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

Its looking very fine.. Sharp, good contrast, good size.. I even wished it had an even bigger resolution, as I like to have more vertical screen space...!

If I get closer than one foot, I start to be able to discern pixels, but I also have very good eyes..
For a 14 inch screen I thinh the 1600x900 resolution is a good compromise...
Lower would definitely be not acceptable...

By the waytoday I had a first test of the computer together with children.. They were playing around with the webcam, the filters and gimmics it brings..
The screen is very patient towards praing childrens fingers.. The resulting fingerprints could be wiped of with a glass cleaning cloth very easily..
The glass cover is protecting the LCD against the pressure when they touch the screen, so no ugly decolorations..

 

Yay! Thank you! +rep

 

I should have thought of that (or the 13" as scishock suggests)... thanks.

Unfortunately, there is no fry's near me, so I guess I will do some searching for a different retailer.

 

ademmer said he would upload the manuals today, hope he remembers ^^

 

well i wont be doing any video editing, or even gaming really. used or OEM sammy drives go for under 399 so it seemed the logical choice for me, but wanted to make sure since i likely wont be upgrading my hdd again for a long time

 

I do a lot of computation fluid dynamics on a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo, and it can be inadequate at times. I'm not sure how much faster a dual core i5 is, but I'm probably going to go with a quad core. I would recommend the same for you.

 

Does a higher CPU increase frame rates in a game like Battlefield 2?

 

ohh awesome, so i know the quad core i7 are available for ENVY 14, so its a good idea?

 

I disagree. Since the Envy has a 900p screen I think you'll be able to play it on high settings at a playable framerate and medium-high at perfect framerates.

Then again I have a 520 and a SSD in mine so hopefully that'll make it run a frame or two smoother.

 

Yes but most games are GPU bound.

 

I wouldn't recommend the i7 for the envy 14 because it does not have the integrated gpu so no switchable graphics which will slice your battery life in half.

 

The processor will but the SSD will only decrease loading times.

 

hell medium's fine if that's all it can run on smoothly.


I just don't wanna play on low (it looks a lot like WC3 when you set sc2 on low...but requires a stronger computer)

 

I guess that's not too bad. I really didn't buy the Envy for gaming anyways, but it'd be cool to play a little D2 or SC2.

 

Honestly, I think it'll scale well, so you should be able to run it at at least high everything, cuz my desktop (AMD Athlon 64 3200+ OC'd to 2.25ghz + Radeon 9600PRO 256mb + 1gb of pc3200 ram) runs it "fine" at low-settings, and this is a 5year old computer. So I'm guessing any computer built in 2010 will be able to run it. Find the videos of the UL30VT(might be UL50VT) or the m11x running SC2 at high/ultra settings on youtube.

 

So my brother is interested in the laptop but he has one question.
I5 450 or 520? He will be using it for college and some ocassional gaming of recently released and future games.

 

apparently 450 scores a little higher in the benchmarks than 520 so I'd go with 450 unless he plans on doing vmware.

 

Hey Lvivkse, what happened with your order? Did you use us mailing address but Canadian billing with your cc?

Did it go through?

 

The quad core will perform much better for most, if not all, engineering programs. But there's two things you need to consider with quad core.

1) Battery life. As others have stated, you will get about double the battery life with a dual core processor because they can utilize switchable graphics.

2) Heat. The quad cores run hotter than the duals, and no one has gotten their Envy 14 with a quad core yet, so we don't know how well the cooling system will handle it. The cooling system of the Envy 14 does look pretty good, based on the two people who have gotten theirs, although they both have i5 machines.

 

If you guys want more pictures,

HP Envy 14 and Envy 17 hands-on - Engadget Galleries
http://www.engadget.com/photos/hp-envy-14-and-envy-17-hands-on/#2947939

 

With all the talk about the OS and battery life, maybe running XP on it will get it to above 4 hours.

 

If you are a power user then HP wants you to get a quad, so they can sell you the ungodly expensive slice battery which doubles the battery life.

If they offered the dualcore i7 620M you would have performance similar to a 720qm quadcore while still keeping good battery life, without having to buy the slice!

As it stands now, the upgrade options for dualcore suck, they top out at i5 520M. They offer better CPU upgrades on their lower budget laptops, it makes me very suspicious that this arrangement was by design, just to sell more slice batteries.

 

US shipping and billing address, CDN visa

it's still "being verified" *knocks on wood*

if it doesn't work I'll try with a US based Paypal. They recieve the money from Paypal, which is in the US, so AFAIK they would never be able to tell it's a Canadian CC if I use Paypal.

If that doesn't work, well, I'm going to Buffalo in a week to open up a bank account and apply for a credit card in the States so I never have to deal with this BS again.

 

looking forward to the release of Chrome OS for long battery life purposes.

Would be interested to see how this USB bootable version does:
Chromium OS builds by Hexxeh

 

i hope erathostenes is done uploading the video...

 

The last 20 minutes I was doing videoencoding, maxing out all four CPU Threads and the maximum temperature I got was 78°C (172°F).

Fan noise went a bit up, but still less than the DVD drive ripping some MP3 in the background..

 

202 Min @ 6k upload left..
Sorry guys, its taking forever.. The first upload even failed.. I will post more as soon as its available..!

 

youtube being annoying?

 

Thanks erathostenes! Can't wait!

 

I am in rural Germany now, my parents internet connection sucks. The ISP cant be bothered to invest in proper infrastructure here..

Download tops out at 60k, Upload at about 12k, feels really ancient here..

Very different from my usual 100mbit up/down connection at Uni..

In case everything fails I can still upload from there tomorrow at noon GMT +1

 

oh wow. Trying to upload a video on what's more or less Dialup? Godspeed man.

 

does the e14 have a slice battery option?

i remember seeing a video of it, but since its been released, i haven't heard of a single mention of it.

is it the 6-cell $200 battery on the hp.com site?

 

yea, that's what lots of people are saying, but some HP reps say otherwise. (most of those reps don't know what they're talking about tho )

 

Thanks man.. We are making progress..
I am seeing 10k now, 186 min on the counter and 11% on the progress bar..

Lets hope the upload doesnt fail^^

I reencoded the video, from the strange MOV file from my camera to proper AVI, a file size gain from 800mb to 90mb, which makes the upload possible at a small quality price..
I will upload the full quality version tomorrow or maybe follow up with some other video..

 

Oh, so I understand the heating part, but hmm batterylife? So how much battery life is cut? Is it possible to get apprx 5 hrs?

So I was doing a lot of searching, decide to call them up (my uni), and there like well most of the programs are optimized for threading (also there cluster is a super scalar processor, so parallel processing like scalar and vector processing together type thing i guess) so there like well get the newest Intel architecture, with a high amount of cache, reasonable clock speed and a lot of cores/threads (so quad core i7). So i guess quad is the answer. Also I'm more inclined to ATI as Nvidia gpu aren't as powerful XD



EDIT* Also I want a powerful CPU n GPU for explicit computation u know (like the unknown :confused2: )

 

ati's ahead of nvidia now? man, i've been living under a rock the last few years

 

I've seen a lot of discourse over the different CPU options, and I'd like to throw in a little of my own limited (mis)understanding:

While the I5-520 seems the beefier CPU over the I5-450, and of course the I7 quads the beefiest of all, I think that the I5-450 is the way to go. If you look at the specs of the different processors, note that the I5-450 has almost twice the system bus of ALL of the other processors, and only a little bit less speed compared to the I5-520. That memory bus is the pipeline for the data, and just like a pipe carrying water, the bigger diameter pipe is going to transport more data.

WHy pay that much more for the 520? If you need the quad 720 for processing power, more power to you, but if you want the best bang for the buck (and battery life), I'd go for the 450.

 

fermi never really happened.

on at least the mobility side of things radeon 5870's around the same as the 480m

 

It's a pretty big drop in battery life from the i5 to the i7. This is because the dual core processors have an integrated GPU built in, so you can switch off the ATI card when running on battery. This saves a ton of power. Plus, the quad cores use more power than the dual cores.

The Envy 14 is so new that we don't know for sure what the battery life will be, but if I had to guess, I'd say 3.5-5 hours with i5 and switchable graphics versus 2-3 hours with i7.

 

the 370 also has a 4.8 GT/s system bus

in the end, as we concluded before, if you're not going with the i7, its 370 vs 450, and the what you get for that $50 is a mediocre 200khz "turbo" boost

370 ftw

 

fermi for mobile did come out but the mainstream stuff is slated for august, they have had to redo the chip design 3 times now because of manufacturing issues, so they are late to market. ati still is behind nvidia though, they haven't got anything to compete with optimus yet, they havent got a 3d solution, and fermi when it does come is going to blow them away. at least i hope it does, i hate ati for the bad support and bad drivers, especially in openGL

 

My only holdout to buying this thing is the lack of USB 3.0. I see that the new update of their ENVY 15, as well as the 17 have 3.0. What the heck is up with that? Do you reckon that they will update the unit with 3 anytime soon?

 

On paper yes. I don't know about real life

Yeah actually the 450 has a higher bus, that's good, but it all dims down to how many processes can be run and at what degree can it be ran at.

Approximately to be exact. If regarding gaming, there is fluctuation in fps (frames per sec) but on other processes it depends actually. I also think we haven't even reached the potential on gpu yet, if we do then ATI would be superior. On paper ati is amazing, plus price to performance ratio for ATI is better.

Ahh. I really want processing power as well, for explicit research LMAO
As you know i won't be able to use the cluster all the times, but then again its a laptop so i'd want a lil portability and battery life to be good.

hmm guess so.

 

Doubtful. Maybe for the gen 2 Envy 14.

It has a USB-eSATA combo port anyway. Since hardly any devices use USB 3.0 these days, that should be sufficient. Besides, the only things that really need the bandwidth of USB 3.0 compared to 2.0 are hard disks, which eSATA has covered anyway.

 

By the way, is the 1 gig of ram in the 5650 GDDR5?

 

what? ATI has more processing power, and nvidia cost to much IMO.

usb 3.0 is nice, but the lightstream technology or something like that is gonna be better.

 

Yea, also a few more benches were done over the world with passmark and the mean score of the 450 is a lot more than 1 point ahead of the 540m now (2449 vs 2435). The i7 620 remains high at 2758.
So far it sticks to the plan I had, taking a 450m or 370m and upgrade to 620m when (more like when hp part store will provide them for under warranty upgrade) I feel the need.

 

It's not so much what will be the fastest, but rather what will be fast and used most often. USB 3 has been out for a while, but there's barely any support for it yet. I imagine lightstream will be even less adopted

 

Can someone tell me how I'm suppose to order this from Canada? I can alway ebay. But thats a little more costly,.

Lvivkse I see your also a canadian looking at this laptop, what are ur plans to get it? seeing as how they wont mail to a p . o box

 

Here's the review they did on the new fermi chip comparing to 5870.