*HP ENVY 14 (1XXX series) Owners Lounge, Part 1*

upgradeable

 

If you're paying $900 for an LCD you might as well make the jump to a 27" Dell U2711 with a 2560x1440 rez or go for a 30" with a 2560x1600 rez. You can get a very good 24" 1920x1200 IPS panel for $500 or less. No reason to overpay for an Apple monitor.

 

There's speculation both ways, and both possibilities have been confirmed by HP reps. The going theory seems to be that the CPU is placed beneath the GPU, so the GPU must be removed to service the CPU, though that seems like it would run very hot.

Be aware that the Envy 14 won't game too well on any of those resolutions - the 5650 will be adequate at 1600x900, but it'll be likely to slow down significantly on higher resolutions.

 

Especially if you go refurb you could get a professional quality, calibratable, monitor for that price:

LaCie 324 LCD 24" Monitor 1920x1200 Widescreen DVI HDMI - eBay (item 180525617476 end time Jul-05-10 22:18:04 PDT)

 

Hey prospective and current Envy 14 owners,

The NBR Envy 14 driver thread is now up! This should be helpful for those of you who have done or are doing clean installations. Please let me know in the driver thread if there are concerns and/or questions. Also be sure to post your driver experiences there!

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...027-drivers-hp-envy-14-intel.html#post6415517

 

Will the 5650 handle most games at full resolution?
I want to play Aion, Left4Dead 2, Dead Rising 2 (upcoming), Sim 3, etc. Nothing like Crysis.

 

I think it will handle those fine, there was a 5650 benchmark page somewhere that had a bunch of games and the min,max,average fps on each setting and most were playable on high or medium if it was a really graphically demanding game. I just don't remember where that was,lol. Crysis is even playable on medium, which is still pretty nice, so everything (except possibly Metro 2033) will probably play on a decent setting.

edit: here it is, don't know if all the games you asked about are there, but it should give you a good idea of its performance.

 

Favorited and thanks.

 

On that drivers page, there's a driver for USB 3.0. Does that mean E14 has a USB 3.0 port?

Also, I'm not sure, but does the HP have a esata/usb port?

 

grrr I am trying to order my envy14 right now, but I got an error....

"Thank you for your order.

We regret that we cannot process it because the financial institution that issued the following credit card did not authorize this purchase:"

Then it says to call them from 8am to 11am =[ What could to problem be?

 

Let me look into the documentation to make sure that there is USB 3.0 support. I'll reply back when I can confirm or deny this. I'll also make appropriate changes to the driver thread if necessary.

 

Some reps have claimed that quad-core Envy 14's have a USB 3.0 port, but it's not necessarily confirmed.

All E14's have one combined esata/usb port.

 

Man, I'm getting close to pulling the trig on this. But I think I'm gonna wait till "July 20th" passes. ( I still don't understand the significance of that date, cuz school's out now, and summer sessions for college students wouldve started already ). Or do you mean back to school shopping starts around that time?

I guess I gotta wait till the 27th anyway for SC2's release.

 

So I'm confused. Do we still get time to buy a warranty through HP if we purchase through Amazon?? Do we still get 21 days to return if we purchase through Amazon?? Because if we don't get these things, the Amazon deal is nowhere near worth it...

 

Ugh ok, so HP rejected my order, but still took my money! They put a hold on my account for $1144.73. I called my bank and they say that I should just call HP and confirm that I have a valid order, and if they say I dont, then the hold will expire and I'll get my money back by friday night. What a pain in the ....

I hope they do take my order, because if they dont, I'll only get my money back friday night, and I cant purchase until that money is back in my account.

Has anyone else ran into this kind of problem with HP?

 

One person argued it's to sucker potential students into paying full price sans coupon, though that would be true only if students are buying before July 20th and are fully aware of HP's infamously slow build time at product launches.


But I would think it would be better to offer generous coupons to jump on a wave of pent-up demand as students don't traditionally grow too many money trees in their backyard. Plus let's not forget that a certain fruit-named company's student promotion provides competition...

 

I had my first order declined, so I just reordered. I still have ~$1375 on hold in my account. Fortunately, I made a big transfer a couple days before I ordered, so I had plenty of headroom to reorder. I had assumed that I hadn't been charged the first time, so I didn't even check my account until a Dutch guy mentioned that he had been declined for trying to use a Dutch card on the US site, but they had still billed him.

So yeah, at least a couple of us have been hit with this loopy policy.

 

ugh that sucks, now I am going to have to wait til friday night to order! Hp better make this up to me somehow...

 

I believe all you get from HP when you buy from Amazon.com is their 1-year warranty until you upgrade it separately from HP's website:

Services | HP Official Store

Note that the HP Envy 14 warranties are currently discounted. The 3-year standard+accidental which is normally $399.99 is now going for $329.99. $70 saved. Too bad it has to be bought during the time the Envy's standard 1-year warranty is active, otherwise I would've scooped it up. Requirements:

Link

 

There are some caveats to replacing the CPU, you have to make sure the HSF assy is sufficient and that the chipset and bios supports the chip, and you must buy the replacement CPU from HP if you don't want to void your warranty. I got it confirmed from a HP envy service technician in the USA that consulted the service manual and schematics and with the team lead just to make 100% sure, this was not a clueless salesperson or tier1 support rep from india like other people have been asking questions to. They are going to call me back about the usb 3.0 rumor when they get more information.

Questions for justinkw1:
Where do you see that the e14 is using a "NEC Electronics USB 3.0 Host Controller"?

What documentation are you looking into? Do you have a user manual or service manual for the e14? Please post it if so.

 

I think we determined that you must also have it installed by an HP-certified technician. If it's like any modern processor I've seen, it's not really necessary for any other reason than to maintain the validity of the warranty, since they're very easy to replace.

 

This sounds like a very good deal. I'm still torn between ordering from HP directly and Amazon.de. Amazon has a base price of ~EUR 1255 for the Envy 14. I do have an Amazon VISA Card however, which means that from ordering the Envy 14 there I'd get ~EUR 25 worth of coupons AND additonal 12 months of warranty through Amazon.de.

Decisions, decisions...

 

From the product page, there only seems to be USB 2.0 ports on the Envy 14. Apologies if I had said documentation; I thought there was some available but I guess not at this time. But I'm interested in seeing what tech support has to say about this. For now, I'll be removing the USB 3.0 drivers off the drivers thread.

The Envy 14 does have an eSATA/USB port however. All of this information can be found on the product page - http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...odexp/hhoslp/psg/notebooks/ENVY/ENVY14_series

 

It actually may not be a requirement to have it installed by an HP certified tech, but definitely that would be the smartest thing to have done, just to cover yourself. They said the warranty is decided on the component level. They for sure will not warrant any non HP supplied parts, so if you did install a CPU from another vendor, they said warranty of your hard drive for instance would not be affected, you just lose the warranty on your CPU.

 

Waiting (the hard part):

HP ENVY 14 customizable Notebook PC
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Core(TM) i5-520M
• 6GB DDR3 Memory
• 320GB Hard Drive (Momentus XT on order)
• SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-R/RW DL

Order in production
(Estimated to ship on July 8, 2010)

 

If you buy the E14 with similar specs to the Amazon configuration on HP's website with a student discount , the total is $1,183.49. This is less than the Amazon listing by $16.50. If we get the Bing 25% instead, then a configuration with the same specs costs approximately $986.25. If the 25% comes back, i will not hesitate.

 

True, but that education store price of $1,183.49 is before taxes. If you can avoid state taxes, all power to you.


For this California kid, it's calculated like this:


$1,183.49+$112.43(state tax)+$8(waste fee)

=$1303.43

Makes the Amazon.com pre-order cheaper by $103.44


Unfortunately, I don't want the extra HD size or 2gb of RAM if there's a possibility of a BCB promotion or coupon sometime in July that'll allow me buy the Envy with the base 320gb and 4gb of RAM for less $. Plus I don't expect Amazon to be prompt in shipping the order out and I prefer HP's return policy.

 

lol @ waste fee

But yea, mine came out to $1,144.73 after tax (NC, around 8%).

My only upgrade was to the i5 450. Hopefully HP actually got my order and didn't just take my money. I'll be calling them as soon as I wake up tomorrow to find out!

 

DAMN taxes.

 

How much cooler would the i3 370M run compared to the i5 450M? It's hard to answer right now, I know, but just any guess.

 

Both are 35W. Hard to say unless we can say anything about turboboost's effect on temps.

 

What resolution are they running it at though? Probably not 1600x900 right? I have some slight concerns of the 5650 being able to run newer games smoothly (Bad Company 2, MW2, Crysis, etc) on 1600x900 being that it has about 30% more pixels than the standard laptop screens...

 

Might explain the reason gaming notebook makers can get away with packaging low resolution screens on their notebook.

 

Yeah, if you scroll over and click the numbers it will show you what resolution it was tested on. Not 1600x900.
By the way, thanks for the reply Sdawg36.

 

That's what I was mainly concerned about. I was actually not all that displeased with the rumors that the 1366x768 screen would come base. Contrast ratio and brightness are important, but for those who don't run many multimedia programs like me, it seems sufficient. But I don't really have much experience with laptop resolutions, so...

 

I have got some more valuable information for tweekers hackers and upgraders that is not mentioned anywhere:

I was interested in the possibility of upgrading from a dualcore cpu to a quadcore (or vice versa). At first glance you might think this is technically possible, and it is, but it really isn't possible to do it in practice. -- Both systems will use the exact same motherboard, based on the intel HM55 chipset, both will use the exact same ATI 5650 card, you can verify its the same part in the service manuals, even though when ordering a CTO it shows 2 different GPU options. So far so good. HP will install a less effective HSF assy on the dualcore configs since they use a 35W chip rather than 45W, you could swap it out with a spare or mod it though so that's not a big deal, but here is the dealbreaker: when you order the computer, they will install a different VBIOS onto the GPU based on what CPU you order, and this will not be flash upgradeable by the end user. I was hoping the difference was only a different pre-loaded driver, too bad. *edit here* actually... the really brave among us might be able to find the rom images for doing this themselves, I did find an ati flashing utility after a quick search on the net. Of course if you flash the wrong rom or there is a flash error you will brick the card and most likely have to order a new one.

On other news, the HM55 chipset does not natively support usb3.0, so for the envy14 to have it they would have had to specifically add it themselves seperately, and if they did do that then why did they not list it in the spec sheets... Therefore it is looking very unlikely for the rumor that the quad configured e14 has usb3.o support to be true.

 

Would it be possible to have info on the current BCB % for HP in the first post, perhaps with the other coupon code? I realize this more of general HP info then specific for the Envy 14, but there's numerous posts about it through the thread, and I believe I won't be the only one to find that useful. And this is, after all, the most active thread in the HP subforum.

Unless I'm mistaken, it's currently at 5 %. [repeat]If it would only go up.[/repeat]

 

I bet you will start to see the real big $300 coupons after the AD embargo ends, which is going to be on August 22nd. At that point they will have to compete more with their various distributors and retailers to get the factory direct sales. Right now all the retailers are only doing pre-orders.

 

That's exactly right, so far the only manufacturer that does that

Too be fair, that monitor was made for laptops though

 

My god this thread moves quickly!
Cheers for replying to my post
July/August (the latter is more likely i'll bet) is so far away right now!
I don't know if I can wait that long haha
I just know when it gets released we'll get shafted with configurations too
It'll only come out with an i7 or perhaps all stuck with the low resolutions, something like that anyway

I get my hopes up earlier when I searched the HP site again and found loads of different models (specifically one with an i5 and 1600x900) but now im sad again

Hopefully there will be some news soon about it from someone...anyone!
Then I can decide if waiting until August is a better option than buying a new laptop now (Sony Vaio E-Series)

 

HP just informed me on the Phone that the E14 is now on stock in Germany and will be shipped today!

 

nice. Tell us how it is

 

In that case, we are all looking forward to hearing some reviews from our German friends first

 

I am in desperate need of a detailed review.

 

Looking at the warranties I'm a little confused. I am going to get at least the 2 year accidental warranty, but the 3 year warranty on the configuration page cost about $400 ( I think around 375 actually). Yet when i go into the services page and look for the 3 year envy warranty with accidental cost $325, but it is out of stock for some reason.

So are they trying to screw us over into thinking we should pay $50 more for the same warranty?

Will the other 3 year warranty ever be in stock? Should i maybe call HP and ask them?

Sorry for the super long post.


Edit: Woops Sorry found out that the $367 one in the config sheet has the call in service also while the other one does not. Sorry about that!

 

Does anyone know if I have to pay Maryland sale tax (6%) if I order Envy 14 on HP website? I know Amazon does not charge sale tax.

Thanks!

 

If all goes well we Germans will provide you with first impressions possibly saturday or monday...!

 

I see that the Amazon listing has been updated and now shows the display to be the Radiance 1600x900, not a lower-res panel. That really makes it a sweet deal.

Amazon.com: HP ENVY 14-1010NR 14.5-Inch Laptop: Computer & Accessories

 

cdw told me yesterday they were expecting 5 units in today

called them today and they said the ETA is late august

 

If anyone else was wondering, the Amazon spec'd laptop comes to $1314.99 + tax direct from hp. Before discounts of course.