*HP EliteBook 8540w Owners Lounge!*

hmm, that's bad news :-(

i intend to order the i7-620 + 1920x1080 + 8cell 68 Whr

=> can anyone indicate an average autonomy for this config, in standard desktop usage (internet + office) ?

thanks
anthony

 

Only the Arrandales (i5 series and i7 620) have integrated graphics, the Clarksfield (quadcore i7) does not.
The whole Elitebook xx40 lineup does not have switchable graphics.

I noticed another problem: the sound of my headphone output is broken. It sounds like an equalizer that boosts high and lowers low frequencies. Anyone having the same issue?

 

sorry to interfere on the previous question about the sound being broken, but i have a strange probleme in my buying phase, which i hope you can explain :
i've just asked the dealer for a price decrease, which he did by replacing the " 68 Whr long life" battery by a " 73 Whr" battery !

how can a 73 Whr be cheaper than the 68 Whr ???

and what does this "long life" mean, for the 68 Whr ?
to me, it sounds more like a "marketing data", than a technical one
as far as i know, the more the Whr, the longer the batter life, and that's all !?!

thanks for your explanations

anthony

 

For my 8540w i7 720qm quadro fx1800 Full HD my 8cell 68whr for internet (wifi on) and office and 3/4 brightness lasts about 2h50min.

The 68whr battery has a 3year waranty or 1000 cycles of charching! If during this time the battery has a charge less of 80% they change it (check HP site for full terms and conditions).

 

Thank you for very nice review! Would you please run the Furmark + Prime95 stress test?

 

I can confirm that (lasted only ~2:15 for me but I did a slight bit of video encoding while surfing, 2:50 seems reasonable).

 

thanks for these explanations
now i understand that "long life" doesn't mean that the battery lasts longer in terms of PC autonomy, but in nb of discharge/charge cycles ...
this makes sense

what is weird, however, is that on the quicspecs of the 8540w, they list both batteries, but don't explain this at all ...
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13529_na/13529_na.HTML#Technical%20Specifications

meanwhile, my dealer has provided me with the refs of the 2 batteries :
- 73 Whr : NU487AV
- 68 Whr "Long Life" : WE483AV

now i've got to investigate on the 2 refs ...

cheers
anthony

 

I tried some more GTA 4 today and it seems like the 720qm is not ideal after all. Although the game is playable the framerate barely reaches 30 (according to fraps). Lowering the resolution to 800x600 and setting all GPU-details to "low" boosted the indoor framerate to 50+ but made little difference while driving in the city (~32 fps compared to ~27 fps at 1280x720 and high settings), which proves that the 1800M is not to blame but the 720qm.
The benchmark reported 33 fps for 1440x900 at high but it seems that the benchmark does not represent the game realistically.

Apparently we'll need to wait for the next generation of laptop CPUs to play GTA 4 at solid 30+ fps.

EDIT: Has someone here tried his headphone output yet? Mine sounds wrong (as described above).

How loud is your power adapter? I already mentioned a few pages back that mine makes loud, high-frequency "frying" sounds. I noticed that it only makes those sounds when my 8540w is idle, under load it just makes quiet, low-frequency sounds that sound "normal".
At the moment I'm sitting at my desk with my 8540w on it and the power adapter BEHIND THE DESK and I can still hear those high-frequency sounds clearly. How loud is yours?

 

I can attest that my 90w power adapter is silent/ not hearable over laptop. And the headphone port is a bit wowed sounding. As in it sounds ok but something is missing. I feel it's optimized for comp speakers or something

 

I'd go for the i7 720 because of the 4 Ram sockets. The i7-620 only has 2 sockets so upgrading to 8GB will be more expensive. After notebookcheck the i7-620 consumes more power than the i5 models, even though both have a TDP of 35W, so under light use it will consume almost the same power as a lower clocked quad core.

Sad, I played GTA IV on my Precision M6400 with a Q9100 and Quadro FX 3600 with 4c 2,26GHz without problems. But the CPU was the limiting part, because I could play in WUXGA and WXGA with almost the same fps.

 

yea im suprised this issue applies to the quad cores. i had this problem in my duo cores and it only happens in the car. but the benchmarks says at best for me 29fps with my 770m on 720p

a guy has responded to this saying on hes m6300 he has no probs and i believe that cos i saw a video on youtube using the same laptop on max res and it was perfect.
it cant be graphics to a degree cos the game is cpu dependant.
maybe its cos its the new 1st i7 cores. and a new generation will be better. or maybe if you keep it on turbo boost permanetly whilst playing to see if this is still the case.

 

It might be b/c GTA IV isn't really multicore optimized (the 720QM uses 8 threads).

 

Judging by the times that the others got, it seems that the video card and the quad core processor have a significant impact. Using internet + photoshop + MS office I get 3 hours 40 minutes on 100% brightness.

 

What framerate did you get on the Q9100?

 

about the headphone jack...i found a fix
1. Go to the sound icon on the task bar (near the bottom right of the screen).
2. Click the sound Icon, then above the volume slider click the laptop icon (the one that looks like a laptop playing some music)
3. Go to enhancements, and run Room Correction, it makes it loads better (mess with them as much as you would like.)

This will make the music sound better (if done correctly).

 

With patch 1.0.3 I got between 40 and 60fps.

 

hey mmukalian: funny that I think exactly the opposite when I see the USA models and the available permutations. PLease also consider that HP prices here in Austria are over-the-top: the WD930EA costs $3.400 (street price, not list!!!). This is just the dual core CPU (620M), but at least it features the 1920 display with 8GB of RAM, Nvidia1800M and a blue-ray drive.

 

@SapienZ: thanks a LOT for this statement, really helpfull for my decision.

 

Here in Europe (Slovenia) we are missing Quad core configurations and more configurations with freedos...

 

Yes, same here just over the border in Austria: no Quadcores at all.

 

You were on the right path. Going to that tab and ticking the top checkbox that disables all "enhancements" did it for me, it sounds neutral now.

 

you need to explain to me what u mean? (sorry you lost me) cos this game is recommended/optimized specially for quad core.

All i no is that when it came out the quads that did well was the old quads. then the new quads (i7) came out but it should be better. unless its cos its just using stock speeds 1.6ghz rather than when its turbo boosted whilst playing why the low performance.
thats the only thing i can think of but i dont own a i7 laptop yet to work out why. but when i do ill know exactly then having tried it already on duo core.

im really loving the hp notebooks. but right about now im more pushed on the sager np8690 with ati 5870. keyboard is similar, same size screen etc. its just missing the 2nd mouse on keyboard which is key for me.
but i cant afford it yet so i got time to wait for a m5800 perfomance on the 8540w.....if it ever makes it.

 

On Slovenian hp site is one model marked as "new" (incoming) and it is quad 720qm, 8gb, 500gb, fx880, price unknown...

 

Since GTA 4 really uses more then two threads turbo boost doesn't kick in, it only makes a big difference for dual or single threaded games where the CPU can turn off some cores and boost the other ones.

 

yes, i already knew that only the quad configs have 4 memory slots
but the 720QM is quite expensive !!

hmm , interesting
can you give me an url showing explaining this ..?

thanks
anthony

 

There was a mistake by notebookcheck. i7-620 consumes almost the same power as the i5-540. The German review is already fixed, here are the results:

 

The power is still significantly higher depending on screen size. At idle it's 1-5 W more, which can be a lot for a smaller notebook (say X201 and even the 8440p), though the contribution might not be as noticeable on this system.

 

Here are some results from notebookcheck for GTA IV and the other i7 cpus:



Not much of a difference, all settings seem to be very playable, but they tested them with a GeForce 280m. Did you use the newes patches and the GTA IV driver from NVidia?

 

which program you use to create this statistics mate??

 

You can use Excel

 

I used the latest official driver (197.16) and the GTA4 update 5 (update 6 has a new, prettier shadow system that butchers performance).
Notebookcheck made this graph based on the GTA4 benchmark tool which does not represent the actual gameplay. The same settings that give me ~28 fps ingame return 44 fps with the benchmark, so the benchmark reports ~50% more performance. It feels like the benchmark is less CPU dependent then the actual game.

Again: The GTA IV benchmark is bulls**t

Do you remember how you measured those framerates?

 

I used FRAPS during gameplay. Before the patches I got around 20fps outside, no matter what grafic settings I used. Later with the patches and newer grafic drivers it ran well. While driving with a car I got some hickups when I got in a new area but it still ran smooth (can't remember the exakt fps).

So 4x 2,26GHz seem the minimum requirements, the 128 shader of the FX 3800 seem to be more than enough. Unfortunately the i7-720 can only use 1,73 GHz on 4 cores. Well I will try GTA IV on my 8540w on Sunday. Maybe we can get it tweaked to run smooth on it.

Edit: Found another test where the i7-720 performed better than an Q9000... strange but promising:

 

Reading notebookcheck tests, i've realized that you're right : the 620 doesn't seem to be worth the extra W consumption !

but i haven't changed for a 720QM (too expensive) !
i've rather downgraded to an i5-540, and the delta in money will be used to buy a HP Care Pack 7868 (4 years pick and return)

i'm about to finalize my order, just waiting for another quotation from another dealer ...

thanks again
anthony

 

I just did a GTA 4 benchmark session with GPU-Z and TMonitor64 logging the GPU/CPU activity. It appears the running the game on high settings is limited by the 1800M after all.
Since lowering textures, reflections, renderer and shadow settings made little difference I assumed that the CPU was to blame because resolution and draw distance had a greater effect (and are CPU dependent according to the in-game info). It appears that those settings also demand a lot from the GPU.
The TMonitor64 log says that the sometimes cores were downclocked while gaming by SpeedStep while the GPU-Z log reveals (almost) constant 97-99% of usage.

 

Any news about ATI FirePro M5800 ?

 

to intoxicate saying "Edit: Found another test where the i7-720 performed better than an Q9000... strange but promising:"

in fairness the grpahics was stacked up against q9000 160m vs i7 720m 260m. the graphics is in favour. im no the game is cpu based. but all the same graphics are also needed.

 

If you're customizing the thing, you might want to make sure you can add on-site service later, in case you change your mind. With my laptop, I made the mistake of not getting on-site, and then later regretted it -- and HP's care-pack lookup tool (when it even feels like showing the "choose your model" part of the page) shows nothing for my base model (KW950AV): www.hp.com/go/lookuptool

For me, the "lookup tool" is completely broken -- it doesn't let you choose a model, and then errors out when you fail to specify the "model" parameter (try "select all" on the error page, and you'll see the details).
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.hp.com/go/lookuptool

 

i finally obtained U7868 Care Pack, which corresponds to an extension of base warranty to 4 years, + onsite pick up & return
FYI, i found a list of HP care packs here :
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ie/e...57-64295-3955549-3955549-4096175-4134071.html

i completely agree !
see what the lookup tool tells me when i look for HW support services :
This functionality is currently unavailable. Please try again later

anthony

 

just a thought while waiting: does one still partition a brand new 500GB disk into two or more drives (boot/data), or is it more common nowadays to just leave it all in one block?
My last new Installation was 5 years ago with FOUR partitions on my laptop, which is too much (I thought the backup was easier back then), but would you create a D: Drive with, say, 350GB with your new 8540w/500GB?
thanks.

 

My personal approach:
1) estimate disk space, required for system and progz (e.g. 100 GB) and create an ntfs partition "C:"

2) create an unformatted dummy partition (e.g. 100 GB) without drive letter

3) use the remaining space for data-partition, ntfs, "D:"

4) delete dummy partition.

Depending on accuracy of your estimation, either "C:" or "D:" will be cramped as first one year later. You can then use the free space between both partitions to extend the overcrowded one. This operation takes only a few minutes.

Edit: My Laptop will be shipped tomorrow. Yahhoo!

 

This maybe a dumb question but doesn't this laptop have four slots for ram?
I see two of them, one under the keyboard and one on the bottom under the cover. Where are the other two slots located?

 

Could anyone owning 8540w make a video like this one for the display viewing angles ?

 

Quad core configurations have 4 slots. Two of them are under keyboard (stacked) and two od them are on the bottom under the cover.
Duo core configurations have only 2 slots (don't have "connectors" for rams).

 

i have a question about this interesting approach which i had never thought of.

let's say the dummy partition is 100 GB :

=> due to its "smaller" size, are there any performance benefits to expect when first creating a 100 GB system partition, and then later extending it to 200 by merging it with the dummy partition, rather than directly choose to create a 200 GB system partition ?

=> Or is it simply a way to keep the ability to later extend either the system or the data partition, depending on which partition first runs out of space ?

thanks

anthony

 

So for the video request...I'll take one if you want...anything other than viewing angles, and give me a picture to show in the video.

As for pictures...i took a few (of the hardware and a bit of the software included).

you can find them here: http://popegame.com/LaptopReview/

I will post a review sometime this week (aka explanation of pictures and other stuff).

Somebody asked me to run a stress test, but I do not want to run one, because their is a possibility (however small) that I could damage the laptop.

The laptop I have has windows running on a ssd (intel x25-m 80GB) which is in a caddy from the newmodeus or w/e that site is called.

 

To everybody having problems with the headphone output: this is NOT normal. You should have the STacSV (Audio service) from IDT drivers running. This tool detects whether a jack is present and sets the equalizer to either flat or a very bad low+high boost when on speaker.
If the service is not running you will be stuck in one of these configurations (and the speaker one is VERY bad).

For the angles of vision, I took a quick video with my phone. This is completely useless as I already told precisely what to expect from this screen but anyway, here it is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6ZfOW2YS4Q

The color shifting is minimal (the best on TN panels) but brightness starts to dim rather quickly. Black stays black when viewed from any side.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

Great video - it's now clear to me that this 15.6" display (considering its price) is indeed one of the best on the market. Thank You again!
Now I'm waiting for ATI FirePro M5800 to come and see the benchmarks in order to choose between it and nVidia Quadro FX 880M.

 

Thanks. Please read the description: it's the HD+ but the 1920x1080 one has exactly the same angles of vision

 

Keeping a decent amount of the disk free (say 1GB) is a good idea. Otherways the disk defragmenter will not run properly.