New Lab Hardware: HP Laptop, Samsung Galaxy S8 and More

We’ve added a bit more hardware to our ever-expanding QA lab inventory this month, including a refurbished HP laptop, a Samsung Galaxy S8 phone and some new monitors.

The S8 is a no-brainer (we actually picked it up a while back), since it represents one of the hottest phones on the market right now.

The HP laptop is interesting, especially for testing products that require DirectX 11 hardware support. It’s a Pavilion dv6t model, which uses an older implementation of switchable graphics technology. Not only are these older solutions prone to only using the low-power Intel graphics chip (an HD Graphics 3000) regardless of application demands, this particular system is only DirectX 11-compatible when the AMD Radeon HD 7690 GPU is engaged, making it an interesting hardware edge case for applications with strict DirectX requirements.

The monitors we picked up this month are also interesting – a 29” gaming ultra-widescreen and a regular UHD 4K 24” display. Both give us more flexibility in testing super-widescreen aspect ratios and high-definition displays across a wider range of GPUs (most of our previous 4K displays were tethered to all-in-ones or laptops).

We’ll keep adding hardware to our testing inventory as we always do – check back here periodically if you are interested in how we are constantly expanding our capabilities, or contact us if you have any questions about our hardware inventory or are interested in soliciting our help with a project.