Envy 15 2nd Gen Benchmarks

Concidering the i5 is already throttled to LFM at 1.2Ghz (x9) when on battery I'm not sure what more you can gain by undervolting without affecting stability. I have no idea how much lower you could go.

CPUHWmon shows (intermitantly) my 540M dropping to 4.2W at idle and max under load of 15W when on battery. Considering the i7 720 idles at 15W I am happy i5's power management.

You may be able to get more of a gain by underclocking the GPU when unplugged. I played around with that a little, power play drops the GPU clocks to 99 / 199 min and 299 /299 max when on battery. I tried different setting while playing a .wmv movie file and as low as 60 / 120 seemed stable. Did not test how this impacted battery life though.

 

I forgot about the LFM, so I guess that rules out dropping the voltage there. I'm going to see if dropping the graphics clocks on battery helps without sacrificing stability.

The reason I'm trying this is because I don't think I'm getting anywhere near 3 hours like others are claiming. I don't think I'm even getting 2.5 hours with light web browsing (5-6 tabs on firefox), with low/medium brightness, wifi on, and BT off.

 

I get between 2:40 and 2:55 with real useage like you described and 3:15 just idleing. I use power saver plan and IE8, maybe firefox uses more CPU?

A couple of tweaks you may not be aware of: In power plan settings I change the 'battery reserve level' to 0, I think preset is 12% so you agin an additional 5% because it still shuts down at critical level of 7% min., change fans to passive mode on battery and you may want to change the BIOS setting for the fans from 'fans always on' to 'disabled' which makes them cycle and can be a little annoying noise wise.

Also shut off any unecessary startup programs and services that may run in the backround. Turn off / remove any USB devices (including webcam app) which will keep the USB controller poewered up.

 

You don't want your battery reserve too low... it can prevent it from automatically hibernating properly, and if you completely discharge a LiIon battery it can ruin it.

 

I use the power saving plan on battery and I have fans set to always on, that's probably an issue on battery. I wanted the fan always on because I think it's generally accepted that heat isn't good for electrical components and you want them to stay cool to extend their life. I haven't changed the reserve setting either. The only startup programs I have running are the synaptics driver, beats audio, MSSE, and CCC.

That's true too, 0% might be too low because at that point you run the risk of the laptop battery losing power before it hibernates.

 

I think you both missed the part where I mentioned that Windows power plan settings will not let you change the critical battery level to less than 7% so you have a built in 7% reserve no matter what you do therefore the 'battery reserve level' of 12 % is unecessary (you gain net of 5% capacity).

Secondly, completely discharging the lithium ion polymer battery is not possible with the ENVY (or most devices) because the system reads 'capacity' by measuring voltage (mV) and sets the 0% level where the voltage is to low to operate the system safely. This 0 % 'setpoint' is somewhere around 9VDC which is nowhere near a full discharge of the battery. This "0" point is determined by the manufacturer to be were there is not enough current left to run the maximum load that the computer may demand. The bottom line is that the 0% discharge level is very conservative and nowhere near the point of true 'full' discharge which would cause problems.

 

That makes sense. I just checked my critical battery life in the power settings and it's set to 8% by default. So the battery gains from changing that in my case will be negligible.

I might try out the laptop again with 'fans always on' option off. I didn't like how it got warm with the passive cooling but I'm wondering how much it could improve battery life.

 

One more time. There is a "Battery reserve level" setting that should be set by default to 12%, change that to 0%. Then you can drop the 'critical' level to 7% (won't let you set it lower). Instant gain of 7 - 10 minutes.

 

or you can actually do this:

Download my powercfg.txt files, then rename it to powercfg.bat. run it as Administrator and it will disable critical battery action and hibernation within windows 7/windows Vista. This file is especially useful when you are looking at SSD. hibernation allocates about 4-5gb of space on its own. I think it is a complete waste of space, if you have SSD.

what you can do with critical battery disabled is change the low battery to 1-2% and change the action to showdown. this way, it will allows you to gain another 10-20 mins from battery.

 

How does Bad Company 2 performs?
Can you post a min. and average fps (with settings)?

Thanks

 

Nothing record shattering but just an update to my old 3DMark06 benchmarking.

Got 9925 with the GPU overclocked to 560/1150.

Guess I could make a try with the gpu at 600 MHz to at least shatter the 10k mark, if it is stable enough.

(i7-720QM)

 

I can't get mark06 to work well with OCing. Vantage usually will handle 1100 for the memory but with 06 1100 setting seems to lockup and kill the laptop, grrr

 

Ah ok. I just looked at it and my reserve is set to 7%, I changed it to 0% and dropped my critical battery level to 7%.

Hopefully that helps a little.

Thanks

 

a few people asked before but got no answer yet, so I'll give it a try:
could anyone add to the gaming experiences posted on page 1? what's the best settings you can play other games at?
anything about Bioshock 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Shift and Dragon Age?

 

Thank you! I think this is exactly what I'm looking for A few questions before I run it.

1) Does it also disable (override) the 'critical battery level' which won't let you set it below 7% ?

2) Please clarify / confirm -- After running, your 'low battery level' setting becomes the point at which 'low battery action occurs ? And no critical action occurs ?

3) If I change from hybernate to shut down, what happens to data and unsaved open files, specifically say photoshop images being edited, when the 'shutdown' occurs from 'low battery action' ??

4) Once I run this will it be loaded by default for all power plans and stay active without having to rerun each startup ?

5) Is there an easy way to restore original 'default' plan ?

And finally, what if anything does enabling 'hybrid sleep' option do and does it affect how computer shuts down or just what happens when you have no activity for specified time...does it also use up large amounts of disc space ?

 

@JJB
Since I have a platter drive is your powercfg file still good to use? I honestly don't use hibernate so if that would be the only reason to NOT use it then I assume its safe but thought I'd ask.

 

Not my file. I'm waiting for the response to my questions from 'Raidenfx' before I run it.

 

1. no, it doesn't change your critical battery level %. it changes the critical battery level action. critical bettery level is hard-coded into windows 7 system for all laptops, as the system reads from your motherboard bio on the exact state of the battery and determines the % to allocate for hibernation/shutdown at "critical battery level". What my powercfg.bat do is to disable critical battery level action to nothing. thus eliminate the whole thing.

2. since no critical battery actions will occur after you run my powercfg.bat file. it is highly suggested that you set low battery life to 2-3%, and action to shutdown. this way the windows system will shutdown when it is down to 2% of battery power, instead of shutting off abruptly while you are working/gaming and losing all your information.

3. shutdown will be a forced process, it will close all open applications. I personally hates Hibernation in windows, as sometimes I have problem restoring the windows from hibernation (display driver not loaded, or some other crap). If you don't wish to use shutdown, you can turn it back to hibernation with attached .txt (rename it to bat as usual) and change low battery power setting to hibernation (hyper sleep in windows)

4. Once you have run the .bat file as Administrator. The active profile will be changed, and it will stay this way until you wish to change it in the power management setting. Thu you won't be able to enable hibernation in the power management setting. You will have to run my attached files - since it disable hibernation all together

5. Yes, I have attached another txt file to restore everything back to normal. (as always, rename it to bat and run it as administrator)

 

It doesn't matter on what type of hard drive you have. It it just more beneficial to SSD with hibernation turned off.

Hibernation reload back from cold start on SSD is about 10 secs, while cold reboot for SSD is about 7 secs. Saved 6gb of space which is about 3.75% of drive space for a 160gb SSD.

Hibernation reload back from cold start on normal HDD is about 15 secs, while cold reboot from normal HHD is about 20-25 secs. Saved 6gb of space which is about 1.2% of drive space for a 500gb normal HDD

 

Set your reserve to 2-3% at least. Letting the machine discharge too low can kill your battery, and make it fail a lot sooner than it otherwise would.

 

Did you see my post on page 46? (second paragraph)

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5939439&postcount=456

You cannot run the battery down to anywhere near a full discharge on the envy or most modern devices. When the envy shuts off, even with above posted tweaks, it is at ~9VDC with plenty of "capacity" left, just not enough to run the envy at full load.

You would need to put a load on the battery after shutdown to get it low enough to cause any problems and there is no way to do that.

 

Guess I didn't. IHBT Good info there, thanks.

 

NEW BATTERY TEST RESULTS -- FANS ALWAYS ON vs OFF

First the test setup. I have 2 envy i5-540M machines, 1 is matte screen w/ RAID0 SSD's, 4GB 1066 and factory restored to HP specs. The other one is glossy screen, dual SSD non-RAID, 8GB 1333, clean win7 install.

My intent was to test battery life with fans always on vs fans off via BIOS setting. Both were in standard 'power saver' power plan with the follow changes; battery reserve 0%, WIFI and PCI E set to max power save, BT off, HDD off 2 min, brightness 80% dim to 60% 1 min and set to never turn off or sleep. The glossy had the tweak from 'raidnfx' to bypass the 7% critical battery level (more on this later).

TIME ------- Glossy ------- Matte
Minutes ---- Fan off ------- Fan on

30 ---------- 88 % -------- 81 %
45 ---------- 79 % -------- 71 %
65 ---------- 68 % -------- 56 %
90 ---------- 55 % -------- 40 %
120 --------- 37 % -------- 19 %
136 ------------------------- Shutdown 8 % remaining
150 --------- 19 %
170 --------- Shutdown 7 % remaining

So with the fans always on it appear you lose 34 minutes of battery life. In actual use this will probably be less of a gain as the fans will operate more often if your doing anything more taxing than light web browsing.

The 'critical battery action' bypass appears not to actually work since the machine with this setting applied also died with 7% reamaining (as measured as soon as restarted with power adapter).

FYI: While testing the only program in use was IE8 with 7 tabs open. Each time the battery level was checked I also opened and reloaded each tab.

 

Let me set up my new Envy up with the new Catalyst 10.3 Drivers and I can give you a heads up with Dragon Age.

 

Don't have those but was planning on transfering a copy of my Aion game to the Envy to see how it will do if your curious.

 

Thanks for comparing the battery life with both fans on and off, JJB. That backups my hunch that I wasn't getting much more than 2 hours, if that with fans always on.

I think I'm going to change my settings to have fan always on if plugged in and passive if on battery.

 

That doesn't turn the fans off. You need to change the BIOS setting from 'fans always on' to 'disabled' to match the way I tested.

Setting fans to passive (which is default on battery) only is supposed to 'slow the processor (CPU) before increasing fan speed', I don't think this does anything in the envy's case because of the severe throttling already applied to the CPU when on battery. It definately does not turn the fans off plus it has no bearing on the GPU fan.

 

how dangerous is it to shut the fans off from the bios?

 

Not at all 'dangerous'. It just changes them from running continuously to cycling on when needed based on the temps of the CPU (~42C) & GPU (~52C).

On my i5 it does not really change the external temps of the computer but on i7 models it gets quite warm (not hot) at idle. The noise of the fans cycling on & off can be a little annoying in a quiet room because they kind of surge (rev up) during startup and then change to a constant speed until temp gets low enough to shut them down again. The more load you put on the system the more often the fans kick on.

 

I know that, I already set it back to off in bios. The weird thing is even with the fan in the power settings set to active when plugged in, the area on the palm rest directly above the CPU is now warm when before (with fan always on in bios) it was always cool to the touch. I can't feel any airflow coming out of the left side of the notebook either when before I could.

Did I miss something? I thought that setting the fan to active in the power settings would make sure that the CPU fan would always be on. Do I need to change something else?

EDIT: I just read the description under processor power management and setting the power plan to 'active' just changes it so that it'll rev up the fan instead of lowering the clock speed if the temperature of the CPU rises. Not what I was expecting, why can't they just add an option to have the fan running all the time?

I'm going to leave the bios settings to fans always on when I'm at home and disable it when I'm not, I don't like how warm it gets and the noise doesn't bother me since I don't think it's very loud.

 

interesting, and what happens when you want to play a bit, do you need to go back to the bios or do high performance settings make fans behave normally?

 

Well I only just now put a copy of Aion on my laptop. I'm running it, on the laptop, at 1280x720 for now and in the city where its busy with other players I'm getting 31-80 FPS with the avg being around 50-70. This is with no AA all effects but Shaders at max. Screen shots won't tell you much but it looks just about as purty as my desktop system



and

 

Let me try to explain this a different way.

Fans always on: All 3 fans (1 GPU and 2 CPU) run continupously whether needed or not. Normally this is at a low RPM (= low noise). When the processor(s) heat up from high performance usage the fans speed up as needed to maintain a specific predetermined maximum temperature. When the temps get below a certain point the fans slow back down to idle but never turn off. This keeps the 'idle' temps very low since the fans are cooling before the sensors would normally tell the fans to turn on.

'Fans always on > DISABLED': All 3 fans are off until the thermal sensors tell the system that it has hit a certain temp and needs some cooling, just like the thermostat in your oven or heating / air conditioning system. It appears that on the i5 series that I have this temp is ~40C on the CPU and ~50C on the GPU. When the temps drop below the 'setpoint' the fans turn off again. Therefore, in this mode the idle temps will be a little warmer than with fans always on, but in no way will it harm or shorten life etc. of the processors, they were designed to operate this way.

Both of the above modes act the same way when a large load (ie gaming) is heating up the processors. The thermal sensors have a program that varies the fan speed as needed if the temps keep rising to keep them within a safe thermal envelope (maximum temp). In tetsing with 100% loads (burn in software) on my system my CPU never exceeded 77C and the GPU (with max stable overclocking) never exceeded 72C. Both processors are designed to operate continuously at above 100C. Bottom line is the envy has a very well designed cooling system.

If you have an i7 processor the idle temps (ie left palmrest) will be significantly higher with the fans 'disabled' but in no way will it damage anything.

You figured out what the Active vs Passive cooling options in the power plan settings do in your above post, so no need to go over that again.

Hope that clears things up for you.

 

Just played BF Bad Company 2 and the graphics are stunning.
Too bad it feels pretty choppy. At some situations the FPS drops below 10. Everything on High with no AA I was able to run at 25avg prob. But as I said before in many situations the FPS drops below playable.

I've been playing at 1920x1080 with different configuration options ranging from Low to High and DX9 to DX11, but it just feels choppy in many situations regardless of settings level. DX9 seems to give you best performance. If I drop to 1024x768 the game becomes quite playable at 60fps.

 

I find that, on the Envy at least 1280 x 720 seems a good in between setting, not too taxing and pretty good looking. Will give Aion a try at 1920 and report back as to the FPS difference from my previous test.

 

ahh, new i5 envy, squeezed out a nice, stable 9185 3dmark06 on it's first overclocked run, 550/1000.

 

Has anyone figured out how to overvolt the HD 5830? Even a slight overvolt on this sucker can yield ridiculous OC potentials!

 

The bottleneck is still going to be the 128 bit memory bus not the GPU. Here is a quote from notebookcheck:

" The memory interface of the Mobility 5830 is composed out of two 64 bit wide controllers leading to a 128 bit memory bus that can access up to 1024 MB of DDR3. Because of the small bus width and the lack of GDDR5 memory, the memory performance should be the bottleneck of this card."

I've ran the 5830 up to 665Mhz stable but my memory will only go to 1130Mhz max. without crashing. I get no improvement on benchmarks with anything above 633Mhz core speeds.

 

I know that, but the thing is mine won't even hit 600/1100 without crashing. I figured it was due to low stock voltages the thing has.

 

I don't think thats the problem, remember this is only a 24W TDP GPU. During graphic intensive benchmark runs your CPU is not using much power so voltage drop shouldn't be an issue. I find better results with the AMD clock tool when I do not "set voltage" at the only choice available of .9V (not sure why it makes a difference). I assume you've tried turning off all unessecary power using devices / features before you try to max out you OC settings....

I think it's just luck as to what 'grade' of GPU you receive just like with CPU's, some are more stable and OC better than others. Also seems to be a significant variation in what the max stable memory speeds people are able get. My second envy maxes out at about 575 / 1050...

 

At least I can get 550/1100 though, but I am uncertain if it can go any higher than that in a significant manner.

 

3dmark 06 570/1075 Default settings 9891, so close yet so far hehe

 

how come you have the i7 820, i havent seen that as an option anywhere
where did you get it from?
with the laptop? or did you install yourself?
what processors can the Envy use?

 

It was an option on the US customize page:

 

Ah, nice but $700? a bit expensive???

 

HP has offered the 820 since day one in the U.S.

Since it appears you cannot access the www.shopping.hp.com U.S. website I made a .pdf of the Envy 15 configurations page which shows all the options available; View attachment HP® Official Store — Buy and Customize your ENVY 15 series PC direct from HP.pdf

Could please keep this type of question on the main threads in the future?? This is the Benchmarks thread....

 

Your so strict, LOL:laugh:

 

Good lord 700 bucks!

 

Well thats if your going from the lowest i5 cpu. If you start with an i7 720 then its a $300 price diff to go from 720QM to 820QM.

Now to get back on track, for JJB's sanity, I just tried to run mark06 at 570/1080 and she locked up

 

It looks like I can't even stabilize 600/1050. Empire: Total War keeps freezing and locking up? Is it my silicon is not god-tiered or is it a driver issue (10.3 Beta)? I know for now, my Core can't hit the godly 600.