HP Envy 14 - i5-520M or a i7-720/740 quad-core?

Hello,

I'm going to be purchasing an HP Envy 14 soon, and I'm wondering about how the different CPUs will affect my experience with the laptop.

Apps: I use the laptop for Adobe CS3 applications (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, InDesign...some Photoshop, very minor Flash), plus the usual Office and web browsing. I do not play games with the laptop. I do watch movies when travelling and this will be my main iTunes computer.

So... how will going with a faster processor impact:

• Battery life (length of time on a charge)
• Heat
• Performance/speed

 

Getting an i7 vs an i5 will send your battery life into the toilet (relatively speaking). The i7 chips do not have an integrated GPU like the i5's do, thus you will be running exclusively on the power-hungry dedicated graphics card if you go for the i7. This will also increase heat produced by the system.

Unless you need* a quad-core and/or don't care at all about battery life/heat, go for the i5.

*If you need one, you'd know it by now. If you can't already say exactly why you need it, you don't need it.


Also, questions like this have been asked and answered dozens of times in the E14 owner's lounge. You can find lots of good info by reading that thread.

 

I have an Envy 15 with an i7 and I've found that I can get pretty decent battery life by tweaking the settings.

At high performance, maximum brightness and really taxing the GPU, I only get around 90 minutes with the six cell and an extra 4-5 hours with the slice battery, for a total of 6 - 8 hours or so, so you can see the benefit of the slice battery. It's extremely well-designed and incredibly thin (although it weighs a ton), it fits flush with the bottom of the laptop and doesn't increase the footprint at all on the 15. I think with the Envy 14 there is no slice battery but some sort of extended optional battery.

The i7-820 uses a lot of power, certainly; however I got some excellent advice on these forums to adjust the advanced power options for the "on battery" power saver mode as follows:

(1) set maximum processor state 25% (you can go even lower to stretch it further),

(2) adjust the critical battery level to 2%

(3) make sure the catalyst settings for powerplay are enabled and your laptop is set to power saver mode

With these settings and by dialing down the screen brightness, with WiFi on but Bluetooth off, still doing regular work in Photoshop, After Effects, etc., but not editing 1080p video footage, playing 3D games or doing blu-ray authoring projects, I can get over five hours with the 6-cell battery before it automatically hibernates. With the slice battery in I can get another 7 -10 hours, for a total in this power saver mode around 12 - 15 hours with my "battery into the toilet sending" i7-820QM and dedicated Radeon HD 5830, non-switchable. We have 2 slice batteries, so I could actually travel for a couple days without recharging if necessary.

That said, i'm not sure whether going from i5 to i7 will really improve your Creative Suite experience but I can tell you absolutely go for SSD and at least 8GB RAM if you can afford it. I work with huge poster-sized files in Photoshop and even though my desktop has faster CPU and more RAM, it takes a little while for them to load; however, on my Envy they load instantly, as a result of the SSD. On my old laptop I used to sit around waiting for these files to load for 20-30 minutes!

 

Understood, but when those threads grow to 100's of pages long, it really doesn't make it worthwhile to read through tons of "me too" postings or countdowns for delivery to find one nugget of information.

Searching can also be fruitless since people use a variety of terms and spellings.

I assume there will be a FAQ eventually.

Sorry to trouble you. ;-)

Thanks to everybody for providing input. FWIW, I'll be moving up from a Dell Latitude D630 Core 2 Duo (T7500), so I'm sure I'll be quite pleased with the improved speed.

 

I'm a little confused. When I asked this question on a Macbook Pro forum, they said that there isn't a real difference in terms of battery life between the i7 and i5. Am I missing something here?

 

Macs and OSX has a magical feature known as "dude I can somehow make what should last 4 hours last 8. Also, onboard vid card + ati card or whatever but not through the chip..or something or two onboard ati cards like how the dv6z does it.

also also super battery (maybe something like 80 whr)"

 

If battery life is important skip the i7 720

 

Macbook Pro's use the i7 620M which is a dual core i7 processor.





I think.

 

Yup. The top processor in the 15's and 17's is the dual-core i7 620M, which is basically a souped-up core i5. The 13 inchers still have Core 2 Duos.

 

Thanks, everybody, for the feedback. I'll stick with the i5!

 

Well, surprise... my partner had ordered me an Envy 14 and it arrived yesterday. It had the i5, and I was very impressed with a lot of what the HP Envy 14 had to offer.

Here's what I like about it:

• Unboxing experience. Best one I've had for a Windows product.
  
  
• Size/weight/build quality. Best one I've had for a Windows product.
  
  
• Speed. Between the Core-i5 and the solid state HD... this is VERY fast. I think an SSD is now a must-have for me, because I would find it hard to ever go back to a traditional HD.
  
  
• Display. Bright, beautiful, vibrant.
  
  
• HP Customer Service. Excellent... see below.

Here's what I don't like about it:

• Port location. I understand why they are where they are, but it does make using the laptop with a few USB devices a little awkward -- I like those in the back. I'll chalk that up as personal taste.

Here's why I just got an RMA for it:

• Trackpad location. It's off-center from the keyboard for a touch typist, and that makes it hard for me to use. It is centered, left-to-right, on the notebook just fine, but not on the F & J (index finger positions on home row) keys.
  
  
• Trackpad performance. I have spent all of my time, from 6PM until 11PM, using the laptop and tweaking the settings on the trackpad control panel. It doesn't work well for me, and I believe that could be simply personal preference. I have tried with varying settings for Palm Guard and the other touch setting (cannot recall now), etc.
  
  I read all of the forum postings about how to get the trackpad to work well, but it was to no avail.
  
  What happens is that I cannot select text because of the way I hit the left "button", which is simply moving my thumb down from the spacebar and pressing the button with the side of my thumb. I'm thinking the trackpad interprets this as something other than a left-click, and so it doesn't let me select text. If I press the button with my left index finger and then try to select the text with my right hand, it works ok.
  
  I still find the trackpad a bit jumpy (unintended movements) no matter how I have the control panel settings configured.

In the end, I feel the input device (keyboard, mouse/trackpad) is the most important aspect of a computer or laptop... maybe as important as the display itself. I'm used to "flying" on a Dell Latitude or IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad with the nice keyboard and convenient touchpad. With the HP Envy 14, I think the shortcomings I see in the trackpad would make me less productive. It's the same reason why I would not buy a Sony Z-series... the keyboard doesn't have dedicated PageUp and PageDown keys, and I do a lot of long document editing!

I'm bummed about the Envy 14 not meeting my satisfaction, since it is the "perfect" size of under 15" screen but with a 1600x900 resolution... those are very hard to come by these days of so many laptops having 1366x768 resolution...

So...it's an excellent laptop, but just not for me.

 

You can set the trackpad into zone mode, then deactivate the lower portion of it, that will fix the button clicks not being registered. If its too sensitive or jumpy turn down the cursor movement speed and turn off acceleration. -- I am going to use a normal mouse with mine most of the time so I am not too worried if I hate the trackpad, but those tips should help alot.

 

I did try the zone mode, but it still was a bit too jumpy whenever my hand got near it.

Again -- this is just my personal experience. I think a lot of the problems would have been solved if the trackpad was centered on the keyboard for touch typists, not centered on the keyboard deck.

For what it's worth, HP was EXCELLENT in their customer service when I contacted them for a RMA number. I was extremely impressed with how quickly they handled the request, and they even gave me a FedEx ship label at no cost. All I'm out is the shipping to me from the original order.

 

great review, very thorough, Tyler.

I think I have finally figured out how to install the drivers to use my Apple magic mouse on the Envy 15. I'm going to give it a try, hope it works properly.


Magic Mouse driver 64-bit Windows version