HP Compaq 515

Few people know and care to check, that the Pavilion is not HP’s only notebook family. The Compaq notebooks also belong to HP, and despite the fact that they are not so widely spread among the users as other notebook families, they too are great laptops with quality components, HP is present on the market long enough to manufacture good and quality laptops. It’s time to review one of these notebooks, behold the HP Compaq 515.

Design:

This notebook is very elegant. The simple dark-gray finish of the casing blends with the keyboard, which has identical color, and gives the notebook s stealth craft feeling. The notebook is all matte, and still it slightly glows when light shines on it, it is simply beautiful and elegantly simple. The keys are large, the touch pad is a little bit small, but you will get used to it.

Performance:

This HP Compaq 515 is slightly over the budget class in price, and although it is cheap, it contains an AMD Athlon X2 QL-66 dual core processor, with a very good 2.2 GHz clock speed. Many average notebooks have slower processors, so this is a good feature. The amount of memory is strange. The default unit has 3 GB of Random Access Memory, but the notebook can handle an astonishing 8 GB of RAM. We don’t quite know why they built it this way, the processor is not strong enough to use programs which require this much RAM.

Although the presence of the ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics Processing Unit allows for gamer usage of the notebook, the high performance games which could actually use the huge 8 GB of RAM need a bigger processor and a bigger GPU. The 320 GB Hard Disk Drive is more than enough for storing a large amount of games, movies and everything. The 14 inch LED backlit widescreen display has a native 1366 x 768 resolution depth, which is just a bit above the average, you can’t complain about this. The screen has a matte finish, and still it has very good and vibrant colors thanks to the BrightView technology.

Overall:

Without a doubt, this is one of the best middle class notebooks you can buy. It is small, fast, strong, nice looking, and relatively cheap, HP’s expertise in manufacturing quality equipment can really be seen here.11