HP Envy 14 - i7-720QM Temperature/Heat readings?

I placed an order for an Envy 14 with an i7-720QM two days ago and after looking through the forums I see that everyone says the i7 will have half the battery life and will run hotter than the i5 (which makes sense). I called to cancel my order and the rep offered $100 back to keep the order so I took the bait.

I can live with half the battery life since it will usually be plugged in, but I can't live with it scalding my lap. I tried sifting through the 1000+ post threads for some heat benchmarks with no luck. Can someone point me to a nice comparison or let me know how hot their i5 or i7 runs?

 

Well I can tell you that I recently sold an Alienware M15x which had one of the most efficient heat dissippation cases i've ever come across. I to have read the numerous posts about the problems with the i7 and I can say that the battery life on my Alienware was terrible couldn't leave it unplugged for more than 2+ hours. The heat was non-existant and I had custom installed an 5870 and it still didn't get so hot you couldn't touch it. I hope your envy purchase with the i7 turns out to be ok.

I recently purchased one too, except I ordered mine with an i5 so I could have a laptop that would last unplugged for more than 2 hours.

 

I have an i7 and it doesn't get too hot to put on my lap.

It does get hot while playing games around the heat vents, but that's expected. Honestly this is still the coolest laptop I've used save netbooks.

 

I truthfully think you will be ok, like Konceptz says his is just fine, and I doubt you will ever have a problem with the heat with the Envy you want. Go ahead and take the plunge. You won't be disappointed.

 

Thanks for the responses, guys. I went ahead and decided to cancel the order and downgrade to the i5. After looking through the forums and other sites some more, I had a nagging feeling that the huge loss in battery power was going to come back and bite me. Can't wait till it ships!

 

I read somewhere that you could limit processor usage to save battery life. This guy limited his i7-720 envy 15 to 25% and manage to get 5 hours out of it, apparently. Given that the envy 14 has a slightly larger battery (59Wh vs 53Wh), I expect you should actually be able to get quite a lot out of an i7 E14 while doing simple tasks. You could probably underclock the GPU too, but I'm not sure.

This laptop ain't cheap and one thing you should consider is future-proofing. Even though in single-threaded tasks the i5-520 can almost keep up with the i7-720, the i7 is still much more powerful overall. Take a look at the E14 review on notebookcheck.net, which is an i5-520. It lacked about 10fps on a few games compared to i7 laptops with the same GPU. Although part of this can be attributed to the lower clocked 5650 on the E14, OCers report only slight fps gains anyway. And these are games, when it comes to more multi-threaded applications this difference would become really noticeable. I'd expect, then, to be able to use the i7 for a longer time than the i5.

I personally think the trade-off between performance and battery life as well as price is worth it, and it's possible to get long battery lives with an i7, it's just gonna be a lot more troublesome. Regarding the heat, some people have issues and some don't. I think this has to do with the way hp applies its thermal compounds, which is apparently pretty sloppy. So if yours does have issues, just change the compound and everything should be fine.

I'm getting an i7, and if you haven't decided on yours by the time mine arrives I'll let you know how it is

 

I have an i7 720 and so far I love it. As mentioned in quite a few threads, the battery life is pathetic, but that was expected. The performance though of the chip for gaming, running VMware, photo editing, etc is fantastic. I find that with general use (browsing the net, viewing photos, etc) the heat is fine although does run quite a bit hotter than what I'm used to. I'm very happy with my purchase.

If you are big into games, you won't be able to play with the laptop directly on your lap. It gets quite hot on the bottom, and unfortunately quite hot on the right side where I hold my mouse. I started holding my mouse a littler closer to my body, which helps a lot.

For people that have the i7, you should look into getting a laptop desk. I'm able to play games, or do anything really with the laptop on my lap with one of these:

 

My Envy 14 has a i520 cpu in it and it's had been fairly cool. Around 36-38 degrees C on idle. I'm able to run VMs as well with out any performance issues. Using VMWare Player with Unbuntu and XP images. Battery life is reaching around 4 hours with screen dimmed on wifi.

Does get hot when gaming. No surprise there. An i7 won't help you much with games since the gpu is the bottleneck in this laptop.

 

Running multiple internet tabs, youtube, an essay, and a few folders with aerofoil turned on, i get ~60 degrees Celsius

 

So I received my laptop today.

Did a bit of stress testing with Prime95, the torture test thing. After about 10 minutes the temperatures on all 4 cores hit 85 degrees celsius, and 185 fahrenheit. These temperatures were stable so I stopped the test at around 25 minutes. On stopping the temperatures dropped immediately, and I mean immediately into the mid 70s. Takes a while to cool off after that. On a bit of web surfing, chatting and installing bits of software, cpu temps are in the mid-fifties.

All in all temperatures were very stable at 85 +/- 2 degrees for all 4 cores. This is pretty acceptable considering i7s are rated to run at up to 105 degrees. The surface of the laptop remained generally cool to touch, well the bits that you normally touch anyway. The right side did get quite warm, both on the top and bottom. I assume this is the where the processor is? I haven't opened it up yet. I live in the tropics so this test was conducted with ambient temperatures at around 30 degrees.

Overall, an i7 will not get too hot. Although I must mention I have a beats edition envy, which is just slightly thicker, so I assume would allow more airflow. Though I don't think it would be that significant.

EDIT: After stress testing was completed cpu temperatures dropped to normal usage temperatures (mid-50s) in less than half a minute. That's really testament to the cooling ability of this thing.