.

While I don't distrust anyone in particular, I've seen HP quality drop off over the last decade, and I had an ASUS gaming laptop just plain melt less than a month after its 1 year warranty died, but I'm willing to entertain anyone with a good price range

13. What country do you live in?

[b}USA[/b]

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.

Quad core decidedly preferred, no A4 or pentium/i3 models please.

I've been looking heavily at AMD A-series (A6/A8 Llano, a8/a10 trinity) laptops. I've seen refurbished A6-3400M laptops as low as $300 which might do the job, but I'm not sure I want a refurb. an i5 2xxx quad laptop with a dedicated card in this range would also work. HD 3000 won't cut it.
 
A Notebook Review forum post from Andrew Baxter: Re: Envy 15 vs. Pavilion dv6t

.... Finally, the ENVY 15 1920 x 1080 screen is an IPS panel with wide viewing angles, the Pavilion dv6t-7000 has a nice 1920 x 1080 screen but it is not the same IPS technology used in the Envy. I've used and reviewed both the HP dv6t-7000 and Envy 15-3000 and prefer the Envy 15 for its looks but you really can't argue or beat the price of the dv6t-7000, it's one of the best price to feature laptops on the market IMHO.
 

edit1754

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I think it's more likely that he assumed it wasn't IPS since it was never officially stated by HP to be IPS. The main reason we know the HP Envy 15 to be IPS is because HP said so. I don't think he had a real way of knowing it wasn't IPS.

The DV6 and Envy 15 FHD displays both have similarly-wide viewing angles that noticeably exceed those of typical 15.6" FHD TN panels. They also have very similar hardware IDs (LGD037F for DV6, LGD037E for Envy 15), and used to have the exact same red-orange issue until it was fixed. (Orangegate panel hardware IDs were LGD0323 for Envy 15, and LGD0349 for DV6 which, granted, were less similar in number, but the two displays still shared most of their traits and flaws)

EDIT: they're also both the less-common slim-form-factor variety panels.

I'm fairly confident that the FHD display shipping with the DV6 is the matte version of the HP Envy 15's IPS display.

Andrew is a laptop reviewer, and a good one. I don't doubt his overall credibility. But that doesn't necessarily mean his every word is the ultimate golden truth. He didn't even say why he doesn't think the DV6-7000 display is IPS, he just kinda said it whereas te evidence points otherwise.
 
HP has been using the phrase 'Radiance' for it's IPS panels for a long time.
If HP says Envy has one and doesn't make the same claim for dv6t?

I can't believe they'd pass up a chance to use the marketing spin claiming a Radiance LCD screen for the dv6t full HD panel if it used them.

Remember - this is a guy who worked with and reviewed both models.
dv6t has a premium TN panel.
 

edit1754

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Radiance doesn't mean IPS. Radiance is just the branding that HP uses on any higher-end display in their Envy models. The 14.5" 1600x900 radiance display in the HP Envy 14-1000 series (original HP Envy 14) was a very good TN panel.

On a related note: Even the HP Envy 14 Radiance display does not match the viewing angles of the DV6-7000 FHD display. It almost definitely would exceed it in other aspects (e.g. color gamut), but the viewing angles are worse. I have never seen any TN panel match the viewing angles of the DV6-7000's FHD display.
 
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