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Benchmarks
3DMark - Ice Storm: 13,340, Cloud Gate: 1165, Fire Strike 211
Cinebench 11.5 - graphics performance: 8.43 FPS, CPU performance: 0.47pts
PC Mark 8 battery life (Home test): 3hrs 42mins
Performance is poor in general use - with just a few programs open in Windows and several browser tabs in action, the TouchSmart struggled. The Cinebench 11 score reinforces this feeling with a CPU score of just 0.47 pts; incredibly low, even for a budget processor.
The CPU might feature four cores, but the clockspeed is a rather lowly 1.0GHz - therefore it's unsurprising that performance is held back. The TouchSmart has clearly been designed for simple applications like web browsing and Office, but in practice it struggled even at this modest level.
With just four or five browser tabs open and a Word document in use, the TouchSmart felt as if it was at its limit. This was backed up when we went into Task Manager and found that the CPU was running at anything from 50 per cent, all the way up to a rather shocking 96 per cent, most of the time.
Honestly, we found this surprising, and we haven't seen this poor a performance since we looked at the Asus Eee PC 1025C - ironically, a netbook - over a year ago. Even a simple processor should be able to cope with basic tasks.
Multi-tasking is definitely not up to scratch here. Other AMD processors (such as the A6) seem to have suffered the same fate, where they look great on paper but just can't seem to deliver the goods.
The lowly performance does have one plus point - battery life is much better than you might expect, with an impressive performance of just under four hours in mixed use; its strengths obviously lie more in its mobility rather than its processing prowess.
With a little more time spent refining the power options, there's definitely a few more hours to be eked out of the Pavilion. It'd make a great laptop for a few hours out of the office, although you might want to carry the power supply just in case you get caught out.
Interestingly, the graphical performance of the AMD Radeon HD 8210 seemed to fare better than the processor.
The benchmarks are nothing to write home about, but then again it's not that far off the performance of more expensive laptops, such as the Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite. Although most games, other than really basic 2D titles, are out of the question, we did manage to happily run 1080p movies without issue.
