HP Compaq nx6125 biometric laptop

AMD's Turion gets its first HP business notebook outing

By Lars-Göran Nilsson • Get more from this author

21st April 2006 11:33 GMT

HP Compaq nx6125

It's no ThinkPad but the HP Compaq nx6125 is well spec'd and affordable...

Suggested Price:: £817 inc. VAT
More info:: The HP Compaq nx6125 product page

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Review With IBM gone from the business notebook market, the old ThinkPad cachet is changing, and this seem to be an opportunity HP is trying to cash in on with its Compaq nx6125 range of ThinkPad look alikes. But it's only at first glance that the nx6125 could be mistaken for a ThinkPad - there are some major differences. The most obvious one is the AMD Turion 64 sticker, a first on an HP business laptop and not something you'd have found in a ThinkPad...

nx6125_front

The processor in the review model (which more precisely is the nx6125 EK159ET) is a Turion ML-40 clocked at no less than 2.2GHz, making it among the fastest mobile processors out. It has a full 1MB of L2 cache to further enhance its performance, although the 35W thermal rating means it's slightly more power hungry than a rival Intel Core Duo CPU. It's a shame that HP has only fitted 512MB of memory as standard, but it's at least a single module and there's a spare slot for a second one. This won't impact performance as the current range of Turion processors contain only a single-channel memory controller.

The chipset of choice comes from ATI, something that is still far from common in mainstream laptops. The Radeon Express 200M chipset has integrated graphics and supports a wide range of power-saving features. There's more than enough graphics performance for everyday Windows tasks, but don't expect to be able to play any serious 3D games on this machine. However, it's rather annoying that the BIOS allocates 128MB to the graphics, as there's no need for this much memory for general usage. This can be remedied quite easily by changing a setting in the BIOS, which allows for 32, 64 and 128MB options.