Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
I have in front of me a brand new 2100, I7-2620, 8G, mobile 6850. Nice machine, but sadly it's for a client who'll use it occasionally for CAD and Open GL stuff. I'm exercising it (g), to set the thermal paste and get past any early failures (none so far). I've got some questions...
o Thermals. I got some funnies until I flashed BIOS to v.15. Now the performance is consistent and smooth, with good autoswitch between graphics cards battery-AC, and decent frame rates. It still DOES, however, limit to a rather low overall power. Let me describe a typical session (CoolSense2 off), with Kill-a-Watt power figures and SIW sensor temps, CPU-Z 1.57 clockings....
o Off 0W
o Boot 40-60W
o Noodle around in business apps, 45-60W, all chips at 58-62C.
o FurMark 1.65, in "cooking" mode and Prime 95, in heating mode.. 75-95W All chip temps ramp up smoothly over 1 minute to about 95C, then power limits, multipliers go down, cores throttle to 800, fans scream, and input power settles at 70W.
o Stop all apps, and everything settles back to idle, but it takes 3-4 minutes.
To, me, this means the thermals are laptop-form factor-limited and you could game only in one-minute slices (g). Hey, it's a laptop! But you could play Blu-rays all day, etc.
Question: This machine seems to have a 1.5G spindle HD as an Intel "Raid 0" device. It isn't really RAID 0, is it? Yikes.
Comments: VERY good screen, near Apple-quality. Island keyboard - better than I expected, but I'd put two rubber erasers under the back to tilt it forward a bit. All ports and peripherals seem to work very smoothly. Audio pretty decent, pretty loud.
Envy 17-2100 Catchup
Discussion in 'HP' started by fhaber, Jun 6, 2011.
