ENVY 17-32XX (non-3D) questions

I had the Envy 17 3000 with Sandy Bridge, but had to send it back in, so I waited for Ivy Bridge hoping that the drop to 22nm would result in better energy efficiency, unfortunately I am quite disappointed so far from the reviews. Sandy Bridge provided enough performance, I wanted a cooler and more efficient laptop with Ivy Bridge (i.e. longer battery life and runs quieter due to less cooling needed). I was hoping to wait for Haswell now and see if it could deliver on what I see Ivy Bridge fail at and if HP would up the resolution of the screen (like the Retina display on the Macbook Pro, though it doesn't have to be that high of resolution), but my HDX16 has been running into quite a few problems and some of the components are starting to show signs of failure. So I am forced to at least start looking and getting an understanding of the new Envys and the Envy 17 32xx thread is way too long and search was not working when I tried it.


Questions:
What is the battery life of the Envy 17 Ivy Bridge i7-3610QM (non-3D)(solid estimates work too, you don't need exact measurements to answer this):
at idle?
when browsing?
when gaming or another intensive task?

How hot does the laptop run and how often and loud are the fans when they kick in?

How does the Enduro of the 7850m work and are there any issues at this time?

What other issues plague the non-3D at this time (I know the 17 3D has some issues)?


I would appreciate multiple responses especially to the battery life one, so I can get an idea of the variance between different Envy 17s on this.

Thanks Everyone

 

These have mostly been answered before in other posts, but I'll answer again, so you've got a clear answer.

Battery Life:

• Idle: no clue - my power plans are set to sleep after a few minutes.
• Browsing: almost six hours.
• Streaming Hulu: four to five hours.
• Gaming: I wouldn't know.

Take those with a grain of salt. I have tweaked my power plans, so that my battery saver plan forces all applications to use integrated graphics only (there's a setting in Control Panel's power settings). I'm also running at about 30% brightness.

Heat:
Not hot at all. Only warm, even after hours of gaming. Also, the CPU and GPU are located right in front of the screen, on the right half of the chassis, so the heat is far away from your hands, and the exhaust is blowing away from you. In fact, the exhaust that vents directly in front of the screen is only moderately warm.

Fans:
There are two dedicated fans: one for CPU, one for GPU.
When they're really being pushed, I wish they were a little quieter, but they're certainly not like a jet engine taking off. They're ok - not ideal, but not bad enough to complain about, imo.

Enduro:
I miss the solution they used on the 3000 series, where you could go into BIOS and force it to use Intel HD graphics on battery, and Dedicated Graphics on AC power. That would be perfect, IMO.
As it stands, out of the box, Enduro will automatically know to use dedicated graphics for most games, because AMD retains a list of recognized apps. For unrecognized apps, Enduro makes a guess as to what is needed and stores that preference for the future.
Alternatively, you can go into your AMD options and tell it to ask you every time you run a new program. That's how I have mine set. For certain programs, like games, it automatically knows, so it doesn't ask. But for lots of little apps, it pops up and asks me what to use. Again, the popup system is optional; you can just trust it to automatically know, and fix it app-by-app if it messes up.
And remember, there is an option in the power settings, where you can force it to use Intel HD graphics on battery, regardless of what Enduro says. So, even though I have my games and Photoshop and Adobe Premiere set to use Dedicated graphics, they would default to Intel HD if I were to run them on battery. And, to be clear, you can force it to only use Intel HD graphics on battery, but you cannot force it to use dedicated graphics ever.

That brings me to an interesting point; before I knew that there was a power plan setting to force integrated graphics, I accidentally left Photoshop open while I was on battery the first time ever, and I was wondering why my battery was falling so rapidly. It's cuz Photoshop was on the Radeon card, and even though it was sitting idle in the background, it was still sucking battery. I'd estimate battery would have died within two to three hours.

Other issues - I'm not really hearing of any defects or failures, just some people being picky about some of the finer details of the specs that don't make it onto HP's advertised spec sheets. There are some power users who are unhappy that one of the HDD bays only runs at 3GB/s, but that's for a good reason. The chipset for this laptop only supports two 6GB/s ports. One of those hi-speed ports is for HDD Bay 1, and the other is for the mSATA slot, which is exclusively for smaller SSDs - the kind you would find in an Ultrabook. A lot of people are buying the newest, fastest mSATA drives (cuz most mSATA SSDs are laughably slow), and using them as a SSD boot drive, so they can use both of the 2.5" HDD bays for full size disks. Just remember, one 2.5" bay is hi-speed 6GB/s (SATA-III), and the other is 3GB/s (SATA-II speeds). The one toward the outside of the machine is the faster one, and the one toward the inside of the machine is the slower one.

For reference, I've got a 3610QM, 8GB RAM, and the 750GB Hybrid Drive.

 

Thank You for the reply I appreciate it. I spent a few hours in other threads trying to find the answers, but it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I planned on getting a SATA III MSATA SSD 128GB online and 16GB of 1600mhz 1.35v (a little more efficient than normal 1600mhz ram) ram. Besides the 750GB hybrid that comes with the laptop, my current HDX16 has a 750GB 7200rpm drive that I self upgraded it to which would go into the second 2.5in bay of the Envy.

I appreciate the passing of the knowledge of the 7850m also, the 7690m XT was quite a bit different in usage when I had the Envy before. I wonder how the new ZeroCore technology will increase in efficiency with new drivers just as the Enduro becomes more capable from driver updates and more controls within the updated Catalyst Control Center versions to come.

Maybe Intel will eventually release a more efficient version of it's quad core i7 that can operate at lower voltages than the current ones do (Sandy Bridge could operate as low as 800mhz, whereas Ivy Bridge can only operate as low as 1200mhz, this is part of where Ivy Bridge sacrifices the efficiency at idle). I think the new 22nm process has quite a learning curve for Intel especially with adding the 3D transistor tech in. Just as the i7-2670QM replaced the i7-2630QM, I imagine that the i7-3610QM will get a new replacement in the lineup that operates more efficiently at idle.

With the dedicated MSATA drive, I was able to pull off 6 hours of browsing on the 3D Envy 3000CTO, hopefully I can pull a little more with a similar setup on the non-3D Envy 3200CTO