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Review: HP Envy 17 redux

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 28th 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: gpu graphics 3d gaming hp laptop envy computer

Second time’s a charm – but the first time wasn’t bad either

This is a lot of computer for $1,600. It comes with a 120 Hz (S3D) 17-inch display, a Blu-ray player, 750 GB HDD (7200 RPM), 6 GB DDR3 (1333 MHz) system RAM, AMD HD6850M discrete GPU with 1 GB GDDR5, HDMI and an Intel i7-263QM (2.) GHz—2.9 GHz). It’s got a SATA I/O, DS memory slot, VGA and four USB 2.0 sockets. A whole lot of computer for not too much money.

It’s a complete media center that can be used for watching HD Blu ray movies, listening to music, editing videos and pictures, and playing games—serious FPS games. And the games and movies can be in 3D.

The updates to this new Envy 17 include:

• Switchable graphics (controlled by user or automatically when going on battery)
• Discrete graphics updated to Radeon 6850M;
• Added CoolSense hardware and software. The computer detects where you’re working and adjusts the cooling;
• Added Intel Wireless Display;
• Updated to HDMI 1.4;
• Added RAID 0 for dual HDD configs;

Changed Media software solution from HP MediaSmart to Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 for both 2D and 3D. (will up-convert DVD video and photos)

Added DDD’s TriDef Ignition S3D Game player as preinstalled software.

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The Envy comes with three video outputs: VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort; in fact, it’s the first notebook to offer a DisplayPort interface. The displays are driven by an AMD HD 6850M GPU with:

• Engine clock speed: 575-675 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 920-1080 GFLOPS
• Memory clock speed: 900-1000 MHz
• Memory data rate: 3.6-4.0 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 57.6-64 GB/sec

Eyefinity is enabled. You can use up to 3 external monitors­—one on HDMI, one on DisplayPort, one on VGA. It will only support 3 monitors so if you’re using 3 external you have to turn off the notebook display or use the notebook display and 2 external monitors

Equipped with a GB of DDR5 memory, HP says the machine will get up to one TFLOP of processing capability.

The system has switchable graphics. With power supply plugged into the wall the default is the discrete GPU, and when on battery it’s the integrated graphics. You can override it by right click on desktop and choose, “Configure Switchable Graphics”

Movies

To play a Blu-ray disc CyberLink requires you to down load the CyberLink BD & 3D Advisor. This is setup, and the country code protection for the HDCP copy protection.

An internet connection is required obviously (to down load the Advisor) and also to allow you to rate and post your impressions of the movie via SocialBlu, Sony’s social network gateway. You can link into your Twitter account from it. You can also skip it, which we did. The internet connection is also used by Sony to download previews of other movies, which can become pretty annoying. You can skip past most of them but you have to be careful, if you get too aggressive or impatient CyberLink Power­DVD 10 hangs and it takes the Task Manger to kill it.

You also have setup the software to allow a mouse to work with it. When you do that you get an iconic display that gives you the normal remote control functions, and you can then activate those functions by clicking on them with the now activated mouse.

When you start up CyberLink Power­DVD 10, which is a free version and comes installed on the HP Envy 17, you are invited to upgrade to PowerDVD 11 ($59.99)

Sounds good

The movies look great and sound terrific using the Beats Audio with HP Triple Bass Reflex Subwoofer. HP of course recommends Beats headphones, but since we don’t have any we used a ear-cup set of noise canceling headphones and it sounded great—unbelievably good for a PC and headphones.

HP engineering collaborated with Interscope Records to develop the headphone/line-out audio solution which consists of an audio controller with great noise performance, really good Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise (THD+N), and a wide range DAC. The notebook’s internal audio signal routing uses HP’s signal integrity techniques to eliminate low level noise typically experienced with PC audio, the listening experience is nothing short of amazing.

Click on the arrow in the notification area (lower right portion of screen) you should see a red circle with the b (Beats logo) as one of the icons. Double click on it to open the equalizer.

Games

To start we loaded a game, “Far Cry 2.” We set its options up for the wide screen and 120 Hz refresh. Then we launched the TriDef Ignition application and pressed the scan button, in seconds it found “Far Cry 2” and we launched it from the TriDef list. Naturally it didn’t work, TriDef doesn’t support DirectX 10 on “Fry Cry.” So we loaded “Crysis” which TriDef does support on DX 10—a better choice. It played S3D OK (with settings on medium, but at full res) but it’s an older game and so the characters didn’t look great, like cardboard cut outs. However, there was no ghosting or flicker. So then we down loaded from Steam “Battlefield Bad Company 2” which TriDef supports in DX 11. The game ran. Then we tried to get it registered in TriDef’s Ignition game launcher app—that was tricky, and had to browse through the system to give TriDef the path. Then we launched from the TriDef app and were told the game doesn’t use Dx 9, 10, or 11. But of course it does. We then found out from DDD they are still working on their Steam client. DDD is a most responsive group and within two days we had a patch for BBC2 and it worked like a charm, and looked great—it does stress the system through..

We ran Unigine on it. Even with reduced resolution to 1680 x 1050, AA off AF 4X and shaders low, it only got 10 fps, not good enough for heavy duty FPS game play. We ran “Crysis” DX 10 and got 12 fps with AA off at 1920 x 1080. Dropping the resolution to 1680 x 1050 it got to 19 fps. And with “Far Cry” we got 19 fps.

Can’t get lost

The machine comes with a huge TB HDD in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 benefits users who work with large files and want improved storage performance. As a result power users often enable RAID 0 through a lengthy & complex process to achieve the best performance; the ENVY17 enables RAID 0 right out of the box.

When a system is configured with RAID 0, the user sees a single large storage drive rather than two smaller drives. Even though the user sees only one drive, RAID 0 data is distributed across both drives. This allows data, especially large files, to be read faster, because data is read simultaneously from both drives.

What do we think?

You could make this machine your entire entertainment center. With its Blu-ray player, large 17.3-inch, 1920 x 1080 120 Hz screen, Beats sound system; it’s got everything one would need. It’s not a great game machine but it’s got lots of compute power for productivity applications and web surfing, and a comfortable keypad and wrist rest.