HP HSTNN-I60C-4 Battery | http://www.labatterie.fr

Storage could be a problem, with only 17.3GB of space available of the 32GB eMMC flash drive, but these machines are designed to work with lightweight apps and cloud services, not heavyweight graphics suites. HP bundles in Office 365 Personal with 1TB of OneDrive storage for a year, although it will cost you £60 a year to keep that going once the initial period ends. Not all the extras are so welcome. The Stream is stuffed with apps, and shortcuts to online services abound, many of which seem to do little more than act as a portal to third-party services; if we want to use Deezer, we’ll download the Deezer app, thanks. While the laptop comes with a year’s free use of HP Connected Music’s radio playlists, it’s no match for Spotify.In terms of specifications, the Stream 11 is standard Bing laptop fare, with an Intel Celeron N2840 processor and 2GB of RAM. The dual-core Bay Trail-M CPU is fine for mainstream applications and will even make a good fist of more demanding apps, although video-editing, high-end graphics apps and the latest games are still firmly off the menu.The HP scored 0.4 in our Real World Benchmarks, which is slightly faster than the Toshiba Satellite CL10-B, however, and came closest to the Toshiba Chromebook 2 in the Peacekeeper browser-based test. It feels very snappy in everyday use.

HP Stream 11 – from side, lid open
Battery life sees the HP edge ahead of the CL10-B, with nearly ten hours in our light-use test and nearly six hours in our heavy-use benchmark – enough juice to get most people through a working day. Basically, what we have here is a good-looking, well-built laptop with a decent screen and reasonable battery life at a price that shouldn’t be feasible.What’s more, it’s a bit more versatile than a Chromebook, working brilliantly with online apps, but still able to run more conventional Windows software if you’re sensible about your requirements or pair it with an external USB 3 hard disk. As a result, while the Toshiba Chromebook 2 offers better hardware and a nicer screen, the Stream 11 outmatches it for sheer value for money. It’s the best sub-£200 laptop money can buy.After forging its own high-speed path with Thunderbolt technology, Intel has finally embraced universal connections – not content with delivering a major upgrade to the Thunderbolt 3 standard, it has now adopted the recent USB Type-C connector.

Announced at Intel’s Computex 2015 keynote, Thunderbolt 3 brings an array of improvements over its predecessor, Thunderbolt 2, not least the addition of support for the USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard.Bandwidth for data transfers has doubled, with the Thunderbolt 3 interface now supporting bi-directional 40Gbits/sec speeds across both PCI Express and DisplayPort protocols. The standard now provides four lanes for PCI Express Gen 3 transfers and eight for DisplayPort 1.2, and the extra bandwidth gives Thunderbolt 3 the ability to power two 4K monitors at a 60Hz refresh rate, or drive a single 60Hz 5K display, both via only one cable. Meanwhile, DVI, HDMI and VGA connections will all be supported with the use of dedicated adapters.

Thunderbolt 3 also supports slower 10Gbits/sec transfers via the USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard, and now takes advantage of the USB Power Delivery specification to provide up to 100W of power to compatible devices. Even in the absence of USB PD support, Thunderbolt 3 can still deliver up to 15W to bus-powered devices.Adopting the USB Type-C connector heralds a bright future for Thunderbolt 3 – there’s no question that sticking with the existing mini-DisplayPort standard would have been a mistake. Combining all the strengths of USB 3.1 Gen 2 – not least its ability to charge a wide range of devices such as laptops, tablets and phones – with the high-speed data capabilities that we’ve come to expect from the Thunderbolt standard, Intel looks to have made a very canny decision indeed.

The potential for Thunderbolt 3 to make the jump from computers and laptops and onto mobile phones and tablets is also increasingly likely through the adoption of USB Type-C. With a height of only 3mm, and rumours that it could be replacing the Lightning connector on the iPhone 7 (6s), it may not be long before we start seeing Thunderbolt technology reaching a variety of devices.You can bet your bottom dollar that Apple will be among the first to bring the technology to its laptop line-up, but we suspect other manufacturers won’t be too far behind. The ability to connect ultra-lightweight laptops to external Thunderbolt 3 graphics docks certainly presents some interesting opportunities. Could this be another nail in the coffin of the desktop PC? Perhaps.Bear in mind, though, that not every phone, tablet and laptop will be able to expect 40Gbits/sec transfers as standard. From launch Intel has stated there will be two principal variants of Thunderbolt 3.

The first, lower-cost option will use a standard, passive USB Type-C cable capable of delivering both USB 3.1, PCI Express Gen 3 and DisplayPort 1.2 communications, albeit with a maximum bandwidth of just 20Gbits/sec. However, to reach the headline 40Gbits/sec speeds, Intel will be releasing an active cable, which retains USB 3.1 compatibility while removing support for connecting displays via the DisplayPort 1.2 interface. Come 2016, however, Intel is hoping to supply active optical cables that deliver all the speed and interface benefits of Thunderbolt 3 with cable lengths reaching up to 60 metres. Intel has stated that Thunderbolt 3-compatible devices will be shipping before the end of 2015, with production ramping up in 2016. It looks like the dream of a single-cable future isn’t so far away after all.

Over in Taipei, home of Computex 2015, Intel and AMD have revealed a tasty platter of freshly baked silicon. With a smattering of new Broadwell and Xeon processors from Intel, and an all-new mobile APU family from AMD, there’s a whole host of new chips for desktop and laptop manufacturers to get their teeth into. After delivering its Ultrabook-class Broadwell CPUs way back in January, Intel has finally taken the wraps off of its long-overdue desktop Broadwell range. This five-strong array of consumer-class quad-core CPUs sticks with the same 14nm process introduced by the rest of the Broadwell range, but Intel has packed each of the CPUs with an Iris Pro 6200 integrated GPU, 6MB of L3 cache and a whopping 128MB of L4 cache. Otherwise known by its codename, Crystal Well, that huge 128MB L4 cache is a portion of ultra-high-speed eDRAM designed to both improve GPU performance and system memory efficiency.

Interestingly, though, the five-strong range only includes two LGA-socketed CPUs, the overclockable 3.1GHz Core i7-5675C and the 3.3GHz Core i7-5775C: the other three BGA processors in the line-up are intended to be soldered permanently to a motherboard. We suspect that these BGA CPUs may begin to surface in a variety of all-in-one PCs and perhaps even Apple’s forthcoming refresh of its iMac range. On the server and workstation side of things, Intel unwrapped its Xeon E3-1200 v4 range. All based on Broadwell architecture, the E3-1200 v4 family adds features not found on its consumer Core processors, such as support for ECC memory and a variety of virtualisation features including VT-d and GVT graphics virtualisation.

Unusually for a family of CPUs aimed at business use, all five of the new CPUs are equipped with integrated GPUs. That might sound like an odd choice, but Intel is positioning the new Xeon E3 as an ideal fit for remote graphics workstations or video-transcoding duties. Here, the combination of the beefed-up Iris Pro Graphics P6300 integrated GPUs and Intel’s graphics virtualisation technologies (GVT) allows server-based virtual machines (VMs) to take direct control of the local integrated GPU for responsive graphics performance, as well as deliver vastly improved video-transcoding performance.

On the mobile front, Intel finally got round to delivering its high-powered mobile Broadwell CPUs. Following on from the release of the low-voltage Broadwell-U platform earlier in the year, these chips are designed for high-end desktop workstations and mobile gaming behemoths.In keeping with their desktop counterparts, the four Core i7 models combine a quad-core, eight-thread architecture with the latest Iris Pro 6200 GPU, 6MB of L3 cache and 128MB of high-speed Crystal Well cache. Clock speeds start at 2.5GHz, while the top-of-the-range 2.9GHz Core i7-5950HQ reaches up to a heady Turbo Boost frequency of 3.7GHz. Meanwhile, the cheapest model in the line-up, the 3GHz Core i5-5350H, adopts a dual-core, four-thread architecture and makes do with 4MB of L3 cache. With Intel’s next-generation architecture Skylake waiting in the wings and ready for a release later in 2015, these high-end Broadwell processors are little more than a stopgap for manufacturers wanting to upgrade the beefier laptops in their line-ups. Notably, Apple shunned Broadwell for its recent MacBook Pro refresh – in truth, the benefits of moving from Haswell to Broadwell are unlikely to be dramatic.

Not to be outdone, AMD also made an appearance. It’s difficult to even remember the last time we saw an AMD-powered laptop, but that may be set to change. The arrival of AMD Carrizo – the sixth-generation A-Series APU – is the company’s bid to regain a foothold in the £300-to-£600 laptop sector. AMD continues to push its APU (accelerated processing unit) concept, giving equal billing to both GPU and CPU cores in its latest SoC. Carrizo combines four of AMD’s Excavator CPU cores with eight GPU cores based on the existing Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture to deliver a total of 12 compute cores. Built on a 28nm process, and with a power consumption of 15W, these chips are designed to deliver superior gaming and compute performance for low- to mid-range laptops. AMD is claiming victory over Intel’s Broadwell Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs in 3DMark 11, with performance increases in the order of 20% or greater. And as ever, Carrizo’s integrated GPU is capable of pairing up with a discrete GPU thanks to AMD’s Asymmetric Rendering technology, which is a far more elegant, scalable version of the older Crossfire tech.

In addition to support for DirectX 12, Carrizo stakes a world first: it’s the first processor to support high-efficiency video coding (HEVC), otherwise known as H.265. This is a compression technology that provides twice the video compression of H.264 and heralds the possibility of streaming everything from 4K video to pixel-perfect games, all without chewing through a huge amount of bandwidth. Not excited by HEVC? If you’re a gamer, you probably should be. It’s set to be the codec of choice for Windows 10’s Xbox-One-to-PC game-streaming functions. Will Carrizo prove the shot in the arm that AMD’s been waiting for? Possibly, but it’s got a tough road ahead of it. Ultimately, its fate rests squarely in the hands of the manufacturers, and Carrizo will live or die by the quality of the laptops they produce – with Carrizo-powered devices due to land around July or August of this year, I’m praying for something special.http://www.dearbattery.co.uk/dell.html

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