ENVY series cooling + gaming-ability?

Can any ENVY owners (any model is fine), comment on the cooling system, hardware temperatures, physical temperatures, etc.? And if anyone knows about the cooling system/features/vents for the ENVY 14, please advise.

Also, please compare ENVY's gamingability to the m11x, MSI GE600 or MSI GX640, if possible.

Thanks in advance!

 

Yes it can run SC2 on ultra, yay

 

The Envy 14 will run Starcraft on ultra if that's what your looking for. The graphics performance of the Envy will be a tad better than that of the m11x and a tad under the MSI GE600 [but that can be fixed with a little overclocking :wink:]. The GX640 blows the Envy 14 out of the water however graphics wise and can max out any game on the market.

The Envy 15 is more powerful than all you listed save the GX640 in terms of gaming by a considerable margin.

The m11x I hear keeps within reasonable temperatures but the fans do kick in pretty fast. The Envy 15 [with i5 processor] stays cool pretty much all the time. To heat that thing up you really have to try. The i7 variant gets warm if you push it but stays within reasonable levels under normal use. The MSI GX640 runs quite hot, as there is only one fan cooling the whole thing. Doing small tasks it is manageable on the lap and palmrests stay fine to touch. However while gaming the palmrests become warm, and putting it on your lap is a no go.

Info about the Envy 14:

Specs in my sig, 5.25 lbs, 1.1 inches thin, 5-6 hours of battery life, very good screen, beats audio [very good laptop speakers].

 

The Envy 15 (4830HD variant) which I own gets good temps, max ever gotten is 91C under full load while rendering, when teh fans kick in, they get somewhat loud, but control the temps in a few seconds literally. From 91C under full load, once the render was done, temps dropped to ~70C in a matter of seconds and went down to the ~50C in a few minutes.
Does that help?

Gaming-wise, I am no gamer but, I can run some old games on the WUXGA with everything maxed out and get good framerates out of my 128bit DDR3 GPU.

 

The MSI GX640 has a 5850 driving a 1680x1050 display, so If your primary concern is gaming the MSI will be a way better choice.

I wanted a machine for programing and photo editing that could also game, so Envy 15 with its 1920x1080 display was the better choice for me. I care way more about game play than eye candy and have no problem playing at non-native screen resolution. I only play RPG's and the Civilization and Total War series, so I don't need hard core gaming capabilities. The Envy is working out just fine for this.

After a three hour gaming session my CPU core temps were 56c and 57c and the GPU was 63c, so the internal components in the second generation i5 Envy 15 are clearly cooled very well. The body itself does get pretty warm, though not nearly as hot as dell XPS or 15/17 inch mac book pro from what I understand.

 

Anyone play Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on any Envy? How's that?

 

The Envy line just looks much better than the MSI GX640.

 

My athlon x2 2.6ghz desktop part can handle BC2 so there deff wont be a CPU bottleneck (desktop athlon <<<<< mobile i5).

As for the 5830, notebookcheck really has nothing on that part, but if you look here
Notebookcheck: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650
the 5650 can handle most games around medium detail, even crysis is playable at low, so I think its a fair assumption that the 5830 will give you reasonable gmaing performance.

 

Battlefield plays nearly maxed out on my envy 15, Just turn shadows to the lowest setting and it plays at full hd at 45-55 fps

 

My athlon x2 2.6ghz desktop part can handle BC2 so there deff wont be a CPU bottleneck (desktop athlon <<<<< mobile i5).

As for the 5830, notebookcheck really has nothing on that part, but if you look here
Notebookcheck: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650
the 5650 can handle most games around medium detail, even crysis is playable at low, so I think its a fair assumption that the 5830 will give you reasonable gmaing performance.

 

Just checked the PCSX2 forums for system requirements, and it looks like even the ENVY will run games well. WOOHOO. SC on ultra and Ps2 games woohoo!

Thanks guys for the support over the months. Can't wait till this bad boy hits the states, and hopefully at $1g for the i5+5650 combo.

 

Does the ENVY 14 have 1 or 2 fans?

 

Should have 2. The 15 has 3.

 

I just received my Dell Stuido Xps 16 yesterday, and it runs WoW and oblivion fine, but after playing BF: BC2 for about 15 minutes, the system just throttles like crazy and the game becomes unplayable. I will be returning the system, but I'm curious if the envy 14 would be a good alternative to switch to?

On my i7 processor, my temps reach the high 80s when the system starts to throttle. Will the envy 14 be able to handle games like bad company 2 without throttling?

 

If your running on AC power, there probably will not be any throttling issues.

 

I still don't understand what "throttling" means? By now though, I do understand it's a negative thing. But what exactly is it, and what causes it?

 

when your gpu starts to get really hot, the drivers on your computer "throttles" or forces the gpu to slow down. think of a queue of people in a line going through a gate. instead of having people go through as fast as possible, some higher authority forces people to go through a 1 person per minute to maintain order. that's what the driver is doing to the gpu. it's implemented to protect a gpu from burning out.

 

So how do you protect from the GPU throttling? Can you adjust the BIOS so that it notifies you when it gets to a certain heat level? Or can you just use a laptop cooler to keep going without the "throttling" happening?

 

i cant answer your first question, but from personal experience, a laptop cooler will reduce the occurrence of throttling. i have a crappy 8400m gpu that i push to run sc2 and mass effect 2. before i bought a laptop cooler, those games were unplayable 50% of the time due to graphics lag from gpu throttling. afterwards, those games ran smoothly 90% of the time.

 

Laptop cooler will be purchased, regardless of whether I buy a GX640 or ENVY14. I've already begun to give up on the 3820TG which has "superior cooling," cuz I dont think it'll be avialable with a 520/540M in the US...

 

Envy 15 running WOW prefectly fine. I played with it for 10 hrs straight w/o any issue. It does get a tad warm at the palm rest. I do also have a notebook cooler at the bottom just for the sake of having one.

 

In case you were wondering, the boost from the 450 to the 520 in terms of gaming performance is absolutely mediocre at best. I think it was like a 5% difference in pcmark vantage - the bottleneck, at least with the 5650, is gonna be gfx, not cpu so long as there is an i5 involved.

 

One of the things to take notice of when comparing the Envy to the others is the construction. When we Envy types talk about things getting *warm* we're talking about the physical surfaces due to the fact that the case is metal (instead of plastic) and has been engineered to be essentially a giant heat sink. Thus the palm rests get warm when really pushing the machine, but as for the actual internal cpu/gpu temps, they are substantially lower than almost any competing unit. The Envy 15 has two fans on the cpu and one for the gpu, a better fan deployment than anything else out there. However, the 5850/5870 WILL substantially outperform the 5830 in the most demanding of games first because of the low 128 bit interface which relies upon the fast GDD5 mem on the 5850 and 5870 to gain sufficient bandwidth. The 5830 is using the much slower gdd3.

I would strongly suggest you get your hands on your main candidates before you buy. There is a BIG difference in the general look and feel of the units you mention.

good lluck

seer

 

I've played BFBC2 for hours on my Envy 15. Sadly, I had to bump the resolution down to 1280x720 with med-low settings to get perfectly smooth gameplay. If you're okay with some choppiness, you can up the res/settings.

 

So the internal parts remain under acceptable temperatures when gaming and such? The outside will just get warm, but won't be hot?

 

Define "perfectly smooth". Many play BFBC2 on max res with pretty good settings as long as shadows are set to the lowest setting. Your 5830 seems pretty weak.

 

While we're talking about cooling, how about we talk about some top quality options not lapdesks and cooling pads that are Envy14-friendly? I plan to buy one so that I can always use my laptop in bed and whatnot without worrying that the covers are going to block the vents.

FrozenCPU has a lot of nice models, though some can be pricey, especially the metal-surface ones. Some even offer additional USB ports and have powered fans. However, we need to be sure that the fan direction is compatible with the laptop - sometimes these coolers can blow air into an exhaust vent, for instance.

 

As I've posted in the other thread, the i5-430M+5650 seems to handle PCSX2 quite nicely. And in some other related research, there are videos of Dolphin running well too, with similar specs, if not lower specs.

Thus, the ENVY14 shall be the one Only question now, is whether or not to get max power out of the 520/540M, and whether that upgrade is worth it for $150tops.

 

Indeed. I will be getting this as well. Not sure if it'll be when I get refunded for my dell that I'm returning or when its released though.