AMD & HPs Awful Laptops...How bad are they? 

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"

Glad you're finally back in action! It's been too long

Is been a long time budget builds, a long time indeed.

WOOOO YEAH BABY let's go, the king is back!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

These reasons you explain in this video is why I am so hesitant to replace the thermal paste in my thinkpad x220t lmao

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.

"DDR3 RAM clocked at some speed I'm sure." Glad to see Hamish really is back!

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 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

I'm so happy to see you on my screen again! Talking to you on Discord is fun and all but i want to watch your videos from time to time, heh welcome back Hamish -POTTU

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.

Tbh, this video looks pretty great considering it was edited from this potato…

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!

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 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.

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.

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 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 :)

Very good to see you back buddy. I really hope everything is fine there and hopefully we will see more videos soon :)

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

finally my favorite budget builds yt is back , i thought we lost a soldier

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.

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.

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.

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.

OOOOhhh, you are back, you're finnally back! Damn, I really missed you. Had to do a system wipe in one of these and reinstall windows recently, and finding a driver that would activate crossfire was a pain, all that so in the end I gave it back without even being able to test it on anything but uniheaven. Its nice to see what these can do.

That was some quality content for only using a phone and a laptop, your so damn skilled! :)

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.

Man, I was wondering where you had gone just yesterday. Glad you're back mate !

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

The Budget Master is Back! Great to have you back.

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

holy crap welcome back! Its like this channel was on quarantine!

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.

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.

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

Hello. Can someone tell what it's the spray or that solution that he's cleaning the monitor at the beginning of the video? Thanks a lot and very nice video! I had a similar laptop HP and it was freaking hot, I remember that most of the HP laptops suffers from overheat issues.

Interesting video as always Hamish. Happy to see you in my subscription feed again. 👍

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 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’m so glad you didn’t stop putting out videos. I love your channel brother. Thank you for the A++ content. Been looking forward to your next video. Even checked your twitter to make sure you were still alive!

Welcome back!! Missed ya! Looking forward to more uploads :)

Glad you are uploading again, I have been watching since 2017 and your videos are really entertaining to watch!

Finally a new video

Nice video on this interesting laptop! Kind of glad to see it back again, even if it hasn't aged so gracefully... lol. Also, welcome back!

Welcome back, Budget-Builds Official! Good to see you again after so long.

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

Been a while since I've watched a video from you, those amd a series cpus age terribly.

I was just looking yesterday to see why I wasn’t seeing your videos! Welcome back!

I missed you so much! Glad to see nothing changed with the videos

"The laptop did top out at around 112°C" **This is fine.**

"see you next year" lolololo funny joke 😂😂🤣

Glad to see you're ok, mate! I missed your voice and weird computer finds.

Welcome back! :D

Man took you months to come back.. Welcome back!

It's been sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo long. Nice to see tou back, I was getting bit tired watching only Michael MJD videos.

I see that this is the first video in a while, found ya because of that. Another channel to satisfy my itch for older hardware. Subbed :)

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.

What is that green stuff you are cleaning with? Please do tell...... Great to see you back as well.....

It's been a while. Welcome back mate!

I was just yesterday watched your previous video wondering where you have been. I guess I had my answer now. Welcome back m8

Welcome back, brother! I missed your videos!

So glad to see another video from ya, man. You're one of my favorite budget PC channels, no lie.

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 :(.

I had the touchscreen version of this which was lower spec so an A8-455m and no dedicated GPU. That thing is and was horrendous even for the most basic of tasks.

its been ages since a video, hi welcome back

Interesting video, I have a pavilion 15ab111la wich my parents bought me for school in 2016, it has those damn dual graphics too, the thing is, the integrated gpu (R6 512mb) performs better than the dedicated one (R7 m360 2gb) in terms of heat and fps, im planning on doing an specific video for this model on how to deal with this disabling the R7 at least on windows 7 and 10 so far. Linux is a different nightmare, but I like to experiment.

I've never been so surprised to see a notification from RU-vid. Welcome back!

Ah, HP laptops and pre-Ryzen processors. The painful duo. In experience, my sister is using a year 2017 model HP laptop that sports an AMD A4 processor. Quite a pain to even just boot and use. P.S. It's been a while since your last video. Glad you're back in action!

I just got this in my notifications. Man i forgot about this channel. Time to binge lol

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)

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 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

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!

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.

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.

Missed ya, big guy. Good to see you're back.

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

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

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.

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.

I got the i5 variant of this back in 2013 and it was my main pc for quite some time. It carried me through many hours of gaming and internet browsing.

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.

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)

Been waiting for this channel to finally upload welcome back man!!!

Do you use a paid or free version of 3D Mark? And what version do you use for your tests? Thank you!

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.

Welcome back ! I love your videos and your voice ! Take your time king.

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.

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