It is so refreshing seeing a youtube channel look into older hardware and give it a second look/chance compared to all the others who are "oo intel 12th gen"
@@IgorGiganskiANtiatom I was talking about the major tech channels with the new and shinier Intel generation. For this hardware you will also need someone to place thermal paste...had a A8 4500m back in the day.
As well as the few who thinks $400 is very cheap for a laptop or PC and tries to say nice things about it but subtly wanna complain about what’s wrong with it. 🤷🏻♂️
I remember having a Pavilion DV6 years ago with an i3 that would overheat after a few minutes of gaming. I pulled it all apart and saw that the CPU fan had a plastic shroud that covered the exhaust holes. Snipped it off and it immediately improved temperatures.
I had 3 DV7s and all 3 of the left speaker died because it had bad cooling design where the heat from CPU literally destroyed the left speaker. I mostly use headset though. It's subwoofer is nice but has niche use because I barely play movies (although that laptop was designed for that In mind) or play music on high volume.
Oh my god, when I heard that this laptop has a CPU with an integrated graphics chip AND a discrete AMD graphics chip I immediately experienced a flashback from the 2010s when my friend had a laptop with that combination and the struggle behind making that second GPU work in games!
Every once in a while my laptop decides the intel UHD630 graphics is the proper one for game while the desktop SKU 1660ti sits there like :| It's some finagling to get it to use the dGPU but then it's fine.
If you want to play games, there is no reason to install Win 10. Win 7 would run much better and stable on this older hardware. Or you could try some minimalistic Linux distro.
One ""hack"" I came up for my old pavillion laptop was pointing a USB fan at the vents of the cooler. It worked surprisingly well, because otherwise it would throttle like a mf. No joke, I would get a 20-30% increase in FPS in most games. I remember when I got a new PC and went to play GTA 4 I started to think "where the hell is the fan?", then I realized how stupid that was.
imagine getting a $400 hp laptop in 2016 (as a gift) with an A10-9600P and thinking "wow this must be decently fast and it looks sleek" it was BRAND NEW and it's been nothing but broken plastic tabs, overheating, eating batteries like there's no tomorrow (about to be on its third if the replacement one gives out), and so many driver issues
I got mine as a hand me down and i hated how much of a scam it was, 400 bucks, no ssd, instead a slow ass 1tb 5400rpm hdd with bloated win10, 4gb ram, not even 1080p screen but i guess that's coz the amd gpu can't game on 1080p, and it overheats. Overheats is it's thing even with 2 coolers. Ain't getting HP laptops anymore. I added another 4gb ram and replaced the cd drive with ssd so it's more bearable to love with. Their PCs are fine but laptop fuck no they're a scam
@@largejoe2195 not even gonna bother tbh, the thing is falling apart, dead DIMM slot and the only memory channel that works only runs at 933 MT/s for some reason
I’ve opened many of these at work (I’m a computer repair tech). Glad to see someone else sharing the hatred. The absence of a model name on some of the cheapo HP 15” laptops has earned them the nickname “HP Peasant Book” at the shop. Now just wait until the battery puffs up and pops out the keyboard
My sister's ex did video game development on one of these. He was working for a subcontractor for Bethesda at the time doing odds and ends at night. Of note was some of the water features in Fallout 4 and some work in the 2016 version of Doom. Needless to say he abused that laptop and I had to substitute quite a few screws from my stash to keep it together as with normal hammering it had lost most of the structural screws holding it together... and yes, I've replaced the thermal compound on one of these and it was NOT fun. I told him if he ever wanted it to get repasted or cleaned out again that it was a better option to just replace it outright. In the here and now one can get one of those Gateway laptops from Walmart with a Ryzen 5 3500U and 16GB of RAM for like $319-349 refurbished or new, your choice, and for that price for the specs you get it's a steal over the absolute junk this became after Win10 took the center stage.
I remember having an HP laptop with AMD A8 APU and R5 Graphics. It got me in to PC gaming and fiddling around as most games I had to follow the lowspecgamers channel to run
@@JackBandicootsBunker Same with the T430. On the other hand my current ThinkPad, the T450s is stupid easy to open and replace anything that isn't the keyboard.
I just looked up how to disassemble it, and I honestly don't blame you, what a pig that looks to take apart. The absolute worst I ever worked on was a Packard bell of some kind, just to replace the cmos battery it took a solid 2 hours of disassembly and requires removing the screen, the keyboard, about 40 different screws all of which are different sizes, and undoing a heat spreader that covered the entire motherboard on both sides, and there were no shortcuts, it all had to come out. It was then another 2 hours of reassembly so 4 hours total just to replace the cmos battery. I wish I was joking.
I know how bad they are with AMD laptops. My aunt spent $465 on a laptop with an AMD-A9 and it struggles with loading emails. Anyways, great informative video to warn people about this.
My a8 laptop is still kicking and pretty usable. Give your aunt an SSD for a holiday, these cheap laptops almost always have slow 5200 hdd with 8mb cache and all CPU does the whole day is waiting for data from it, especially if swap is enabled (again, cheap laptops and their low amounts of ram)
I can't stop laughing this is literally my laptop. I gave up on Windows very early on and just moved to Linux because it was too sluggish to do anything. Eventually, I wrestled with it to upgrade the internal HDD to an SSD and took the chance to also clean up and change the paste for something that wasn't bad. I don't even know if Windows would run decently after this upgrade pipeline, because I'm too used to the Linux workflow to really feel at home on Windows 10. Oh, well.
@@askaykeeners8712 It can depend on the OS and desktop environment. Ubuntu and GNOME will be a lot slower than MX Linux or Slackware with LXQt, Trinity, or a non-compositong window manager.
I would say, I used this exact model. It's far better than using brand new Celeron powered laptops. Buying Celeron laptop was the most regretful decision I've ever made.
It always seems that HP gets things close when it comes to their hardware... close, but never great. It's as if the designers design a great system and bean counters come along and muddy things up. Less support here and there, remove doors oh and who needs a second ram slot? We'll reserve them things for our high end workstations and remember don't use a decent amount of thermal paste because as long as the thing works well enough to get beyond warranty that's all that counts. I've seen this with HP more often then not.
God, my first experience with AMD CPU is this kind of APU + discrete GPU and it's a horrendous one. Giving me so much trauma that I had never went back to AMD CPU for the past 7-8 years.
AMD CPUs derivated from the Bulldozer architecture didn't work well at all on laptops, the very low clock speed crippled the performance and it was still power hungry :/ Anyways the Ryzen laptop CPUs are great nowadays!
@@ismaelsoto9507 I am currently daily-driving a Piledriver laptop,which is based on Bulldozer and other than the CPU being very underpowered and it being originally paired with a hideous amount of ram (4 GB) it runs Windows 10 fine somehow (I ran debloater and now I actually dont see 90-100% usage when only 1 edge tab is open)
@@tezcanaslan2877 That's cool, Pile-driver APUs are quite slow at 2 GHz but it's usable for basic tasks. Certainly better than the very low end APUs like E-350 or C-60 :p
@@ismaelsoto9507 even a core duo,maybe a pentium d even, is more useful than that waste of silicon e series cpus (my piledriver is 3.1 ghz btw with 3.8 turbo)
the E-450 and C-60 are even slower than a Pentium D 830, and I have a AMD C-60 in a old Asus netbook, and yes, Piledriver is way better than that crap, my Desktop PC has a Piledriver CPU (not APU tho and has NVidia GPU)@@ismaelsoto9507
I had one of those in 2011-2012! I actually tried really hard to overclock the processor on it and downloaded a custom BIOS to achieve it, but ended up bricking it. I think I tried to get it from 1.8ghz to like 2ghz on all cores constantly. HP actually repaired it free of charge so that was nice. The actual Laptop was, as you said, a big mess of prototype ideas that didn't quite work out. The assymetrical crossfire thing didnt work most of the time, I think. If you were able to get the crossfire work it was actually decent in some games, like World of Warcraft, but in general it was just an extremely overheated and strange architecture. Also yeah the keyboard was dogshit. I gave it to my mom who ended up using it as an email and light media laptop and I just got an ASUS with an actual intel chip and nvidia card for general usage.
I had one of these laptops, or at least a few specs lower (hp n268sa). Based on some digging I did when I replaced the TIM a few years ago: the reported CPU temperature in most system monitoring applications (HWInfo etc) is actually higher than the actual temperature on the CPU. It was something to do with how that series of CPUs/APUS records temperature at the hardware level as an offset against TJMax instead of just the temp. I think you could get the accurate temps if you use whatever AMD software they had ship with it, although that's likely long been deprecated in favor of another piece of software that probably doesn't record the temp properly either knowing AMD...
I am currently typing this on an old HP/AMD laptop from the era. I can totally relate on how hard it is to take apart. Took me forever to upgrade the HDD and RAM, and replacing the thermal paste did indeed requite a total disassembly. Did not experience overheating or misc build quality issues though. It seems HP had poor quality control for these laptops. It is still a good light duty laptop as long as your expectations are low.
Good timing, right now I'm helping a friend who has a newer version of this machine (AMD A8 7410 and a separate R5 M330/M430 GPU). With the latest driver installed, but also with older versions, Photoshop glitches out and a basic game has *serious* performanche issues when the M330 is used. To circumvent the issue she unplugged the AC adapter to disable the secondary GPU, and it worked: no glitches and the game runs at 30+ FPS. I'm not sure if the M330 is actually an improvement over the A8's iGPU, to be honest.
Could it be possible that the M330 is faulty? Either that or it is actually a really bad choice of GPU they put in that laptop! It could be just a really bad choice of hardware. I have a laptop with an i3 2330m and a gt520m, and if I remember, the integrated graphics are like only 5% worse than the 520m, and instead of having just the integrated graphics, they have the 520, and no integrated graphics.
Brooo you have no idea how nostalgic your videos are. Your channel taught me how pc's work without dedicating videos specifically for it, with a retro spice on top. Same great quality content, even though this was produced on a toaster... regardless of the end card positioning for mobile :D
I clicked on this video without noticing it was you! I'm so glad that you're back! Could you make a video or a post listing all the products you use to clean hardware? I could really use this, and i'm probably not the only one :)
A classmate had one of these back in high school. A laptop fan blade had broken off and you could hear the rattling all the time. Performance was as described. Man we have come a long way from these APUs.
Oh judas priest, those HP Pavillions... I remember buying one years ago off Ebay for the purposes of fixing up, because I liked working on computers and I wanted to practice taking them apart and fixing them. It worked when I got it but the model I had had an issue where HP decided to not make sure the heat sink was touching the GPU inside and just shoved a little piece of thermal foam in there thinking it would be fine, and over time they'd legit cook themselves to death unless you took them apart and fixed them. So I did. I took an old 100% copper penny from the 1980s, sanded it down so I could use it as a bridge so the GPU would be making contact with metal, and I proceeded to take the laptop apart. It took me 6 hours, with instructions, to take that dumb thing apart and put it back together, with me finishing at like 3 or 4 in the morning, only to find I had broke the motherboard in the process of trying to fix it so it never worked again. I gave it to my brother and he used it for target practice after I striped everything useful off of it that I could. Thankfully the one I own currently is much easier to take apart, even if it's a toaster with a 1.3 GZ dual-core AMD processor, and it works surprisingly well with a lightweight Ubuntu flavor install.
That sounds like the first generation of dv7s, more exactly the silver ones. They're the only one HP I know of that uses that retarded approach of cooling both GPU and NB.
I5 2500k with a 1650 super or similar performing gpu will do reasonably well imo, some titles you'll see quite the cpu bottleneck though still on certain titles, at least i do here on for example battlefield 5 & borderlands 3. On a 1660 super here with the I5 2500k at 4.5 ghz 4x4 gb ram for a total of 16 gb. Not quite fast enough for borderlands 3 too run as smoothly as I'd like with 60 fps all the time so I'm pretty much not playing it atm. But it's not far off honestly, might be better if I'd run dx12 instead of dx11 as im on windows 7 here still. But I'm not that bothered too install windows 10 yet honestly for the two - three games I'd be interested too play or try out a pirated version or demo of said game if available. Kind of hoping i can put aside some money towards a platform swap too am4 with a used 2nd gen or 3rd gen ryzen 6 core cpu, 3200 mhz ddr4 2x8 gb ram kit & a decent motherboard that allows some overclocking + mounting brackets too am4 from Noctua too my current cpu cooler.
@@Mini-z1994 1650 Super is way too expensive right now. I'd rather get something more readily available like an R9 380 or 380x. Drivers would be a bit outdated, but that wouldn't be a problem if I used Linux.
Funny thing... HP also tried to do this on desktops, in regards to the APU + GPU crossfire. Have a Radeon R5 330 OEM, sitting on my desk, which originally was paired with an A8-7600.
I can confirm that these generation of laptops from the first Intel i series generation to second intel i series generations are terrible in build quality. I still use a Dell Inspiron 15R-N5110 with a quad core i7 2nd gen/nivida gt 525m dedicated graphics and this video hits the nail on why these generation laptops dont age well. The plastic bits that are still on my laptop are barely keeping the screws holding the motherboard due to trying to figure out why my laptop was overheating. A display cable change later, I finally realize that you have to screw in the fan part of the laptop really hard to the point where you think you are stripping the screw in order for the chip and fan to contact and I think this is the prime issue of why these generation of laptops overheated as badly they did. This contact on the fan got my tempature from 100C to 70c on max load. Even if you finally fixed the temperature issue, you still get a laptop that has a subpar hardware that is unable to play most mid 2010's games but I got my laptop for free so I will keep using it until the laptop gives even if it is more reasonable to get a new laptop.
This is not correct. You just haven't had a great laptop from that era. The beloved Thinkpad T410, T420, X220, X230, HP Elitebook 8440p, 2570p, 8460p, Dell Latitude E6410, E6420, and E6430 are some of the best laptops ever made. The 8440p has superb build quality. I'm even typing this on a Fujitsu Lifebook T731 with the Intel Core i5-2410M. The CPU is struggling to hit even 55 degrees celsius despite it having a 35 Watt TDP. This generation of laptops are some of the longest lasting computers ever, lasting from 2010 with the release of Windows 7, all the way until the end of support for Windows 10, 2025. And that's not even the end because they could be unofficially installed with Windows 11.
@@0w3nn yeah but the issue is that alot of the laptops that you shown were $1000+ when they first came out around 2011-2013. These laptops would of been way out of the price range for a person who was just going to college for the first time. Today this isn't an issue since you can buy these laptop used for 100 bucks or less but back then the only options that was brand new and affordable was either those really cheap netbooks or laptops like the dell Inspiron 15R-N5110. However what I will say is that Nowadays where the laptop market is going, these 2011 laptops are alot more better in value for a person who just wants to do basic web browsing and youtube. Even Today 13 years later, my dell inspiron is still working when most of the modern laptops today would be ewaste by the time it is 13 years later for them.
@@426alan ah.. that is true. i3/i5/i7 only began appearing above the 600-700 dollar range in 2011. Luckily, that had dropped to around the 500 dollar mark in 2014. However, I also don’t think the pentium dual cores and core 2 duos were bad either. In fact, they’re still pretty good. I guess you get what you pay for.
It's not just Pavilions with AMD graphics. I have a 2008 Pavilion with the nVidia chips that 1) were crappily pasted and overheated, and 2) tended to fail. I recently took it apart to replace the paste (disassembly took over an hour, assembly only half an hour). It still heats like a mofo but at least the GPU won't yeet to 100+ degrees C under any load. Now the problem is that it doesn't have any remotely new drivers for the nForce chipset, which I had blissfully forgotten about in the ~15 years since nVidia last made mainstream chipsets. Might try Linux next. :D
Things have changed a bit. Picked up a HP Pavillion Ryzen 7 4700U (8c8t) 15w tdp, 8gb ddr4 3200mhz and 256gb nvme drive for $350. Mind you it was black Friday 2020 but still, thing is great for the price. Upgraded it to 32gb cl20 ddr4 3200 as well.
i had one few years ago, it was working fine until one day my hdd died, and then another one, and then anoter one, and so on... the hdds were on warranty so i had them replaced for free when they died so it wasn't that bad, but it is quite amusing that the amount of dead hdds i had was easily in double digits. the record hdd lasted only 2 days! it became too annoying so i upgraded to an ssd which still serves me years later in my new laptop.
I had an HP gaming laptop. I ripped the WD blue HDD out of it and replaced it with a Samsung Evo SSD. Then I ripped the disc drive out of it and replaced it with a 1TB WD Black using a special caddy.
My friend and i bought this laptop in 2016 ish. little did we know the problem that this laptop would cause. - constant fps drops (dual graphic on) - low fps (dual graphic off, already set to high performance) - random shutdown (even after replacing thermal paste, have to turn off turbo boost by setting the processor power to 90%) - windows updates keeps messing with graphic card drivers (black screen, have to go back to windows 8.1)
I still use similar laptop with A6-6310 and R5 250M dedicated graphic card. I never knew, if the game ran on the APU graphics or the integrated one. If the video game had a choice to "select" a GPU, then it always showed only the APU one. Even with upgraded RAM to 8 GB and an SSD it feels sluggish even at ordinary office work.
I built an A10-7870k ITX and wanted to do that Crossfire thing. Never did though. It ran in integrated mode as a tiny small form factor system until the difficulty of cooling and powering what is basically an FX processor with 2015's state of the art in SFF, wherein it became a larger cube PC and served on my desk with my RX 570 since it has slightly better IPC than my full size FX4100, meaning better performance for the same 4.4GHz overclock. It now has a revival of its original mini concept with better cooling and power, and lives on my entertainment center as a streaming PC, since I have a 3400G mini now.
Had one of those, had mostly good memories of it, got it on a sale and had decent performance for what i wanted to do (mostly playing 2004 games) with good resoults, seeing it here made me smile and get nostalgic, i miss that laptop a bit
I had an Asus r510 with the a10-5750 dual graphics and it took me a couple of weeks to figure out the specific way to install a very specific set of drivers that allowed the dual graphics to work correctly in windows 10. Once I figured that out the dual graphics worked fine.
It is great to see you upload again! I know the chip shortages and insane prices on pc hardware has put some channels down. Just a crazy time we live in at the moment. I will just say, do your best and know your fans are here for yah.
This thing reminds me A LOT of the Lenovo Ideapad Z585 a friend of mine had with an A8-4500M with integrated HD 7640G and dedicated HD 7670M 2GB GDDR3. Screw crossfire. Forcing anything to run on the dedicated GPU alone was damn near impossible. Games _always_ defaulted to the garbage integrated graphics, never the dedicated HD7670M. No matter what you tried to force in the trashy drivers that also kept crashing left right and center. I'm honestly glad this piece of trash cooked itself to death due to a failed singular (!) fan with a dry bearing... not that it ran at healthy temps even when the fan was still good. The slightest hint of a load would have it shoot above 75°C, games or CPU intensive stuff even higher. This also took its toll on the case plastics and things were brittle AF near the end
That's basically any Intel-based Pavilion G6. Forget running the HD7670M whatsoever, you're basically stuck with its HD3000 graphics. I tried high and low to activate it. It just won't, not even in Furmark.
Had an Envy with a 5550M & 8750M. Got me into PC gaming. The laptop itself was great. AMD's 2 year driver support was a pain. Frequent crashes in Office and Chrome in Windows 8. The first windows 10 release stopped crashing all the time, so AMD probably thought that was a good place to stop.
I had a HP 650 with a Pentium B980, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD replaced once, Intel HD 3000. It couldn't even run settings, and struggled to do simple tasks. It finally gave up after 9 years. RIP 01/19/13 - 08/09/21
Hello There, a great video and it's shame they didn't get the balance right with both the hardware and design as well as the exterior hardware etc. Thank you for sharing this and keep it up. Cheers Peter :-)
I got the HP Pavilion 15 Beats special edition from a friend who had absolutely destroyed the harddrive and some of the case. put a new drive, and a copy of windows 7 on it, and it was my daily driver for years, but needed a MAJOR repair every four or five months. even got soup spilled through it and was still fine. eventually gave it a big polish to the point where it shouldn't have needed anymore help and passed it on to my sister before it finally fell off of a shelf and wouldn't you know, the hinges snapped off. internals never failed no matter what you did to them, and are probably still good to this day, but the build quality was horrific.
Just to give you an idea of how bad is the cooling on these HP laptops, I have a Pavilion dm1 that gets so hot that the keyboard and trackpad turns off to protect from the high temperatures, while the laptop still keeps going. And I've changed the termal paste, but turns out it's just bad cooling design.
I remember when I swapped the drive to an SSD, changed the paste and added more RAM I was actually able to play Mafia 1 without stuttering 8:35 I installed Nimez drivers many many years later to much success since they support mobile cards
Fun story: I got a HP Pavilion G6 in 2011 as my computer, with an AMD A6-3400M CPU. Yeah, it started to overheat after two years (and definitely needs new thermal paste), and it needed me to run K10STAT to drop the voltage to not melt as much, but for $400, it was an actual quad-core with 6GB of RAM and that was surprisingly usable for years. I even made TH-cam videos on the thing because it could.
3:12 I used to work for a company that did HP RMA sorting. Pallets upon pallets of the laptops crossed our dock and we would have maybe 1-2 pallets of their desktop units in comparison. That was when HP decided desktop was dead and made it a fact for HP by not making all new desktops but a shedload of new laptops instead... and desktop is still alive and kicking hard enough to keep AMD and NVidia in the billions of dollars of profits while HP is lagging compared to 1990. Anywho HP though they claim quality... as an old middleman employee I disagree. Their early laptops had a huge return rate compared to the desktops. Printers with their thousands of moving parts and allot of plastic only exceeded returns for laptops with only the HDD and fan being the moving part. My point: I am kinda surprised that laptop even works.
I had one of these laptops!!! i never could figure out how to fix Crossfire microstutter in games, no combination of OS version, driver version and settings seemed to do much so I ultimately left it disabled most of the time. The drivers had other issues as well, particularly frustrating was their penchant for corrupting my desktop and leaving me with an unusable session every so often and also crashing Photoshop quite frequently. It always was terribly slow, crossfire or no, I suspect an SSD would've improved overall system responsiveness over the shipped 5400RPM HDD but frankly the 1366x768 display really wasn't doing it any favors, after a while I couldn't bear to look at the thing anymore and further upgrades were out of the question. At that point all I had done was taken the RAM to 16GB of quality RAM because the stuff that ships with these is bad and APUs are super highly dependent on RAM for performance, also they reserve like 4GB just for graphics memory
Clicked on this video on a whim, and went "wait... I have one of those..." Mine shipped with two sticks of RAM from two different manufacturers. The keyboard is surprisingly comfortable, and It did a fair job running CS:GO and R6S. Games like Ark would occasionally make it overheat. My cooling solution was putting it in the freezer for a few minutes. These days I use it as a tinkering machine dual booting Windows and LInux. Infuriatingly, the UEFI is incorrectly coded. Getting it to load the Grub boot menu requires some messy workarounds.
@@armorgeddon I'm honestly not sure which games support Crossfire nor how to tell which GPU is in use. I assume it's running on the dedicated one, since the framerate isn't noticably worse than Windows (although I only think I've tested CS:GO on Linux). I kind of doubt Crossfire would work, since the driver/utility in Windows seems to assign iGPU or dGPU to specified .exe's.
@@justsomeguy5103 Thanks for your reply. For Nvidia equipped systems there are Linux tools to tell an application to use the Nvidia GPU instead of the one in the CPU though I don't know of something similar for ATI/AMD GPUs.
@@justsomeguy5103 You can apparently still use this feature with hardware and software that supports it, but it only ever allowed Crossfire between the same generation iGPU and dGPU and AMD doesn't ship it anymore, if you can get a Vega dGPU you're better off just using that. It never worked very well or improved performance much over just using the dGPU, so it's probably worth the tradeoff for the increased system stability and better frame times. Most newer games don't support Crossfire anyway.
Actually having a intel 4th gen laptop with a ATI radeon graphics card (8790m) have the best price to performance ratio, but the problem is that you won't find them easy like the dell latitude e6540 upgraded from 4800MQ to 4810MQ which I'm rocking with
If anyone is interested in this kind of crossfire setup. It is possible to run x3 hybrid crossfire. Using an AMD G Series Athlon or older Ryzen chip with x2 Radeon GPU’s. Make sure the motherboard and select games are compatible. Harder part is also finding the correct driver to be stable in your setup. It’s very fun to do once running. I managed to get this to work iRacing and run 3 screens extended at 1080p at 90 fps. I used a 3400G with two RX590’s I however could only allocate 6GB of VRAM to the system. Pretty fun for a $800 build (pre shutdown)
I had a pavilion G6 for years with the 4th gen AMD A6, 4gbs DDR3 1333, 1tb HDD, Windows 8. A few months of having it I got the A10 (yup, upgradeable cpu), upgraded the ram to 24gbs, and put a 256gb SSD in. Guess I got lucky with it by putting good thermal paste on way back then. With the A10 it had the Radeon HD 7660g graphics. That machine ran my favorite games until about 2019 and it was over for my G6. The machine would start draining the battery while plugged in if it was under load. I will say the G6/G8 is a better machine than the DV6's. It aged much better. I do remember comparing my APU with another HP like the one in the video, that on paper is better, but my G6 outperformed it (Game was Empyrion Galactic Survival).
ive got an A8 powered pavilion, the thing has a high pitched fan thats on all the time when running Win10. it also draws air in through the keyboard and struggles even after cleaning bc of it. the family member who originally had this thought it was defective because of how hot it got
I had a Samsung dual graphics laptop with an i7 and an AMD 7XXX graphics. It wasn’t terrible, but you had to use horribly outdated graphics drivers to have access to the dedicated graphics and I had to buy a USB fan to keep it from overheating. Got playable performance on older (~2012) games and was a godsend when it was my only PC.
Sounds like what ASUS did woth one of my previous laptops - an X54HR. LCD would literally turn off and not work correctly if you didn't use anything else besides ASUS' drivers.
I had one of these when ever i would try to play anything the fans would spin up to max rpm and then crash... I replaced the thermal paste and it turned on once and then the display stopped working ://
my dad has one of those 2015 lenovo z50 with an a10-7300 and dual graphics. it's always overheating, takes 5+mins to start up properly, and the battery has always lasted 1 hour at best, now more around 40min. what were they trying to achieve with this laptop? i think they succeeded at the thin design, but it came at the cost of overheating. and dont get me started on hp's x360 envy machines... BSOD design overheating out of the box
Had an A10 desktop APU for a 'media' PC which surprised me with its ability to actually do some gaming - especially when fed with fast RAM. It still works, and took a quick overclock a few months ago for shits and giggles. Actually got it to creak up above 2000 points on Cinebench R20
Nicely done. And glad you're back. How do you fancy testing out what I call my "craptop" that was my daily driver from 2011-12 and my backup system for on the go thereafter? It was a Lenovo G500 with a Pentium P6200 CPU and "Intel HD Graphics." It was kind of an emergency purchase when I got it because my previous laptop had totally died (a 2007 HP running Vista) and I didn't yet have the cash saved up to get a desktop (due to at that time being terminally underpaid.) The desktop I did get the next year I've had ever since, albeit with 2 new cases, 3 new CPUs, 4 new GPUs, 3 new motherboards, 2 new mice, 2 new keyboards, 3 new power supplies, a new monitor, and 2 new SSDs.
I have the A10 6800k desktop processor (upgraded to ryzen 3600 recently) I was stuck many years ago in a bind I needed a new processor but was stuck for $ the 6800k had integrated graphics and my plan was to be able upgrade to one of the compatible GPUs in six to eight months after purchasing it. I could not get one and the apu was working so I used that for quite a while until I got a 750ti, then upgrade to rx 570 4gb. Never did get the opportunity to use the dual graphics
I used to have one of these. Eventually the boot drive fossilized and the laptop made a better grill than a web surfer. I could of fixed the issues, but by that time the shell was pretty damaged from it being quite flimsy.
Still Running till this day the Samsung NP355V5C with the upgraded A10-5750M (undervolted), 16GB RAM, 8660G+7670M Dual Graphics, Upgraded Wi-fi Card, WD Black Dual drive (SSD+HDD) and Upgraded Blu-ray Drive all with windows 10. somehow still works and my daily driver! (9 years old laptop), still gaming on it as it was new
I used an HP Pavilion dv6 as main pc from 2012 to 2017, and honestly it’s a great machine. Still works flawlessly with a good quality keyboard and decent performance
I remember when I was 15, I had this awful HP laptop I had to deal with. Constant overheating issues to the point where the fan inside PHYSICALLY stopped spinning.
Congratulations on your C70! That Astra was a faithful budget PC carrier but it was getting unsafe by today's standards. Happy for you and welcome back!
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial Ah, my mistake. I saw that in your intro and just assumed what I previously said. Sorry, I also love cars and just look for details like these in all videos :) Glad you are back with videos nevertheless and thank you for reviewing this dinosaur. I have noticed that many of these ended up in small offices and can be found for very cheap now, I would say it still makes sense for a cheap student laptop that does not break the bank if stolen/broken.
My first very own PC was one of these Pavilions, can't remember the exact specs. Going to this from the ancient office PCs with Windows 2000 felt like a huge upgrade at the time, but boy the performance was kinda rough and the chassis really didn't survive even pretty mild transporting well. Eventually the CPU fan just straight up stopped spinning and the thing would thermal shutdown after an hour of use, although it's entirely possible that that was caused by a bunch of ants crawling up inside the left side exhaust vent. Don't ask.
Turn Palm Check off hopefully you have it in your track pad settings. I game on a wireless logitech keyboard and trackpad combo myself, and when you turn up the sensitivity it works pretty well for adventure games and indie.
I had a my uncle's old Pavillion G7 1100 series with Athlon P350 (or something) with radon 6960M (or something). Since my uncle wasn't aware that modern laptops all have a recovery partition he wiped it out. So when I reinstalled the pc with windows 10 it's driver doesn't want to work with windows 10 and works only in Microsoft display driver. For once I managed to install the correct driver after spending 6 hours. But windows update would always breaking it by installing incorrectly 7600M driver. Though my intention of his unused old laptop was just making It use as NVR laptop. So I guess it would still work with Microsoft Basic Display Driver?
@@claritoresdiano1021 I tried that out. But it just refuse to work. I think the issue is its driver is very spesific as it's a switchable video card driver (it uses both radeon 4250 and 6470m) but for some reason the windows 10 ui (or any window that existed only since windows 10) fails to load if I have the radeon 4250 + 6470m enabled. In addition windows incorrectly detect them as radeon 4200 and 7400m. Which are unusable as they keep running in basic display. And once I reboot it it will be stuck in infinite boot with a busy mouse icon.
@@TimDragonDeckers 🤔 hmmm... afaik sometimes dual-driver works on previous windows 10 such as Codename; Threshold 2 and Redstone series. I success Installed the old AMD Catalyst on different machine, it uses Terascale iGPU and dedicated GCN 1. if still doesn't work probably should use windows 7 or Windows 8, I see windows 8 and windows 7 as your HP drivers, still on there (HP download driver website). Otherwise, use a different OS (Linux) then run Wine or via VM with Mesa Driver or the old version Proprietary AMD driver.
@@claritoresdiano1021 Alright I looked in the AMD page. It seems the Radeon mobility 4250 + 6470M is indeed incompatible with windows 10. But it's off because my older HP Pavilion DV7 has Radeon Mobility 4510 512mb vram only and it does work without issues even though the video driver comes from windows update instead of official HP. Might just trash this laptop. Kinda shame though. Or use it as sort NVR for my resturant with basic display driver, again somewhat shame for the 6470m gpu but at-least I don't have to invest a actual NVR to store CCTV. My original intention to salvage it from uncle is to replace my old HP Pavilion DV7 that only has Radeon 4510 and only supports up to dx 10.3 (barely any games was made with dx10 in mind) so I can use it on bed (with a cooling stand of course) since I'm not allowed to bring my gaming laptop to bed. I had thoughts about Linux but than I realized my most frequently used software and some games doesn't support Linux. Nor I did ever used Linux before. I may try windows 8. Assuming the windows 7 key and the driver still work once I than upgrade to windows 10. Kinda wish that my uncle didn't use old-school windows xp like method for resetting windows. Because all OEM PCs since windows 7 (or Vista) has a recovery partition.
this might sound dumb. but i had the 5745M/8610G version of thid laptop only. and they had a Dual solution too. i was genuinely jealous over them as a freshman in high school.
I used to love my old Maingear custom PC. I got a Dell Inspirion 700 I5(laptop) 5-6 years ago and have been able to do everything I used to. Its still running well, longer than I expected. I used to have an HP 10 years ago but im very impressed with Dell's laptops for streaming, gaming, and work.
I have a similar 2012-era Pavilion with the higher-clocked A10-4600m in it (and _without_ a dedicated gpu), and it was a total pain to use. The cpu somehow bottlenecks even the iGPU and the build quality and thermal throttling was every bit as bad- even after a repaste. It was my very first laptop when I was 13 and as bad as it was, I still look back at it fondly
re: 9:12 , I have a Dell G7 with an RTX 2070 and a i9-10885H, and the GPU hotspot does not exceed 90, and the average GPU temps, during heavy load, run around 80 mark. The CPU, during boost, will bump-up against tj-max of 100c during initial boost (where it runs, thermally bound, at about 4.95Ghz all-core) before dropping back into the 70-80c range after the boost expiration. The overall chassis temps are toasty, but not anywhere near 100, and my G7 is not exactly known for having a great thermal management setup. So yeah, 112 is not just toasty, it's going to threaten hardware longevity. Then again, that laptop is a complete turd, so I'm not sure it matters.
For about five years, I had to deal with a model similar to that, but worse. It had an A8-5545m and integrated Radeon HD 8510G graphics, and if you know anything about that particular chipset, you would know that it’s Terrascale 3 based. Edit: The cooling fan broke in 6 months.
I bought one of these HP Pavillion laptops with an i7-2860QM and some kind 2gb Radeon graphics (want to say HD7600M?) when they were new for around £450 ($600-ish) and without one of those laptop fan pads under it, it was essentially unusable because of overheating even after adding new thermal paste. It could run pretty much every game I wanted (at the time, Arma 2, Dota 2, Runescape 3) at decent graphics and was hitting 60FPS basically the entire time, it just would overheat and turn off without a fan pad under it. It was a beast of a laptop for the price and the time period but HP really did not care about thermals with them.
I actually parted out one of these a few days ago. System board had issues, machine would freeze, reset or constantly flicker. Build quality was really really poor.
i use that laptop with Fallout 4 at 720p and 200 mods(texture packs 2k) and got 30 fps,and has a 1 GB vram gpu:(only is the intel i3 varriant),and even now i use it for some stuff
i had a Lenovo AMD A8 Laptop with 3 Years of warranty ,It had issues during the warranty and that was fixed but as soon the warranty finished the motherBoard and CPU freaked up at service center they told they havent got parts and At local Tech repair guy had the same issue the laptop was dead in the end i had to sell that on scrap
It is so refreshing seeing a youtube channel look into older hardware and give it a second look/chance compared to all the others who are "oo intel 12th gen"
Or LGR, if you're into retro hard/software!
Well, major tech channels have families and employees, what else can they do?
@@takehirolol5962 the budget/retro dudes are humans too, also there are more poor folks in this world searching info for older & cheaper hardware...
@@IgorGiganskiANtiatom I was talking about the major tech channels with the new and shinier Intel generation.
For this hardware you will also need someone to place thermal paste...had a A8 4500m back in the day.
As well as the few who thinks $400 is very cheap for a laptop or PC and tries to say nice things about it but subtly wanna complain about what’s wrong with it. 🤷🏻♂️
Glad you're finally back in action! It's been too long
GDOOOYYIHH! PUT A KNOIFE ON THE BARBIE!!
I remember having a Pavilion DV6 years ago with an i3 that would overheat after a few minutes of gaming. I pulled it all apart and saw that the CPU fan had a plastic shroud that covered the exhaust holes. Snipped it off and it immediately improved temperatures.
I use a DV7 till this day and it's a nightmare to take apart. Doesn't have thermal issues though thankfully
I built a heat exhaustor for my laptop
IIRC there was a whole sub-line of DV-6 (or was it DV6000?) laptops that had all kinds of problems including motherboard failures...
I had 3 DV7s and all 3 of the left speaker died because it had bad cooling design where the heat from CPU literally destroyed the left speaker. I mostly use headset though.
It's subwoofer is nice but has niche use because I barely play movies (although that laptop was designed for that In mind) or play music on high volume.
@@TimDragonDeckers my DV7 works fine (DV7-3190ec), even the cooling is quite decent since it never goes above 65°C
Oh my god, when I heard that this laptop has a CPU with an integrated graphics chip AND a discrete AMD graphics chip I immediately experienced a flashback from the 2010s when my friend had a laptop with that combination and the struggle behind making that second GPU work in games!
Every once in a while my laptop decides the intel UHD630 graphics is the proper one for game while the desktop SKU 1660ti sits there like :| It's some finagling to get it to use the dGPU but then it's fine.
If you want to play games, there is no reason to install Win 10. Win 7 would run much better and stable on this older hardware. Or you could try some minimalistic Linux distro.
@@aleksazunjic9672 Linux and Dual GPU, that might be a recipe for a quite eventful weekend.
@@aleksazunjic9672 u are funny
@@VV-nw4cz Especially if you try to compile drivers yourself :P
Is been a long time budget builds, a long time indeed.
One ""hack"" I came up for my old pavillion laptop was pointing a USB fan at the vents of the cooler. It worked surprisingly well, because otherwise it would throttle like a mf. No joke, I would get a 20-30% increase in FPS in most games. I remember when I got a new PC and went to play GTA 4 I started to think "where the hell is the fan?", then I realized how stupid that was.
imagine getting a $400 hp laptop in 2016 (as a gift) with an A10-9600P and thinking "wow this must be decently fast and it looks sleek"
it was BRAND NEW and it's been nothing but broken plastic tabs, overheating, eating batteries like there's no tomorrow (about to be on its third if the replacement one gives out), and so many driver issues
I got mine as a hand me down and i hated how much of a scam it was, 400 bucks, no ssd, instead a slow ass 1tb 5400rpm hdd with bloated win10, 4gb ram, not even 1080p screen but i guess that's coz the amd gpu can't game on 1080p, and it overheats. Overheats is it's thing even with 2 coolers. Ain't getting HP laptops anymore. I added another 4gb ram and replaced the cd drive with ssd so it's more bearable to love with. Their PCs are fine but laptop fuck no they're a scam
@@largejoe2195 not even gonna bother tbh, the thing is falling apart, dead DIMM slot and the only memory channel that works only runs at 933 MT/s for some reason
@@FrozenIce alright, but that driver version brings back the option of changing what games run on what gpu
@@largejoe2195 i swear my laptop only has radeon R5 graphics, so that wouldn't be much help
@@FrozenIce give it a go anyway, but if not yeah doesn’t matter
I’ve opened many of these at work (I’m a computer repair tech). Glad to see someone else sharing the hatred. The absence of a model name on some of the cheapo HP 15” laptops has earned them the nickname “HP Peasant Book” at the shop.
Now just wait until the battery puffs up and pops out the keyboard
I have and use a newer model hp 15-da2339ne completely
Stock, it sucks though
WOOOO YEAH BABY let's go, the king is back!
i read that in Moist Critical's voice
@@IgorGiganskiANtiatom lmao that's what I was going for
My sister's ex did video game development on one of these. He was working for a subcontractor for Bethesda at the time doing odds and ends at night. Of note was some of the water features in Fallout 4 and some work in the 2016 version of Doom. Needless to say he abused that laptop and I had to substitute quite a few screws from my stash to keep it together as with normal hammering it had lost most of the structural screws holding it together... and yes, I've replaced the thermal compound on one of these and it was NOT fun. I told him if he ever wanted it to get repasted or cleaned out again that it was a better option to just replace it outright.
In the here and now one can get one of those Gateway laptops from Walmart with a Ryzen 5 3500U and 16GB of RAM for like $319-349 refurbished or new, your choice, and for that price for the specs you get it's a steal over the absolute junk this became after Win10 took the center stage.
TMI
"DDR3 RAM clocked at some speed I'm sure." Glad to see Hamish really is back!
If it's DDR3L then the speed is 1600MHz.
I had an HP Pavilion with AMD from 2007 that had to be placed in the fridge to install Windows XP. The file copy process caused it to overheat.
I remember having an HP laptop with AMD A8 APU and R5 Graphics. It got me in to PC gaming and fiddling around as most games I had to follow the lowspecgamers channel to run
These reasons you explain in this video is why I am so hesitant to replace the thermal paste in my thinkpad x220t lmao
ThinkPad T410 is hell. I only disassembled it enough to replace CPU/GPU thermal compound.
Older ThinkPads are wonderful laptops, overengineered and sturdy but they're a pain in the ass to take apart past the keyboard
I have a x230T, believe me, it’s muscle memory once you disassemble it often enough.
@@JackBandicootsBunker Same with the T430. On the other hand my current ThinkPad, the T450s is stupid easy to open and replace anything that isn't the keyboard.
I just looked up how to disassemble it, and I honestly don't blame you, what a pig that looks to take apart.
The absolute worst I ever worked on was a Packard bell of some kind, just to replace the cmos battery it took a solid 2 hours of disassembly and requires removing the screen, the keyboard, about 40 different screws all of which are different sizes, and undoing a heat spreader that covered the entire motherboard on both sides, and there were no shortcuts, it all had to come out.
It was then another 2 hours of reassembly so 4 hours total just to replace the cmos battery. I wish I was joking.
I know how bad they are with AMD laptops. My aunt spent $465 on a laptop with an AMD-A9 and it struggles with loading emails. Anyways, great informative video to warn people about this.
I had an AMD laptop with a A9, god damn it was awful
My a8 laptop is still kicking and pretty usable. Give your aunt an SSD for a holiday, these cheap laptops almost always have slow 5200 hdd with 8mb cache and all CPU does the whole day is waiting for data from it, especially if swap is enabled (again, cheap laptops and their low amounts of ram)
Stop making bullshit generalizations. HP's AMD Ryzen based machines are great. The Envy X13 in particular is fucking awesome.
@@Cooe. I wasn't talking about Ryzen. I was talking about the A-Series. If you read my comment, you would've seen that.
My laptop costs 400 dollars and it's using AMD GPU, it's dogshit
I can't stop laughing this is literally my laptop. I gave up on Windows very early on and just moved to Linux because it was too sluggish to do anything. Eventually, I wrestled with it to upgrade the internal HDD to an SSD and took the chance to also clean up and change the paste for something that wasn't bad. I don't even know if Windows would run decently after this upgrade pipeline, because I'm too used to the Linux workflow to really feel at home on Windows 10. Oh, well.
i have this laptop too windows seems slow hows the preformance with linux?
ewww linux
@@askaykeeners8712 It can depend on the OS and desktop environment. Ubuntu and GNOME will be a lot slower than MX Linux or Slackware with LXQt, Trinity, or a non-compositong window manager.
I would say, I used this exact model. It's far better than using brand new Celeron powered laptops. Buying Celeron laptop was the most regretful decision I've ever made.
It always seems that HP gets things close when it comes to their hardware... close, but never great. It's as if the designers design a great system and bean counters come along and muddy things up. Less support here and there, remove doors oh and who needs a second ram slot? We'll reserve them things for our high end workstations and remember don't use a decent amount of thermal paste because as long as the thing works well enough to get beyond warranty that's all that counts. I've seen this with HP more often then not.
IDK which model you're talking about, but some of the laptops HP has made over time had the other ram slot on the reverse side of the board...
I think the HP Elitebook 8440p and their Elitebook/Probook lines are great laptops. Some of the Spectres are good too.
@@0w3nn Yup, absolutely.
God, my first experience with AMD CPU is this kind of APU + discrete GPU and it's a horrendous one. Giving me so much trauma that I had never went back to AMD CPU for the past 7-8 years.
AMD CPUs derivated from the Bulldozer architecture didn't work well at all on laptops, the very low clock speed crippled the performance and it was still power hungry :/
Anyways the Ryzen laptop CPUs are great nowadays!
@@ismaelsoto9507 I am currently daily-driving a Piledriver laptop,which is based on Bulldozer and other than the CPU being very underpowered and it being originally paired with a hideous amount of ram (4 GB) it runs Windows 10 fine somehow (I ran debloater and now I actually dont see 90-100% usage when only 1 edge tab is open)
@@tezcanaslan2877 That's cool, Pile-driver APUs are quite slow at 2 GHz but it's usable for basic tasks. Certainly better than the very low end APUs like E-350 or C-60 :p
@@ismaelsoto9507 even a core duo,maybe a pentium d even, is more useful than that waste of silicon e series cpus (my piledriver is 3.1 ghz btw with 3.8 turbo)
the E-450 and C-60 are even slower than a Pentium D 830, and I have a AMD C-60 in a old Asus netbook, and yes, Piledriver is way better than that crap, my Desktop PC has a Piledriver CPU (not APU tho and has NVidia GPU)@@ismaelsoto9507
Tbh, this video looks pretty great considering it was edited from this potato…
I had one of those in 2011-2012! I actually tried really hard to overclock the processor on it and downloaded a custom BIOS to achieve it, but ended up bricking it. I think I tried to get it from 1.8ghz to like 2ghz on all cores constantly. HP actually repaired it free of charge so that was nice.
The actual Laptop was, as you said, a big mess of prototype ideas that didn't quite work out. The assymetrical crossfire thing didnt work most of the time, I think. If you were able to get the crossfire work it was actually decent in some games, like World of Warcraft, but in general it was just an extremely overheated and strange architecture. Also yeah the keyboard was dogshit. I gave it to my mom who ended up using it as an email and light media laptop and I just got an ASUS with an actual intel chip and nvidia card for general usage.
I had one of these laptops, or at least a few specs lower (hp n268sa). Based on some digging I did when I replaced the TIM a few years ago: the reported CPU temperature in most system monitoring applications (HWInfo etc) is actually higher than the actual temperature on the CPU. It was something to do with how that series of CPUs/APUS records temperature at the hardware level as an offset against TJMax instead of just the temp. I think you could get the accurate temps if you use whatever AMD software they had ship with it, although that's likely long been deprecated in favor of another piece of software that probably doesn't record the temp properly either knowing AMD...
I am currently typing this on an old HP/AMD laptop from the era. I can totally relate on how hard it is to take apart. Took me forever to upgrade the HDD and RAM, and replacing the thermal paste did indeed requite a total disassembly. Did not experience overheating or misc build quality issues though. It seems HP had poor quality control for these laptops. It is still a good light duty laptop as long as your expectations are low.
Good timing, right now I'm helping a friend who has a newer version of this machine (AMD A8 7410 and a separate R5 M330/M430 GPU). With the latest driver installed, but also with older versions, Photoshop glitches out and a basic game has *serious* performanche issues when the M330 is used. To circumvent the issue she unplugged the AC adapter to disable the secondary GPU, and it worked: no glitches and the game runs at 30+ FPS. I'm not sure if the M330 is actually an improvement over the A8's iGPU, to be honest.
Could it be possible that the M330 is faulty?
Either that or it is actually a really bad choice of GPU they put in that laptop!
It could be just a really bad choice of hardware. I have a laptop with an i3 2330m and a gt520m, and if I remember, the integrated graphics are like only 5% worse than the 520m, and instead of having just the integrated graphics, they have the 520, and no integrated graphics.
Brooo you have no idea how nostalgic your videos are. Your channel taught me how pc's work without dedicating videos specifically for it, with a retro spice on top. Same great quality content, even though this was produced on a toaster... regardless of the end card positioning for mobile :D
I clicked on this video without noticing it was you! I'm so glad that you're back!
Could you make a video or a post listing all the products you use to clean hardware? I could really use this, and i'm probably not the only one :)
Was literally just looking at your channel yesterday, wondering when you would upload again, and here you are. What a treat to wake up to!
A classmate had one of these back in high school. A laptop fan blade had broken off and you could hear the rattling all the time. Performance was as described. Man we have come a long way from these APUs.
Oh judas priest, those HP Pavillions... I remember buying one years ago off Ebay for the purposes of fixing up, because I liked working on computers and I wanted to practice taking them apart and fixing them. It worked when I got it but the model I had had an issue where HP decided to not make sure the heat sink was touching the GPU inside and just shoved a little piece of thermal foam in there thinking it would be fine, and over time they'd legit cook themselves to death unless you took them apart and fixed them. So I did. I took an old 100% copper penny from the 1980s, sanded it down so I could use it as a bridge so the GPU would be making contact with metal, and I proceeded to take the laptop apart. It took me 6 hours, with instructions, to take that dumb thing apart and put it back together, with me finishing at like 3 or 4 in the morning, only to find I had broke the motherboard in the process of trying to fix it so it never worked again. I gave it to my brother and he used it for target practice after I striped everything useful off of it that I could.
Thankfully the one I own currently is much easier to take apart, even if it's a toaster with a 1.3 GZ dual-core AMD processor, and it works surprisingly well with a lightweight Ubuntu flavor install.
That sounds like the first generation of dv7s, more exactly the silver ones. They're the only one HP I know of that uses that retarded approach of cooling both GPU and NB.
I'd like a video on the legendary Sandy Bridge. Been thinking a PC with Sandy Bridge would be a good first build for me.
I5 2500k with a 1650 super or similar performing gpu will do reasonably well imo, some titles you'll see quite the cpu bottleneck though still on certain titles, at least i do here on for example battlefield 5 & borderlands 3.
On a 1660 super here with the I5 2500k at 4.5 ghz 4x4 gb ram for a total of 16 gb.
Not quite fast enough for borderlands 3 too run as smoothly as I'd like with 60 fps all the time so I'm pretty much not playing it atm.
But it's not far off honestly, might be better if I'd run dx12 instead of dx11 as im on windows 7 here still.
But I'm not that bothered too install windows 10 yet honestly for the two - three games I'd be interested too play or try out a pirated version or demo of said game if available.
Kind of hoping i can put aside some money towards a platform swap too am4 with a used 2nd gen or 3rd gen ryzen 6 core cpu, 3200 mhz ddr4 2x8 gb ram kit & a decent motherboard that allows some overclocking + mounting brackets too am4 from Noctua too my current cpu cooler.
@@Mini-z1994 1650 Super is way too expensive right now. I'd rather get something more readily available like an R9 380 or 380x. Drivers would be a bit outdated, but that wouldn't be a problem if I used Linux.
@@Mini-z1994 If I was going to sell my computer, I'd probably go with something still supported like a GTX 960 or something.
Funny thing...
HP also tried to do this on desktops, in regards to the APU + GPU crossfire.
Have a Radeon R5 330 OEM, sitting on my desk, which originally was paired with an A8-7600.
Also.
Welcome back. :)
Your videos have been missed.
I can confirm that these generation of laptops from the first Intel i series generation to second intel i series generations are terrible in build quality. I still use a Dell Inspiron 15R-N5110 with a quad core i7 2nd gen/nivida gt 525m dedicated graphics and this video hits the nail on why these generation laptops dont age well. The plastic bits that are still on my laptop are barely keeping the screws holding the motherboard due to trying to figure out why my laptop was overheating. A display cable change later, I finally realize that you have to screw in the fan part of the laptop really hard to the point where you think you are stripping the screw in order for the chip and fan to contact and I think this is the prime issue of why these generation of laptops overheated as badly they did. This contact on the fan got my tempature from 100C to 70c on max load. Even if you finally fixed the temperature issue, you still get a laptop that has a subpar hardware that is unable to play most mid 2010's games but I got my laptop for free so I will keep using it until the laptop gives even if it is more reasonable to get a new laptop.
This is not correct. You just haven't had a great laptop from that era. The beloved Thinkpad T410, T420, X220, X230, HP Elitebook 8440p, 2570p, 8460p, Dell Latitude E6410, E6420, and E6430 are some of the best laptops ever made. The 8440p has superb build quality. I'm even typing this on a Fujitsu Lifebook T731 with the Intel Core i5-2410M. The CPU is struggling to hit even 55 degrees celsius despite it having a 35 Watt TDP. This generation of laptops are some of the longest lasting computers ever, lasting from 2010 with the release of Windows 7, all the way until the end of support for Windows 10, 2025. And that's not even the end because they could be unofficially installed with Windows 11.
@@0w3nn yeah but the issue is that alot of the laptops that you shown were $1000+ when they first came out around 2011-2013. These laptops would of been way out of the price range for a person who was just going to college for the first time. Today this isn't an issue since you can buy these laptop used for 100 bucks or less but back then the only options that was brand new and affordable was either those really cheap netbooks or laptops like the dell Inspiron 15R-N5110. However what I will say is that Nowadays where the laptop market is going, these 2011 laptops are alot more better in value for a person who just wants to do basic web browsing and youtube. Even Today 13 years later, my dell inspiron is still working when most of the modern laptops today would be ewaste by the time it is 13 years later for them.
@@426alan ah.. that is true. i3/i5/i7 only began appearing above the 600-700 dollar range in 2011. Luckily, that had dropped to around the 500 dollar mark in 2014. However, I also don’t think the pentium dual cores and core 2 duos were bad either. In fact, they’re still pretty good. I guess you get what you pay for.
finally my favorite budget builds yt is back , i thought we lost a soldier
Very good to see you back buddy. I really hope everything is fine there and hopefully we will see more videos soon :)
It's not just Pavilions with AMD graphics. I have a 2008 Pavilion with the nVidia chips that 1) were crappily pasted and overheated, and 2) tended to fail. I recently took it apart to replace the paste (disassembly took over an hour, assembly only half an hour). It still heats like a mofo but at least the GPU won't yeet to 100+ degrees C under any load. Now the problem is that it doesn't have any remotely new drivers for the nForce chipset, which I had blissfully forgotten about in the ~15 years since nVidia last made mainstream chipsets. Might try Linux next. :D
Things have changed a bit. Picked up a HP Pavillion Ryzen 7 4700U (8c8t) 15w tdp, 8gb ddr4 3200mhz and 256gb nvme drive for $350. Mind you it was black Friday 2020 but still, thing is great for the price. Upgraded it to 32gb cl20 ddr4 3200 as well.
i had one few years ago, it was working fine until one day my hdd died, and then another one, and then anoter one, and so on... the hdds were on warranty so i had them replaced for free when they died so it wasn't that bad, but it is quite amusing that the amount of dead hdds i had was easily in double digits. the record hdd lasted only 2 days! it became too annoying so i upgraded to an ssd which still serves me years later in my new laptop.
I had an HP gaming laptop. I ripped the WD blue HDD out of it and replaced it with a Samsung Evo SSD. Then I ripped the disc drive out of it and replaced it with a 1TB WD Black using a special caddy.
My friend and i bought this laptop in 2016 ish. little did we know the problem that this laptop would cause.
- constant fps drops (dual graphic on)
- low fps (dual graphic off, already set to high performance)
- random shutdown (even after replacing thermal paste, have to turn off turbo boost by setting the processor power to 90%)
- windows updates keeps messing with graphic card drivers (black screen, have to go back to windows 8.1)
I still use similar laptop with A6-6310 and R5 250M dedicated graphic card. I never knew, if the game ran on the APU graphics or the integrated one. If the video game had a choice to "select" a GPU, then it always showed only the APU one. Even with upgraded RAM to 8 GB and an SSD it feels sluggish even at ordinary office work.
I built an A10-7870k ITX and wanted to do that Crossfire thing.
Never did though.
It ran in integrated mode as a tiny small form factor system until the difficulty of cooling and powering what is basically an FX processor with 2015's state of the art in SFF, wherein it became a larger cube PC and served on my desk with my RX 570 since it has slightly better IPC than my full size FX4100, meaning better performance for the same 4.4GHz overclock.
It now has a revival of its original mini concept with better cooling and power, and lives on my entertainment center as a streaming PC, since I have a 3400G mini now.
Had one of those, had mostly good memories of it, got it on a sale and had decent performance for what i wanted to do (mostly playing 2004 games) with good resoults, seeing it here made me smile and get nostalgic, i miss that laptop a bit
I had an Asus r510 with the a10-5750 dual graphics and it took me a couple of weeks to figure out the specific way to install a very specific set of drivers that allowed the dual graphics to work correctly in windows 10. Once I figured that out the dual graphics worked fine.
That was some quality content for only using a phone and a laptop, your so damn skilled! :)
It is great to see you upload again! I know the chip shortages and insane prices on pc hardware has put some channels down. Just a crazy time we live in at the moment. I will just say, do your best and know your fans are here for yah.
He has quite unique videos. They don't depend on new stuff
The Budget Master is Back! Great to have you back.
This thing reminds me A LOT of the Lenovo Ideapad Z585 a friend of mine had with an A8-4500M with integrated HD 7640G and dedicated HD 7670M 2GB GDDR3. Screw crossfire. Forcing anything to run on the dedicated GPU alone was damn near impossible. Games _always_ defaulted to the garbage integrated graphics, never the dedicated HD7670M. No matter what you tried to force in the trashy drivers that also kept crashing left right and center. I'm honestly glad this piece of trash cooked itself to death due to a failed singular (!) fan with a dry bearing... not that it ran at healthy temps even when the fan was still good. The slightest hint of a load would have it shoot above 75°C, games or CPU intensive stuff even higher. This also took its toll on the case plastics and things were brittle AF near the end
That's basically any Intel-based Pavilion G6. Forget running the HD7670M whatsoever, you're basically stuck with its HD3000 graphics. I tried high and low to activate it. It just won't, not even in Furmark.
It was worse when businesses bought them and killed them after 18 months, same with most AMD APU powered laptops, cheap, plastic, slow and awfull
Had an Envy with a 5550M & 8750M. Got me into PC gaming. The laptop itself was great.
AMD's 2 year driver support was a pain. Frequent crashes in Office and Chrome in Windows 8. The first windows 10 release stopped crashing all the time, so AMD probably thought that was a good place to stop.
"The laptop did top out at around 112°C"
**This is fine.**
Which is definitely not normal on any laptop with a dGPU that I've ever owned.
it fries the plastic cover from time to time. I see the mark of plastic damage.
We used to run 3x Dell A8-6410 laptops in my house for myself and my kids. With an SSD upgrade they were not all that horrible.
Glad you are uploading again, I have been watching since 2017 and your videos are really entertaining to watch!
I had a HP 650 with a Pentium B980, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD replaced once, Intel HD 3000. It couldn't even run settings, and struggled to do simple tasks. It finally gave up after 9 years.
RIP 01/19/13 - 08/09/21
Hello There, a great video and it's shame they didn't get the balance right with both the hardware and design as well as the exterior hardware etc. Thank you for sharing this and keep it up. Cheers Peter :-)
I got the HP Pavilion 15 Beats special edition from a friend who had absolutely destroyed the harddrive and some of the case. put a new drive, and a copy of windows 7 on it, and it was my daily driver for years, but needed a MAJOR repair every four or five months. even got soup spilled through it and was still fine. eventually gave it a big polish to the point where it shouldn't have needed anymore help and passed it on to my sister before it finally fell off of a shelf and wouldn't you know, the hinges snapped off. internals never failed no matter what you did to them, and are probably still good to this day, but the build quality was horrific.
Been a while since I've watched a video from you, those amd a series cpus age terribly.
Just to give you an idea of how bad is the cooling on these HP laptops, I have a Pavilion dm1 that gets so hot that the keyboard and trackpad turns off to protect from the high temperatures, while the laptop still keeps going. And I've changed the termal paste, but turns out it's just bad cooling design.
Finally a new video
I remember when I swapped the drive to an SSD, changed the paste and added more RAM I was actually able to play Mafia 1 without stuttering
8:35 I installed Nimez drivers many many years later to much success since they support mobile cards
"see you next year"
lolololo funny joke 😂😂🤣
Well next year aint that far off.
Fun story: I got a HP Pavilion G6 in 2011 as my computer, with an AMD A6-3400M CPU. Yeah, it started to overheat after two years (and definitely needs new thermal paste), and it needed me to run K10STAT to drop the voltage to not melt as much, but for $400, it was an actual quad-core with 6GB of RAM and that was surprisingly usable for years. I even made TH-cam videos on the thing because it could.
I bought my first graphics card because of AMD Dual Graphics, it's a shame it never took off.
Very interesting idea for sure, never heard of it until this video though lol
3:12 I used to work for a company that did HP RMA sorting. Pallets upon pallets of the laptops crossed our dock and we would have maybe 1-2 pallets of their desktop units in comparison. That was when HP decided desktop was dead and made it a fact for HP by not making all new desktops but a shedload of new laptops instead... and desktop is still alive and kicking hard enough to keep AMD and NVidia in the billions of dollars of profits while HP is lagging compared to 1990. Anywho HP though they claim quality... as an old middleman employee I disagree. Their early laptops had a huge return rate compared to the desktops. Printers with their thousands of moving parts and allot of plastic only exceeded returns for laptops with only the HDD and fan being the moving part.
My point: I am kinda surprised that laptop even works.
Oh thank god you're back! Your content is just so comfy and relatable, especially as a fellow Brit with a deep need for cheap and awful PC parts
I had one of these laptops!!! i never could figure out how to fix Crossfire microstutter in games, no combination of OS version, driver version and settings seemed to do much so I ultimately left it disabled most of the time. The drivers had other issues as well, particularly frustrating was their penchant for corrupting my desktop and leaving me with an unusable session every so often and also crashing Photoshop quite frequently.
It always was terribly slow, crossfire or no, I suspect an SSD would've improved overall system responsiveness over the shipped 5400RPM HDD but frankly the 1366x768 display really wasn't doing it any favors, after a while I couldn't bear to look at the thing anymore and further upgrades were out of the question. At that point all I had done was taken the RAM to 16GB of quality RAM because the stuff that ships with these is bad and APUs are super highly dependent on RAM for performance, also they reserve like 4GB just for graphics memory
Clicked on this video on a whim, and went "wait... I have one of those..."
Mine shipped with two sticks of RAM from two different manufacturers. The keyboard is surprisingly comfortable, and It did a fair job running CS:GO and R6S. Games like Ark would occasionally make it overheat. My cooling solution was putting it in the freezer for a few minutes.
These days I use it as a tinkering machine dual booting Windows and LInux. Infuriatingly, the UEFI is incorrectly coded. Getting it to load the Grub boot menu requires some messy workarounds.
@@justsomeguy5103 Does it Crossfire in Linux though?
@@armorgeddon I'm honestly not sure which games support Crossfire nor how to tell which GPU is in use. I assume it's running on the dedicated one, since the framerate isn't noticably worse than Windows (although I only think I've tested CS:GO on Linux). I kind of doubt Crossfire would work, since the driver/utility in Windows seems to assign iGPU or dGPU to specified .exe's.
@@justsomeguy5103 Thanks for your reply. For Nvidia equipped systems there are Linux tools to tell an application to use the Nvidia GPU instead of the one in the CPU though I don't know of something similar for ATI/AMD GPUs.
@@justsomeguy5103 You can apparently still use this feature with hardware and software that supports it, but it only ever allowed Crossfire between the same generation iGPU and dGPU and AMD doesn't ship it anymore, if you can get a Vega dGPU you're better off just using that. It never worked very well or improved performance much over just using the dGPU, so it's probably worth the tradeoff for the increased system stability and better frame times. Most newer games don't support Crossfire anyway.
Actually having a intel 4th gen laptop with a ATI radeon graphics card (8790m) have the best price to performance ratio, but the problem is that you won't find them easy like the dell latitude e6540 upgraded from 4800MQ to 4810MQ which I'm rocking with
I remember with passion using the Lenovo G585 and couldn't but glaze at this powerhouse because it died recently and don't have a PC anymore :(.
If anyone is interested in this kind of crossfire setup. It is possible to run x3 hybrid crossfire. Using an AMD G Series Athlon or older Ryzen chip with x2 Radeon GPU’s. Make sure the motherboard and select games are compatible. Harder part is also finding the correct driver to be stable in your setup. It’s very fun to do once running. I managed to get this to work iRacing and run 3 screens extended at 1080p at 90 fps. I used a 3400G with two RX590’s I however could only allocate 6GB of VRAM to the system. Pretty fun for a $800 build (pre shutdown)
holy crap welcome back! Its like this channel was on quarantine!
Welcome back, Budget-Builds Official! Good to see you again after so long.
I had a pavilion G6 for years with the 4th gen AMD A6, 4gbs DDR3 1333, 1tb HDD, Windows 8. A few months of having it I got the A10 (yup, upgradeable cpu), upgraded the ram to 24gbs, and put a 256gb SSD in. Guess I got lucky with it by putting good thermal paste on way back then. With the A10 it had the Radeon HD 7660g graphics. That machine ran my favorite games until about 2019 and it was over for my G6. The machine would start draining the battery while plugged in if it was under load. I will say the G6/G8 is a better machine than the DV6's. It aged much better. I do remember comparing my APU with another HP like the one in the video, that on paper is better, but my G6 outperformed it (Game was Empyrion Galactic Survival).
ive got an A8 powered pavilion, the thing has a high pitched fan thats on all the time when running Win10. it also draws air in through the keyboard and struggles even after cleaning bc of it. the family member who originally had this thought it was defective because of how hot it got
I had a Samsung dual graphics laptop with an i7 and an AMD 7XXX graphics. It wasn’t terrible, but you had to use horribly outdated graphics drivers to have access to the dedicated graphics and I had to buy a USB fan to keep it from overheating. Got playable performance on older (~2012) games and was a godsend when it was my only PC.
Sounds like what ASUS did woth one of my previous laptops - an X54HR.
LCD would literally turn off and not work correctly if you didn't use anything else besides ASUS' drivers.
It's been sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo long. Nice to see tou back, I was getting bit tired watching only Michael MJD videos.
I had one of these when ever i would try to play anything the fans would spin up to max rpm and then crash... I replaced the thermal paste and it turned on once and then the display stopped working ://
my dad has one of those 2015 lenovo z50 with an a10-7300 and dual graphics. it's always overheating, takes 5+mins to start up properly, and the battery has always lasted 1 hour at best, now more around 40min. what were they trying to achieve with this laptop? i think they succeeded at the thin design, but it came at the cost of overheating. and dont get me started on hp's x360 envy machines... BSOD design overheating out of the box
Had an A10 desktop APU for a 'media' PC which surprised me with its ability to actually do some gaming - especially when fed with fast RAM. It still works, and took a quick overclock a few months ago for shits and giggles. Actually got it to creak up above 2000 points on Cinebench R20
Nicely done. And glad you're back.
How do you fancy testing out what I call my "craptop" that was my daily driver from 2011-12 and my backup system for on the go thereafter? It was a Lenovo G500 with a Pentium P6200 CPU and "Intel HD Graphics." It was kind of an emergency purchase when I got it because my previous laptop had totally died (a 2007 HP running Vista) and I didn't yet have the cash saved up to get a desktop (due to at that time being terminally underpaid.)
The desktop I did get the next year I've had ever since, albeit with 2 new cases, 3 new CPUs, 4 new GPUs, 3 new motherboards, 2 new mice, 2 new keyboards, 3 new power supplies, a new monitor, and 2 new SSDs.
I had one of those bit with a pentium, was so bad that moving to a desktop with a pentium 4 and an 8500gt was a really welcome improvement
I have the A10 6800k desktop processor (upgraded to ryzen 3600 recently) I was stuck many years ago in a bind I needed a new processor but was stuck for $ the 6800k had integrated graphics and my plan was to be able upgrade to one of the compatible GPUs in six to eight months after purchasing it. I could not get one and the apu was working so I used that for quite a while until I got a 750ti, then upgrade to rx 570 4gb. Never did get the opportunity to use the dual graphics
I used to have one of these. Eventually the boot drive fossilized and the laptop made a better grill than a web surfer. I could of fixed the issues, but by that time the shell was pretty damaged from it being quite flimsy.
Still Running till this day the Samsung NP355V5C with the upgraded A10-5750M (undervolted), 16GB RAM, 8660G+7670M Dual Graphics, Upgraded Wi-fi Card, WD Black Dual drive (SSD+HDD) and Upgraded Blu-ray Drive all with windows 10. somehow still works and my daily driver! (9 years old laptop), still gaming on it as it was new
I used an HP Pavilion dv6 as main pc from 2012 to 2017, and honestly it’s a great machine. Still works flawlessly with a good quality keyboard and decent performance
I remember when I was 15, I had this awful HP laptop I had to deal with. Constant overheating issues to the point where the fan inside PHYSICALLY stopped spinning.
Congratulations on your C70! That Astra was a faithful budget PC carrier but it was getting unsafe by today's standards. Happy for you and welcome back!
Still have the Astra G
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial Ah, my mistake. I saw that in your intro and just assumed what I previously said. Sorry, I also love cars and just look for details like these in all videos :) Glad you are back with videos nevertheless and thank you for reviewing this dinosaur. I have noticed that many of these ended up in small offices and can be found for very cheap now, I would say it still makes sense for a cheap student laptop that does not break the bank if stolen/broken.
I was just looking yesterday to see why I wasn’t seeing your videos! Welcome back!
My first very own PC was one of these Pavilions, can't remember the exact specs. Going to this from the ancient office PCs with Windows 2000 felt like a huge upgrade at the time, but boy the performance was kinda rough and the chassis really didn't survive even pretty mild transporting well. Eventually the CPU fan just straight up stopped spinning and the thing would thermal shutdown after an hour of use, although it's entirely possible that that was caused by a bunch of ants crawling up inside the left side exhaust vent. Don't ask.
Ants?
Turn Palm Check off hopefully you have it in your track pad settings. I game on a wireless logitech keyboard and trackpad combo myself, and when you turn up the sensitivity it works pretty well for adventure games and indie.
I had a my uncle's old Pavillion G7 1100 series with Athlon P350 (or something) with radon 6960M (or something).
Since my uncle wasn't aware that modern laptops all have a recovery partition he wiped it out. So when I reinstalled the pc with windows 10 it's driver doesn't want to work with windows 10 and works only in Microsoft display driver.
For once I managed to install the correct driver after spending 6 hours. But windows update would always breaking it by installing incorrectly 7600M driver.
Though my intention of his unused old laptop was just making It use as NVR laptop. So I guess it would still work with Microsoft Basic Display Driver?
I think you need driver AMD Radeon 15.7.1 Driver.
@@claritoresdiano1021 I tried that out. But it just refuse to work.
I think the issue is its driver is very spesific as it's a switchable video card driver (it uses both radeon 4250 and 6470m) but for some reason the windows 10 ui (or any window that existed only since windows 10) fails to load if I have the radeon 4250 + 6470m enabled. In addition windows incorrectly detect them as radeon 4200 and 7400m. Which are unusable as they keep running in basic display.
And once I reboot it it will be stuck in infinite boot with a busy mouse icon.
@@TimDragonDeckers 🤔 hmmm... afaik sometimes dual-driver works on previous windows 10 such as Codename; Threshold 2 and Redstone series.
I success Installed the old AMD Catalyst on different machine, it uses Terascale iGPU and dedicated GCN 1.
if still doesn't work probably should use windows 7 or Windows 8, I see windows 8 and windows 7 as your HP drivers, still on there (HP download driver website).
Otherwise, use a different OS (Linux) then run Wine or via VM with Mesa Driver or the old version Proprietary AMD driver.
@@claritoresdiano1021 Alright I looked in the AMD page. It seems the Radeon mobility 4250 + 6470M is indeed incompatible with windows 10. But it's off because my older HP Pavilion DV7 has Radeon Mobility 4510 512mb vram only and it does work without issues even though the video driver comes from windows update instead of official HP.
Might just trash this laptop. Kinda shame though. Or use it as sort NVR for my resturant with basic display driver, again somewhat shame for the 6470m gpu but at-least I don't have to invest a actual NVR to store CCTV. My original intention to salvage it from uncle is to replace my old HP Pavilion DV7 that only has Radeon 4510 and only supports up to dx 10.3 (barely any games was made with dx10 in mind) so I can use it on bed (with a cooling stand of course) since I'm not allowed to bring my gaming laptop to bed.
I had thoughts about Linux but than I realized my most frequently used software and some games doesn't support Linux. Nor I did ever used Linux before. I may try windows 8. Assuming the windows 7 key and the driver still work once I than upgrade to windows 10.
Kinda wish that my uncle didn't use old-school windows xp like method for resetting windows. Because all OEM PCs since windows 7 (or Vista) has a recovery partition.
My lenovo G50-45 (also with amd apu) died when i tried to swap out the thermal paste, thankfully thermalpaste swaps are much easier now
this might sound dumb. but i had the 5745M/8610G version of thid laptop only. and they had a Dual solution too. i was genuinely jealous over them as a freshman in high school.
I used to love my old Maingear custom PC. I got a Dell Inspirion 700 I5(laptop) 5-6 years ago and have been able to do everything I used to. Its still running well, longer than I expected. I used to have an HP 10 years ago but im very impressed with Dell's laptops for streaming, gaming, and work.
I have a similar 2012-era Pavilion with the higher-clocked A10-4600m in it (and _without_ a dedicated gpu), and it was a total pain to use. The cpu somehow bottlenecks even the iGPU and the build quality and thermal throttling was every bit as bad- even after a repaste.
It was my very first laptop when I was 13 and as bad as it was, I still look back at it fondly
1:11 Is that in Celsius or Fahrenheit?
Man, I was wondering where you had gone just yesterday. Glad you're back mate !
re: 9:12 , I have a Dell G7 with an RTX 2070 and a i9-10885H, and the GPU hotspot does not exceed 90, and the average GPU temps, during heavy load, run around 80 mark. The CPU, during boost, will bump-up against tj-max of 100c during initial boost (where it runs, thermally bound, at about 4.95Ghz all-core) before dropping back into the 70-80c range after the boost expiration. The overall chassis temps are toasty, but not anywhere near 100, and my G7 is not exactly known for having a great thermal management setup. So yeah, 112 is not just toasty, it's going to threaten hardware longevity. Then again, that laptop is a complete turd, so I'm not sure it matters.
For about five years, I had to deal with a model similar to that, but worse. It had an A8-5545m and integrated Radeon HD 8510G graphics, and if you know anything about that particular chipset, you would know that it’s Terrascale 3 based.
Edit: The cooling fan broke in 6 months.
I bought one of these HP Pavillion laptops with an i7-2860QM and some kind 2gb Radeon graphics (want to say HD7600M?) when they were new for around £450 ($600-ish) and without one of those laptop fan pads under it, it was essentially unusable because of overheating even after adding new thermal paste. It could run pretty much every game I wanted (at the time, Arma 2, Dota 2, Runescape 3) at decent graphics and was hitting 60FPS basically the entire time, it just would overheat and turn off without a fan pad under it. It was a beast of a laptop for the price and the time period but HP really did not care about thermals with them.
I actually parted out one of these a few days ago. System board had issues, machine would freeze, reset or constantly flicker. Build quality was really really poor.
i use that laptop with Fallout 4 at 720p and 200 mods(texture packs 2k) and got 30 fps,and has a 1 GB vram gpu:(only is the intel i3 varriant),and even now i use it for some stuff
i had a Lenovo AMD A8 Laptop with 3 Years of warranty ,It had issues during the warranty and that was fixed but as soon the warranty finished the motherBoard and CPU freaked up at service center they told they havent got parts and At local Tech repair guy had the same issue the laptop was dead in the end i had to sell that on scrap