HP ProBook 4425s Review Discussion

[dietcokefiend]

The ProBook 4425s is the AMD-variant of the popular small and medium business notebook from HP. Designed as a near carbon copy of its Intel-based siblings, the 4425s features a quad-core Phenom II processor with integrated ATI Radeon 4250 graphics. In this review we find out how well the AMD offering stacks up against its Intel competition.

Read the full content of this Article: HP ProBook 4425s Review

Related Articles:

• HP ProBook 4720s Review
• HP ProBook 4520s Review

[Charles P. Jefferies]

Very good and very fair review, Kevin.

The P920 has a rather low clockspeed at only 1.6GHz -- it needs to run multi-CPU applications to compete with the i3. I wonder how a dual-core Phenom II would have done compared to it.

The latest ProBook models are indeed big improvements on the older models. The older ones felt kind of cheap; the brushed metal on the newer ones is stylish and as you said, looks great. HP's chiclet/island keyboard is fantastic (at least on my 5310m; I noticed some ProBooks using different models).

The sub-3 hr battery life is unacceptable. With a dual-core processor I imagine it would fare a lot better. A 14-inch business notebook should get 4-5 hours at least.

Anyways, it's good to have reviews of the ProBooks . . . reviews are surprisingly sparse on the Internet.

[jeremyshaw]

I just bought one for work. I liked it.

(Dual core Athlon II; 14" laptop)

roughly 4 hours of office tasks (word/excel/ppt/web/email)

[cavedog]

Excellent review! I am glad HP is providing a good alternative to the Dell 5410s and Thinkpad SLs. AMD on the other hand really needs to address their short comings in the mobile sector. Less than 3 hrs on a basic laptop is simply unacceptable in this day and age.

[Althernai]

The P920 has a rather low clockspeed at only 1.6GHz -- it needs to run multi-CPU applications to compete with the i3. I wonder how a dual-core Phenom II would have done compared to it.

Probably badly. WPrime is a fully multi-threaded application and the P920 still loses by a lot. It's actually kind of surprising because for previous architectures, WPrime was almost a pure [nCores * clock-speed] test. I suspect some mix of the Core i's hyper-threading and the P920's lack of L3 cache is coming into play here.

As I said in the other thread, a quad-core CPU that runs at 1.6GHz and lacks Turbo Boost is a recipe for disaster. I don't understand AMD's reasoning behind that CPU, but HP is even worse. Why put this into a 14" business notebook? And why are they charging $1200 for a 14" notebook that performs worse than most of the competition and has less than 3 hours of battery life? Come to think of it, what is the point of even making a 14" notebook with less than 3 hours battery life? It just doesn't make any sense.

[Jerry Jackson]

I don't understand AMD's reasoning behind that CPU, but HP is even worse. Why put this into a 14" business notebook? And why are they charging $1200 for a 14" notebook that performs worse than most of the competition and has less than 3 hours of battery life? Come to think of it, what is the point of even making a 14" notebook with less than 3 hours battery life? It just doesn't make any sense.

Exactly. Although there's no denying that this CPU isn't the best, I really don't understand why HP decided to choose this particular processor for a 14-inch business notebook.

AMD has faster processors with better battery life than this and it seems like HP might have chosen this processor just because it's a "quad core" processor.

AMD's current CPU lineup is a step behind Intel in terms of pure computational performance and TDP (both power consumption and heat) but there are several current AMD processor options that would have been a better fit for this notebook.

[linuxwanabe]

In all fairness, a 47WHr battery is astoundingly weak for a 14" business notebook. A Dell e6410 has a 60WHr battery and the cheapest plastic MacBook has 70WHr. It's clear that terrible battery life isn't just an AMD issue, but a battery issue - although AMD doesn't help.

I really can't comprehend why HP has introduced this particular notebook. It's a mediocre product that represents terrible value.

[Althernai]

In all fairness, a 47WHr battery is astoundingly weak for a 14" business notebook. A Dell e6410 has a 60WHr battery and the cheapest plastic MacBook has 70WHr. It's clear that terrible battery life isn't just an AMD issue, but a battery issue - although AMD doesn't help.

Actually, it pretty much is an AMD issue. The review points this out:

The HP ProBook 4425s comes standard with a 47Wh 6-cell battery, which is the same size the 15-inch and 17-inch ProBook models are equipped with. In our past reviews the 17-inch ProBook scored 4 hours and 48 minutes and the 15-inch 4520s got 4 hours and 18 minutes. With the 4425s being a smaller 14-inch model we were expecting similar battery times, but were fairly disappointed by what we found in our tests. With the screen brightness reduced to 70%, wireless active and refreshing a webpage ever 60 seconds, and Windows set to the Balanced profile the ProBook 4425s stayed on for a mere 2 hours and 25 minutes. With similar hard drive speeds and RAM amounts, the primary difference is Intel versus AMD between these systems.

I'm suspect they designed these machines around the Core i3/5 configuration and figured they could get away with the cheaper battery because it still gives you over 4 hours, so when the time came to put in a less efficient CPU, the lousy batteries were all they had on hand.

Bizarrely, the 4520s actually costs $750 (compare to $1200 for the 4425s) despite having both better performance and superior battery life, though this is probably an artifact of using different configurations (I checked HP's site and you can get the 4425s for much less, although with a Turion CPU). I'm guessing that particular version of the 4425s is a trap for fools who see a quad-core and assume it is best.

[strangerguy]

Why HP didn't went with the dual core Athlon/Turion IIs but instead of the terribad AMD mobile quads is beyond me.

BTW I have no idea why AMD even bothered to release their low-clocked, power consuming, no turbo mode mobile quads in the first place.

[Ahbeyvuhgehduh]

Excellent review! I am glad HP is providing a good alternative to the Dell 5410s and Thinkpad SLs. AMD on the other hand really needs to address their short comings in the mobile sector. Less than 3 hrs on a basic laptop is simply unacceptable in this day and age.

Agreed 100%!