HP 14" laptop review (14-dq1039wm) and upgrade info

[alceryes]

Hey all. I recently picked up a 14-dq1039wm (with i5-1035G7) and wanted to share my mini review and upgrade experience. Let me know if you have any questions.

First impressions of the HP 14-dq1039wm -

Very powerful for the price.
No problems running Virtual Box VMs and other tasks at the same time. Doesn't skip a beat. More powerful than my much more expensive Yoga laptop from a few years ago.

Cheap plastic construction.
Not a big deal since there aren't any particular issues with the chassis - everything fits nice and tight. Lighter than my aluminum chassis Yoga. No keyboard back light may be an issue at certain times.

Screen is sub-standard.
This is the worst thing about this laptop by far. I knew the screen was only 1366x768 when I bought it but the screen color reproduction and contrast are also horrible. Luckily this laptop has got the 'G7' CPU with the Iris Plus Graphics. HDMI to my 1440p monitor, FTW!

Performance review

I upgraded the RAM from the 1x8GB DDR4 2666MHz (Samsung) that it came with to 2x4GB DDR4 3200MHz (Crucial). Total memory capacity didn't increase but by putting in 2x4GB I enabled dual channel. The memory speed is also now peaking at somewhere in the 1500MHz range as opposed to 1300MHz range previously.

The RAM in these 14-dq10xx series laptops is labeled as NOT user replaceable but it's not super difficult. This is the best video I've found on replacing/upgrading the RAM in these systems -

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN09HjALWL0

I thank the vid OP for doing the discovery but caution NOT to do what he did and destroy the clear plastic double sided adhesive strip. With a little work it can be pulled up with the rubber strip so you can put it back without any damage.

Several benchmarking tools don't properly recognize this motherboard yet and even SANDRA says that it's running in emulation mode for some things but at least I got results.

SANDRA results -

Processor Multi-Media
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 281.67MPix/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 288.24MPix/s

Processor Cryptography
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 6.485GB/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 8.952GB/s

Processor Financial Analysis
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 20.01kOPT/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 19.82kOPT/s

Processor Scientific Analysis
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 16.08GFLOPS
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 21.37GFLOPS

Processor Image Processing
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 230.65MPix/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 227.81MPix/s

Processor Multi-Core Efficiency
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 19.682GB/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 23.499GB/s

Overall Processor Score
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 2.84kPT
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 3.24kPT

Good increase in CPU performance! I'm not sure about the couple scores where performance dropped slightly. It could be due to non-perfect emulation, thermal related slowdowns, or slightly higher latency due to multi-channel access.

Memory Bandwidth
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 14.188GB/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 28.108GB/s

Cache & Memory Latency
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 37.4ns
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 38.0ns

Cache Bandwidth
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 127.001GB/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 152.935GB/s

Overall Memory Score
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 0.92kPT
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 1.22kPT

Spectacular memory performance increase!

Video Shader Compute
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 135.37MPix/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 195.38MPix/s

Video Memory Bandwidth
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 12.476GB/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 19.732GB/s

Media (Audio/Video) Transcode
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 8.004MB/s
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 8.498MB/s

Overall Video Score
1x8GB Aggregated Score : 1.12kPT
2x4GB Aggregated Score : 1.51kPT

A healthy increase in integrated GPU performance as well thanks to faster RAM access!

Even though I didn't increase the total amount of memory in this laptop, it received an impressive performance boost, across the board, thanks to enabling dual-channel RAM and installing faster RAM.