*HP Envy 15 (11XX / 12XX series) Owners Lounge!*

@celibate

It takes a while on initial startup fro win 7 to 'index' everything and also may take a while for the thermal paste to fully 'cure'. Also you did not say what you were doing when you were getting those temps. Try closing everything and open Task manager > performance tab + your temp monitoring program, let it idle for a while and then look and see how much CPU activity there is without anything running, if it does not stay mainly at 0% then you have hidden stuff running in the backround, most likely all the HP crapware....

My 540M is idling right now at 32C core 0 and 23C core 2 while just browsing in IE8 w/9 tabs open... room temp 68F

 

I see, well I'll remove the bloatware and give the temperature levels at idle before commenting again then. Be back soon.

If anyone would be kind enough... how the hell do you install ATI drivers... I've tried one method wherein one is supposed to repeatedly uninstall through "Device Manager". I've done it probably 15 times and no luck...

Scratch the driver difficulties. Seems I'm not a total moron after all.

 

Uninstall from control panel then reboot. then as it shows back up in device manager remove it and if the option is there, remove the driver....reboot and repeat until windows loads the generic vga driver... then install 10.6 from ati's site

 

Hey everyone.

Thinking of buying an Envy 15 in the next week and was wondering if someone would be kind enough to run a G2 through the FF14 benchmark and post their results?

 

Christ. After being idle for a minute or two with my CPU hovering from 0-3%, my temperatures are around 34-38 Celsius for Core 0 and 45-48 Celsius for Core 2... I know it's nothing dangerous but I would rather love to have them in the 20's people are reporting... the hand-rests get quite warm... GPU at 48 Celsius, is that normal?

Also, I would like to say that during Windows updates, the update hangs at 15% for quite awhile. Me being the impatient person I am, I just forcefully power off the laptop which means not every update can be installed. Is it suppose to stall at 15% for awhile?

 

My Envy 15 is too hot and loud. I rarely will use 2 of the 4 cores on the i7 it has. Can I manually disable half of the cores?

I would have bought it with an i5 if that option had been available.

 

Well I am not sure who reported the i5's being that low of a temp. But they should be hovering in the 30's.... as for windows update that is software issue and sometimes it just takes a while.... Personally I would reinstall the system that way you can get rid of any traces of crap from the hp bloat they install

 

That currently isn't an option. Guess I'll have to live with 35-45 for now.

By the way, I recently got into overclocking the GPU. I can get to 73-75 Celsius running furmark. Is that bad?

Scratch that. The fan kicks in at 73 and it stabilizes at 71.

 

That gpu temp seems fine with me.... its no where near that god awful pos studio xps i had that reached 85+ playing flash games....

 

Dear god that is bad... thanks for the input.

 

That was me. Here are my normal full idle temps (BIOS F2A) in a 68F room:

 

Did you reapply thermal paste? I would love if mine hovered around 34 all the time

 

Those CPU temps will not cause any problems, but it does indicate there is backround stuff going on and may cause reduced battery life. I also suggest a clean install and use Win 7 features in place of anything from HP... GPU temps seem fine BTW, just make sure power play is enabled in the CCC control panel so the 'dynamic clocking' will be active, it lowers clocks when there is no demand to save power & lowers temps.

 

yes, but only because I had to replace the fan assembly on this machine, it ran the same temps with the factory thermal paste. Note that ambient room temps will have a significant impact also.... BTW I have 5 envy's now and they all seem to be around the same temps, the only difference is the other 4 have SSD/HDD combo drive option.

 

Your ambient temperatures are very low...must be nice living in Alaska

Down the coast here in CA, my Envy has put up just fine with heat. It was 114 degrees outside the other day and the CPU never got above 80C while playing some BC2.

On another note, I just bought an i7 820qm for my envy on the CHEAP...excited to get it!

 

whats the average number of total processes you have running on your machines? The lowest number I can ever get is around 75.. for me say I am watching YouTube or browsing with chrome Mine hovers around 50ish... then when I am working on school work in word it idles low.... what would you sagest a plan of action to cool the machine down

 

Does anyone experience slow streaming speeds?

 

yes and most times it will stop buffering around the 10 second mark for a bit before starting again... I think its a hardware issue. The newer wireless lan driver is actually worse for me, so i stick to the older driver release

I might send in for repairs soon

 

Christ, and I just sent in another laptop before receiving this ENVY...

Can anyone comment on these problems? If not I'm contemplating sending it in as well...

Meh, scratch the above. To HPEnvy15, you should download the newest drivers available on the hp website. It fixed the problem for me.

EDIT: I'm on the F.18 bios. Would that be part of the reason for the additional 10 degrees Celsius heat on my ENVY?

 

I have 2x2GB sticks of HP's stock 1333MHz memory. Will give them absolutely for free to anybody who's willing to pick em up from West LA

 

if i pay shipping can I haz?

Edit: wait nvm I dont know u lol

 

I'm interested.. but I live in NY. Can I pay you for shipping and handling with PayPal?

 

I really HATE dealing with anything related to shipping/postage. So whoever is local, passing by, whatever - let me know.

 

How about you just place them in a generic envelope and send them to texas

 

do any of you owners experience a lot of heat under the laptop and the right side?


my laptop is very toasty on the right top side and under the right side!!!! mostly in the front

i have a icore 5 430m cpu,
5830 ati card

and a 320 hitach hard drive 7200rmp

 

Yes, same laptop as well. I assume you ordered the quick-ship and it arrived today...

 

negative, i had bought it one ebay.. but i have noticed more heat on the right side... in the last couple of days..
under the battery and beside the battery left and right sides it's as cool as can be.

under the right front it's burning hot!!

it is my assumption that its the hard drive? that is causign the heath that is the only thing i can think of

 

If it is I'm purchasing an SSD ASAP.

 

7200 rpm drives develop a fair amount of heat, yes. what the envy does is throw it all out through the magnesium casing so the actual thing stays under 50C...

 

wanted to follow up on this... It is hard for me to stop troubleshooting stuff... so I went into startup menu for the envy and went into diagnostics (f2 i think). I noticed that the RAM slots were coded as "onboard" and "bottom". The slots I am having issues with is the "bottom" slots. So, I took the memory that came with the laptop Samsung M471B5673EH1-CH9 (2x2gb) and put them in the "bottom" slots and then I put the 4GB samsung M471B5273CH0-CH9 chips (2x4gb) into the "onboard" slots and that worked! I have 12GB of ram and I can shutdown, reboot, sleep just fine. I have been running the software "BurnIn Test" to max out the CPU and RAM with no issues, runs great. So, i wanted to then see if it was a heat issue, so i ran the BurnIn software and got the laptop really hot and then rebooted and it rebooted just fine. Now, the kicker... If i switch around the RAM and put the RAM that came with the laptop into the "onboard" slots and put the 4GB modules into the "bottom" slots, I can not get the system to reboot and start correctly (it wont get to the bios screen). Also, when i put in all 4 4GB modules, i have the same issues it wont boot/reboot correctly.

So, I can get the laptop to work with all 4 slots populated but the issue appears to be with the bottom memory slots. I am going to research the specs of the HP branded samsung memory that came with my laptop and the HP branded samsung 4GB modules I am trying to use to get to 16GB. My laptop has the i7 720 processor. I am wondering if it has to be a specific spec to run 16GB or if I need to run PC8500 in all 4 slots to get 16GB, but I dont have 4 sticks of PC8500 to test it out.

 

Well i have SSDs and they are burning hot as well...

 

I don't think it's too warm, but then again, it could be that our definitions of "warm" are different, heh.

What I do want to complain about is that the 7200 rpm drive spins LOUD. Not the same noise level as the fans, but much louder than the 5400 rpm on my old dv6000 and even the 7200 rpm drive on our fam's macbook pro. If I have the fans off and I'm sitting in a quiet classroom with the laptop on taking notes, I can clearly hear the hard drive whisking away. Definitely upgrading to SSD when it gets cheap

 

HP's deal for SSDs are as cheap as it gets. I don't think SSDs will become equivalent in price to mechanical drives for at least another 3 years. Tech companies always milk consumers until the last minute.

 

Hi guys. I'm a soon-to-be Envy 14 owner. However I was considering the Envy 15 instead should another great BCB come back. One thing though, how is the battery life of the gen 2 Envy 15? The Envy 14 seems to be a little less than 4 hours with basic desktop work with web enabled. Also wasn't an i5 an option at one point, I only see two i7 quads as an option to build.

Battery life is my one hangup on the Envy 15 really. Otherwise the more powerful GPU is appealing to me as is the 1080p screen.

 

I would like this info too. I'm shipping my i5-430m back, and only i7s are optional now. They said they could replace with an identical unit, but I feel like I can argue for an i7 instead. How much of a battery/heat loss will I incur? I also have the slice, so if the batt loss is negligible and the CPU is much better, it may be worth it!

 

Well if you can find the i5 version you can get around 3 hours i7 will be much less then that

 

You've got a PM.

 

GPU-Z shows that my 5830 has GDDR3 memory. Is this a glitch or do the cards come with GDDR3 now? Because I remember people commenting that it only had DDR3 before.

 

Hey guys, I'm thinking about getting the envy 15 but have heard there are a lot of heat issues. Does the 2nd gen fix those problems? And does anyone know the brand of the SSD it comes with?

 

Not a glitch, GDDR3 is Graphics DDR3; the terms DDR3 and GDDR3 are often used interchangeably, but GDDR3 only applies to GPUs whereas DDR3 is system memory.

The 2nd gen fixes the heat issues completely, and it is actually one of the coolest running laptops on the market (when equipped with an i5) thanks to the robust heatsink design. It comes with Intel X-18M G2 SSDs.

 

Has the downclocked CPU speed on battery been fixed with Gen2? Something like 1.2GHz with i5 and couldn't go any faster on battery? Something to do with battery construction?

 

Nope, HP locked the limiter to 9x on battery for i5s. I don't think it has anything to do with the battery construction, but honestly it is not noticeable unless you try and fire up some games on the battery. 1200mhz with hyperthreading is plenty for most demanding tasks, including 1080p playback.

 

how much less battery life does the i7 get?

 

Gah, that sucks. I'm looking for about an hour of gaming on battery. Probably won't happen with E15 anyhow considering battery life is less than E14 by at least an hour with normal web surfing. Either way two conditions have to be met simultaneously for me to even consider E15 at this point: (1) BCB has to go to 30% again (preferably higher) and (2) HP has to offer the i5 CPU which is currently not an option for the E15. It's available in the Beats edition but that costs $200 more basically for a black paint job. I guess at BCB 50% I'd bite.

The more I think about it though, dual SSD's, 1080p screen, and better GPU make it quite tempting.

 

I'd just go for the 14. The 5830 isn't all that much faster than the 5650, and 1600x900 is a nice resolution for 14". The 1080p screen on the 15 is beautiful, but it's something I'd give up for extended battery life and better features on the 14.

 

Yeah, except the 5650 is downclocked to 450MHz instead of 550MHz like it should be and so far proving to be a pain to get it up to "normal" speeds. It's like 7500+ 3DMark06 @ 550, and about 6800 @ 450.

Either way, I have my Envy 14 about to be shipped any day now, just considering my options should HP be generous enough to extend a 40 or 50% BCB for one last hoorah. I doubt it, but fun thinking about it

 

FWIW I am kind of wanting to trade my 15 for a 14. If you are really interested hit me up via PM. I don't really need the extra gaming power and could use the extra battery life around campus.

 

We'll see. I'm most interested in the dual SSD's though, and without a decent BCB, that's not gonna happen if I buy them separately.

 

Can anyone comment on the battery? Is it still useful to remove the battery while on AC to preserve it. Or is it safe to keep it in 24/7 now?

 

HT, if I really end up wanting the 14, I would consider selling you my 15.