HP Envy 15 - $450 Coupon of $1399

Same. I really wish I hadn't taken the free 5-7 day shipping at this point. The wait is torturous enough.

 

the shipping is really no different actually since it's coming from china.
they ship it thru alaska and it takes 2-3 days pretty much no matter what as far as I know.

 

Actually the '5-7 day shipping' versus 2-day is kind of a scam. HP uses Fedex for all this stuff and it seems like most people got theirs in 2-3 business days no matter what they picked. The 2day option seems to speed it through customs a bit (shipped from Shanghai) but I had mine sent from China to the east coast - went out Thursday morning and arrived Monday morning with regular, free shipping.

 

go with glossy. It is so much brighter and sharper.

 

debating on the 430m or the 540m

 

540m.

the 430m is slower than some C2D

 

So what? Core 2 Duos are pretty fast too.
The 540M is only ~10% faster on two cores and ~20% faster on one, with AES-NI, but is that really worth $175? Besides, if you can sell the i5-430M it would probably be cheaper to upgrade yourself.

 

has anyone canceled an order after its in "dropped to factory" status? i made 2 different orders because i couldn't decide on which config i wanted but didn't want to miss out on the pricing. they sent to factory faster than i expected.

 

yeah I got the 430m the 540m is just not worth the price I can always upgrade to i7 later.

 

Why dont you look at the bench and decide for yourself if it is worth it.

http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/9350/41201012316pm.png

 

damn maybe I should cancell and reorder for a 520m I just didn't think they would be that much difference with gaming and school but it looks like it is a big difference

 

i don't think you'll see much if any gain in typical gaming. even the ULV Core2 CPUs are usually bound by the GPU. or that was my take when looking at reviews of Alienware m11x. i think tasks like video encoding will see best gains of like 15%. the 430 model is plenty for me but i'm on the fence as well, i have one order for the 430 and one for the 520. the 520 can clock up to 3ghz and that's a like a magic number in my mind. for no good reason. also the 520 may be easier to resell.

 

Coupon is still valid. I am really close to pulling the trigger on this bad boy.

 

Im sticking with the 430m 100 bucks in my pocket is better than a slight gain.

 

Mine is already in producition. Est ship date is the 9th.
I had roughly 1.5 days of processig, 1 day of drop to factory and already in production...I am hoping it might ship early next week.

 

Yeah same here. For what I do even the base CPU is overkill. Actually for what I do a netbook is just fine, but just fine doesn't cut it now does it - just overkill will just do I'm actually thinking I should have ordered the 160SSD+250HDD and sell my 80GB Intel G2...

I handled the Envy 13 at a local store today. I'm thoroughly impressed by its build quality. It's too bad the 15 doesn't have the edge to edge glass (real glass).

I ordered the matte screen, but I've been used to the shiny screens for so long, hope I'm not going to miss that extra bit of crispness and color saturation compared to the matte screen.

An OT question. Other than the HP WHS server, this is my first HP order. I've bought countless Dells over the years for work and home use. On the few occasions I needed part replacements, Dell has always agreed to ship me the part directly for me to swap myself (including laptop mobos and screens). Does HP do that?

 

Wait the ENVY 15 doesn't have edge to edge glass?

 

No, it doesn't. The Envy 13 does. HP said that they didn't do edge-to-edge on the because of weight considerations.

 

I mentioned it another thread that I garuntee no one will notice a difference between the cpu's unless they are sitting in front of a computer while they're encoding something or doing something that intensive that can be measured in seconds. For me, in those situations, i leave the computer to do somethiing else anyways.

For awhile now, cpu's have SO, SO, SO surpassed software's utilization of them that unless you absolutely HAVE TO HAVE THE BEST or like to stare at metrics, then you're throwing money away. N

That's my 2cents on the matter but I would put up a huge amount of money that in a a double-blind test, that no one here can tell the difference.

Not to say there's anything wrong with having the absolute best. Just trying to be more realistic about it.

 

I chose the i5-540M in small part because of the heat/fan noise issues I've read about with the i7-720QM, but mostly because I'll see (and I'd imagine most casual users would as well) a far more noticable performance increase using that money on the SSD drives instead.

The only thing I'm unsure about was the matte v glossy debate but that like deciding chocolate v vanilla to me, they're both good in different ways.

 

Let me first say that I'm not a big gamer, but I do enjoy cranking up all the eye candies at max resolution. My desktop is a Dell XPS 630 (the case and the power supply anyway), gutted out with a Gigabyte X58A-UD5 mobo and Core i7 920 CPU, Radeon 5850 video. CPU at stock vs 3.8GHz OC, I get no more than a few extra FPS in the games that I did try. If you're spending money on a laptop's very expensive CPU upgrade hoping for more gaming performance, you're going to be sorely disappointed, unless of course you know for a fact the games you play have heavy CPU utilization.

Transcoding HD videos is a whole different story. Running my i7 920 at 3.8GHz saves me more than an hour in transcoding time on one of the videos. I can't imagine doing heavy duty video work on a laptop though.

On a laptop, by far the best bang for your buck is a high performance SSD. If you're going to splurge on a high end CPU upgrade, you definitely need to splurge more on the SSD upgrade. I would have if I didn't already have a G2 Intel 80GB to transfer over to my soon to arrive Envy 15.

 

I went with the 720. It's 225 more for roughly the same performance but you get 3.0. But as more games come out with multi core support it should get better.

Honestly, I'd say it's more worth 125 more max... if they had a 620m option I would have taken that.

 

yea i was looking at the i7 but the price was out of my reach thats why i went with the 430m no point in upgrading the cpu unless i go i7

 

Does anyone know when is the coupon will be expired?

 

I bet tonight. I would order before 10PM PST.

 

by the way... i called 1-888-227-8451 to cancel one of my orders and the CS agent offered a $50 discount (on top of the coupon) to keep it. YMMV

 

what was the order and what did u say i would like a discount

 

wow.

I am feeling regrets about doing core i7 instead of doing an SSD. maybe I can call to get 50 off.

 

nope, they offered. i have 2 orders for 1 Envy 15 each, different specs (couldn't decide). i only gave them one order number, the one i was going to cancel.

 

which one u keeping

 

i was going to keep the more expensive one, money not a problem.. but i'm a bargain hunter at heart. now the cheaper one looks more attractive. UGH. tempted to let them both ship and cherry pick the one that has better GPU OC. but that's not fair to HP.

 

tell us the specs.. we'll help you decide.

 

must be nice i was givin a limit by the misses and I had to stick with it

 

kept the better of the two, i5-520/500gb/1080p glossy. nice CSR lady transferred $50 discount to that order. but i may have waited too long to cancel, i guess both orders are in production already. if they both ship i will return the other order unopened.

 

I dont know why people are complaining the fact of $100 dollar between a CPU upgrade.

As applications get more aggressive, you need more power. When buying a laptop, you want to make sure it last you at least 3 years, the more it last, the more return you get on your money.

My desktop C2D 6800 is about the same as i5-430m. My laptop blows it away when it comes to photoshop processing.

Is the CPU upgradable, ya..but is it a hassle and will you actually do it later, most likely no...

100 bucks, just stop going to starbucks a few times and that practically make up for it. lol

 

I disagree. The upgrade to the 540 or even from 520 the 430 is not worth it in my book. Only differences is 200-300MHZ which will provide minimal real word performance differences. Due to the HT on the Core I5, these little chips can hold there own against lower clocked Quads in heavily multi-threaded apps while still having the high core speeds for single threaded applications.

 

yea the 430 is best bang for buck if you want to go higher mite as well go i7 then.

 

Firstly, because the market prices of the i5-520M and i5-540M are around $220 and $260 respectively. I seriously doubt the i5-430M is only worth $120.
Secondly, the difference between the i5-430M and i5-520M is very slight - AES-NI, and ~5% difference in clock speed on two cores, and ~15% on one core. $100 for 5%? seriously?

If we look at how CPUs get faster with time, it looks like they're not getting faster by as much as they were. Going by Cinebench R10, 2 years ago the Q6600 could be found for ~$200 and got ~9.5k, and now the i5-750 is similarly priced and gets ~14k, which is around 50% faster. Even so, a 5% difference corresponds to only 3 months or so of waiting for CPUs to get faster.

 

It's worth whatever people will pay for it. Translating that to 'is it worth it to me' isn't a question we can't really answer by consensus.

If I had unlimited money, I still would've bought the i5-540; if I were on a budget, I'd have gone with the 430 for exactly the reasons in this thread. YMMV. It's like buying anything else.

 

The slight spec bump on CPU upgrades is by far the worst bang for your buck. $400 for the i7 720 upgrade is a blatant ripoff, either by HP or Intel. C'mon I bought my retail boxed D0 i7 920 for $199. But of course we know things are not priced for what they are but for what they do for you, and they know laptop chips are not that easily obtained in the retail channel so they can price it sky high. Luckily for the less demanding crowd the i5-430m is plenty powerful.

 

It's not just about the money. For me it's about value for the dollars spent. Extra $100 for an extra 140mhz (never mind "turbo boost") is not good value IMO.

The 160GB SSD + 250GB HDD is a good value (especially **IF** I end up with the G2 Intel drive). This is a serious performance boost that you can actually appreciate in everything you do on the laptop. I regretted not opting for it, too late to change my order, so I placed a second order with the SSD option, yes still with the i5-430m CPU I'll convince one of my friends to take the first order. It is an excellent deal with the $450 off.

 

Man, if I had to do it over, I would drop the i7 upgrade (400 bucks), and get the SSD. If you call can you switch it? mine is already in production.

 

no but u can reorder and send that back

 

Right now it's a 320gb. How hard is it just to put an SSD in there.

I was reading that you needed to order a bracket and it might not fit depending on how big the HD is.

 

Infinite money isn't really a practical consideration, but what is important to consider for any spending decision is opportunity cost - what else can I do with that money? The baseline is to invest the money and earn interest on it, of course.
Some people might have plenty of money and much less time, and perhaps the little bit of time they save by going with a faster CPU is worth the extra cost to them, while the time it would take them to upgrade the CPU themselves at a cheaper price is not.
However, an SSD is almost certainly going to save you more time per dollar than a faster CPU, and so I should think that anyone in that sort of situation had better get SSDs as well, unless they have some extremely weird usage scenarios.

Ultimately, I doubt that CPU upgrades are worth it to the majority of people, but I won't deny that there are probably some people to whom they are.

 

honest the reason I didn't do the SSD was:
1) I didn;t know what kind of drive I was getting
2) it's the random read write speed that determines performance and why not upgrade later with a SSD I can spec out and control myself. Is it faster for the OS load and other predictable read. Sure. But not so much other applications.

A lot of folks say the SSD performance upgrade isn't quite there tech wise, especally if you get one of the poorer performing ones.

 

That's why there are these very helpful forums such as the wonderful notebookreview we have here I read through many pages of the owner's thread. As soon as I learned that HP is using Intel SSD, I know it's a good value for $320, considering buying your own 160GB Intel SSD (G1 or G2) will cost you at least $400. Don't forget, you're getting a 160GB SSD PLUS a 250GB platter hard drive. Both drives are 1.8" form factor, it won't be cheap to retrofit it yourself later on - 1.8" drive is not widely available, and the required mounting adapter and cable will surely cost a lot when buying from HP parts.

I had some very poor performing SSDs, so I too was skeptical and stayed with 7200RPM drives for a while. As soon as Intel started shipping the G2 80GB drive, I upgraded my Dell XPS. The difference is night and day. OS cold boots in 30 seconds from pressing power button to OS fully running - wifi connected, anti-virus and firewall active, web browser opened. Plus I constantly put the laptop on sleep/wake cycles, this constant on/off is not very good for spinning hard drives.

 

Excellent points. Unless you're doing constant CPU-intensive work (video encoding, running Prime95 ), a high performance SSD (such is the case with the Envy15's SSD option) is a much bigger time saver in any tasks you perform on the laptop.

How much is time worth to you? You can't buy time. The best that you can do is save time, which is ultimately what buying a faster computer is all about. For my use (and I suspect many others), a faster CPU really doesn't save you much time if any. The SSD does (instant OS wakeup from sleep, instantly open your browser just to name a couple). I said this earlier, if you splurged on the CPU, splurge some more on the SSD option.

 

It's not just a cpu upgrade, it's a motherboard upgrade too

 

I've been using an ASUS UL30A for several months and love it to death, and while I love the thin and light chassis and EXCELLENT battery life, I miss being able to fire up a game when I'm away from home. I've ordered an Envy 15 last night thanks to this coupon code still working, and assuming that I like the unit, I'll be selling the UL30A to recoup some of my costs. For $1000, I couldn't resist.

I've seen a few reviews calling this a less-than-stellar laptop in a flashy coat. After using average consumer notebooks for years, I'd have to disagree and say that the chassis is by far the most worthwhile investment. Hardware can be upgraded (though with difficulty) and peripherals can be added, but the chassis is going to be with you until you buy something new. I'm not happy to hear that the battery life on the standard 6 cell sucks, but it's a reasonable trade-off for such awesome specs. I really wish there was a way to just get a plain finish on the cover / wrist rest. I don't like the pattern from the pictures I've seen... hopefully I'll warm up to it when I see it in person.

I do have a few questions for anyone that happens to know for sure:

- Does the Envy 15 fit one or two HDDs? I assumed that since you can order an SSD + HDD, the chassis will accept two no problem. Mine only comes with one drive, but I want to add a SSD and keep the original drive for storage.

- Are the hard drive(s) 1.8" or 2.5"?

- Someone said something about 2 DIMM slots on the i5 models, but 4 DIMM slots on the i7. I was under the impression that either model had 4 DIMMs slots - can anyone clarify?

- I heard that the slim-fit 9 cell easily wobbles and becomes disconnected - a major downside. Is this true, and if so, how much force does it take? If I have a battery connected I'm probably intending to move around with the unit, otherwise I'd just plug it in.

- Any laptop case suggestions? I keep my UL30A in a be.ez 13" bag ("designed for the Macbook Pro"). It's a great bag, but it looks a little too much like a purse. I'd like something functional, somewhat stylish, and able to hold the Envy 15 + power adapter + wireless mouse and a few other small accessories.

Thanks guys.