*HP Envy 15 Owners Lounge! PART 2*

Compared to the palmrests, the air is cool.

I loaded Hardware Monitor. It says that the cores are running at 46 and 49

The harddrive is running at 44

Are these numbers normal? I'm just browsing web.

 

Those sound about right from what I've been told. I guess laptop CPUs, and the i7 in particular, run hotter due to the smaller space. Mine has been on for 2 hours now, and I'm just surfing the web too. My cores are at right around 50C and my hard drive was just at 38C.

 

Do you have the i7? I have the i5...

And the almost +10C on the hard drive is worrying me, unless you have SSD? Can I get some more numbers on what temps people are seeing?

 

It would be nice if the GPU's LM63 would talk to HWMonitor.

At least it would give me an idea why the GPU's fan is always on. I have used the AMD tool, but having one tool to do the lot would be better.

 

i7-820qm idles around 45-48 degrees, fans hit maximum speed at 80 degrees, haven't seen my the cores go over 86 degrees running prime.

 

Idle is about 50C. 10min of Prime I can get it to 90C, and about 85C the fans kick up to full speed.

I can feel the warm/hot air about 6" away from the machine - that gives you an idea how effective the fans are at blowing.

 

Recommendation for USB Wifi adapter?

I've had it with the less than stellar performance of the Wifi on my gen1 E15. Does anyone have recommendations for a trustworthy USB Wifi adapter? Possibly n, but g is sufficient.

 

Have you opened you envy? you may want to check on antenna connectors they are right below the right palm rest.

Some times things can come loose in shipping and cause these types of problems.

My envy never gets down into the 802.11g range of speeds so if you are considering that then you must have almost non existant networking.

I know many of the people that have complained about the wifi were upset because the speeds are not in the 100 - 200Mbps ranges. but G tops out at 54Mbps and normally sits arouns 20Mbps. I am sitting at the farthest end of my house away from the AP with earth and cement between us and am still getting between 50 to 110Mbps during read write operations.... Make sure you are testing throughput and not just looking at the wireless status to test speed.

 

I'm using an Edimax mini. They're tiny, cheap (at least here in the uk) and reliable, and they use the same chips as the expensive Belkin adaptors. You can probably pick one up from ebay or amazon.

 

I find that my wireless skips and constantly disconnects when I'm doing intensive tasks. It happened on my XPS 13 as well. Not sure if it's an overheating issue or a faulty card.

Got plenty of adaptors anyway and it's not worth taking it back to the shop, especially as it would be hard to demonstrate.

 

Those sound like shielding problems of the antennae leads.

 

I've used netstumbler to check signal and SNR, they look good. Found a channel for my router that nobody else uses. As for signal strength, I'm at moderate strength - 3 bars. So I don' think it's necessary to check the connectors.

Bandwidth jumps like crazy, from 1 to 78 Mbps and actual throughput is in the 50-100 KILOBYTES range. When close to the router (Netgear 3500 v1) throughput climbs to 4.5 megabytes/sec, but no higher. Connection caps at 78 Mbps.

 

Would you please care to elaborate?

 

coming from the guy with another one on the way.

I need to find out the return policy on video cards at Best Buy.

 

I am interested in this too. Would you mind explaining?

 

Is there an app to test network speed or do I just have to do the math?

 

open task manager
switch to network tab
menu->view->select columns...
check bytes/interval
set update speed to normal which on win7 is 1 sec.
then keep an eye on the value as you max out network transfer bandwidth.

 

Sorry to ask this again.
The folks who have receive the Envy 15 v2 (ATI 5830) with SSD can confirm if's Intel G2 Ssd drives? Or HP is shipping with the G1.

 

Did you try that nifty search button at the top of the thread before posting that?

 

Wow with your configuration that 3DMarks06 score should be over 10000, my graphics card registers a 6.8. You should just upgrade the drivers to see if the video card drivers are bad or it could be a defective video card. My 3DMarks06 score with the i7 820qm and platter drives are around the 10300 range.

 

3DMark06 has pretty much no connection to WEI. Why do people insist on thinking WEI is a useful benchmark? IT'S NOT! Really... at most it's just confirmation that your drivers are installed properly and accelerating things as you think they should. At the VERY most. Heck, it can even change between successive runs... I have done back-to-back WEI runs on my desktop and gotten fairly significantly different results depending on what system services happen to turn on in the background while it's running.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=37

 

Do you know what are the latest good ATI drivers and where to get them? I still have the original hp installed drivers. My 3dmark06 is no where near the 10000 points.

 

my dual ssd setup consists of two G2's. and they are quite fast in a raid.

 

Could you please provide details on what settings and O.C. speeds you used to get 10300 on 3Dmark06, a screen shot would be great also.

A lot of envy owners have been trying to break 10,000 on this benchmark with no luck, see benchmarks threads; http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=453084 to see what scores have been achieved so far....no where near 10300.

 

newest driver that works with 5830 is 8.681 and con be found here:

http://strags.com/

 

The only thing I have overclocked is the video card's core clock to 550mhz using the AMD-GPU toolkit. Other than replacing my ram and upgrading it to kingston hyperx pc10600, I didnt do any other modifications to my computer. I m at work right now so I cant give you any screenshots since my computer is at home. I m not sure if I downloaded the latest drivers from ATI website, but HP's website provides no drivers.

 

this is probably somewhere in one of the threads, but where do i change the setting for the screen changing brightness... is it active contrast or something?
I can remember the official wording for a good search.

like sometimes when i click in my envy after idle the screen brightness changes.

 

Finally looked at those. I think I can get the 8.690's to install for the Envy. I'll let you know this weekend how those work out.

 

they definitely did fix the slice battery. it locks in much better doesn't disconnect if you slide the computer side to side. also the webcam appears better, as my first one was purplish...

 

It is interesting, today I was reading notebookcheck's mobile graphics cards page and i was suprised to find that the 5830 clock speed is particularly slower compared to the 5700 series, the only advantage it seems to have is the stream processors.

 

No offense but could you please provide some screen shots of those results when you get home?

With all the attempts to get to 10,000pts it has been proven that the bottleneck is the GPU memory speed and not the core speed. It should not be possible to break 10K without raising GPU memory speeds well above default of 800Mhz. Are you sure your running the test at the default settings?

 

I ll do that when I get home

 

I tried searching for this and didn't come up with anything to here goes. I received my i5 envy 15 on Monday. Overall I like it (matte screen is nice - glad I picked that) but there are a couple of things that bother me and was hoping others can chime in.

1st thing is the speaker volume is very weak IMO even when set to full volume. I am concerned that they are defective. Or are they just lame speakers?
I have a couple of other laptops for comparison, a dell 620 and a hp nc3280, both business laptops. volume is a little weaker then the dell, much weaker then the other HP.
Note - this is my first windows 7 machine so it could be that I am missing a setting somewhere?

2nd thing is the touchpad. I am used to resting my fingers on the laptop buttons, this obviously causes problems on the envy (jumps around etc..). I also find it difficult sometimes to left/right click and drag on something with accuracy. Is there a way to disable the touchpad zone where the buttons are, so they act as buttons and not touchpad surface? I don't see anything in the synoptics setup but I could be missing something.

Thanks,
Jeff

 

The speakers are definitely rather weak in my opinion. Now Volume using the jack is way better in my experience.

As for the pad I only know how to totally disable it not just the pad part.

 

Agreed. I die a little inside when I see someone put any weight behind their WEI score.


As for low speaker volume. I find the speakers to be pretty loud as long as you have the EQ flat. They are louder than my Macbook and an older Dell laptop that I have.

 

I second that. Speakers are definitely week. Im not sure if we install Creative software emulation will it improve or boost sound??!! I know the xps16 uses the same IDT hardware but also uses the creative emulation X-fi MB software and they provide great improvement. Not sure if its applicable in this case;.

 

Hello everybody,

Glad to have found this place the posts are very usefull and im happy to find out that for most you, the ENVY has not disapointed. I am currently waiting on mine which was ordered on the 20th of jan and I have no more fingernails / Lack sleep / Cannot follow any usefull conversation not about ENVY laptops... I truly hope my machine gets here which I'm being told by HP that it will ...so far so good.

One thing I haven't been able to confirm from all the threads, videos, high res pictures I've been staring at for the past month, hoping someone knows for sure: Is the lid on the Beats Envy magnesium as well. Might sound stupid but as shiny as it is I'm just not sure it isn't just plastic.

I read somewhere is IS magnesium with a shiny coating of crap over it but i can't find any official litterature on this.

Thanks

 

That also has the 4830 listed can anyone comfirm this is good for the 4830 cards?

 

Nope. Why don't you be the one to do it?

 

oh ok then but if it crashes :cry:

 

If it crashes, you just roll back If the GPU is listed, it should be alright. Windows will fall back to a VGA driver if the Radeon driver doesn't work at the worst case, which will let you roll back to the previously working driver.

 

I have to say that calling HP and working with one of there CS people was a complete joy. After explaining my problem the rep sent me a replacement slice. (which was overnighted) and set me up with a return for repair for my lines on my screen.

I see some people talking about their wei score of 7.9, since that is the max then they will never have to upgrade

1st thing, there is another thread that is now closed that has a ton of info you can search and find many answers but I did this for you http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5668647&postcount=3614

2nd thing, Although I had many problems with this also I am now used to this and it is not too bad... Also you can get a wireless mouse and have the touchpad disable whenever another pointing device is plugged in.. this works out well.

enjoy the envy...

 

ok installer file C7_94008 is the package that has the display drivers for the ATI 4830 (1st gen Envys). Only crashed once finding that out

 

All these comments reminded me to go back to the original thread to find the speaker volume tweaks I posted 2 months ago. Boy does the 'search engine' suck!

These tweaks worked very well on the original machines and I see nothing that has changed on the Gen 2's that should affect this. I have not taken the time to try this yet because I still may be Removing RAID0 so I would lose all data

Just keep in mind that the speakers are incapable of low bass frequencies and that you will need to defeat the EQ tweaks in 'beats' in order to get full range output to headphones.

HERE ARE SOME TWEAKS FOR IMPROVING SPEAKER VOLUME ON YOUR ENVY:

It took me awhile but I now have the sound level about 3x what it was to start with. Try these tweaks:

Control panel (all items)> Sound> Playback tab> Highlight speakers & Headphones> Click configure (button at bottom)>

New window 'speaker setup' > Test (should hear sound L/R)> next> Uncheck 'front L/R if it's checked> next> finish>

Back at 'sound screen'> Highlight 'Speakers'> click 'properties (button at bottom)> Enhance..tab> check bass boost> settings> set at 80hz / boost 3 db>ok Tone control tab> Bass +1 treble +3> Advance tab> default format drop down> select 24 bit 96000Hz > Apply

After this DO NOT use the Beats control (Fn + B) or it will reset the tone controls. Note: all the Beats does is set bass to max and treblr to max or when turned off it sets bass to min and treble up (it's a marketing scam by HP)

Now to increase volume level you need to boost the signal level by going to the 'beats control panel' which is really the IDT audio driver with a beats logo. Should open from control panel or hidden icons tab in task bar. Once open go to playback tab> Speakers and headphones> hit arrow above speaker symbol and select small speakers> ...

Select Equalization> Select 'custom'> Adjustments for this are mainly to boost the signal level in the preamp so we get higher volume while not distorting the sound from the tiny built in speakers. My setting values are as follows: left to right;

-1, +8, +10, +8, +9, +9, +9, +8, +9, +10

MAKE SURE TO CLICK SAVE WHEN DONE!

Note: Do not crank up the Bass (31hz) control or it will overload the speakers which can't reproduce this anyway, you can even turn down more if you have distortion at high volume.

Check that the slide controls for 'master' and 'speaker symbol' are all the way up.

This should make a big difference in sound volume and quality, and there is one last way to get louder sound. Depending on what you use to play back your audio you can adjust the programs sound settings or EQ controls also. In itunes the eq has a 'preamp' slider which I boost to about +6, this increases the output level while leaving the EQ settings alone (make sure to check the turn eq on box). Windows media player you have to raise all eq levels equally (not to much) to boost without affecting sound quality. In general it is not a good idea to use more than one EQ system in an audio signal or you get more distortion, so don't adjust the EQ curves or bass/treble on more than one device. I chose the Beats / IDT EQ to make the tonal adjustments because it is the audio driver program and preamp that outputs to the speakers, so it should have the best sound quality. Any adjustments before the preamp that add distortion will just be amplified, so go easy on adjustments in your play back programs.

Finally when you play your audio make sure to click the speaker logo in the taskbar so the slider pops up> click 'mixer' and then you should see all the sliders for your devices; you can independantly adjust the levels for the right mix. If you open the Beats panel and minimize it then a mixer slider also shows for this and you can dial in the effect of the EQ settings.

One last thing; When listening to headphones you will need to increase the bass EQ setting (since headphones can reproduce the low freqrencies) in the Beats panel or I just change the drop down selector to the one with a flat curve (beats studio I think) -- the volume for my headphones was not an issue so I defeat the EQ for better sound quality.

Whew...didn't think it was this complicated when I started typing....

Hope everyone enjoys better sound with this.

JJB

 

Psst, in case anyone else was looking for it that Kingston memory is instock again at Newegg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104158

EDIT:
Also I'm still looking for a good case for my envy. The things I need/want are:

1. Secure fit when the Slim Bat is installed

2. Sholder Strap

3. Nice looking

4. Space to store extras such as brick, some disks and maybe paper and a book
or 2 for school

5. A decent price and durable

 

JJB-
I Just gave your settings a spin. It made a big difference. Thanks for that.
Jeff

 

The antenna leads track next to the hard drive and the GPU, and cross the leads for the GPU fan.

These might be generating a EM field that could interfere.

 

All-
I've been following this thread for a couple of weeks now and have learned much from the conversation. Thanks to all for making this such a lively and approachable thread.

I've had the machine for about one week and am loving it. There are two issues however that have me concerned and so I'm looking for your expert advise. Issue 1) this is fairly minor, the right ctrl key pops up, not off, if I press on the bottom of the key. It goes back down when I press on the top of the key, but pops up again when I press the bottom. Like I said, no big deal, just annoying. Issue 2) the machine will randomly freeze and the screen will go black. This happens when idle, when under load, when watching a movie -- can't deterministically reproduce. The only way to get the machine to respond again is to hold the power button to power off and then boot again. I don't get any BSODs just a black screen and the fans tend to pick up a little when this happens.

I was searching on the HP support forums and found a couple of people who had the same issue. Apparently they contacted support and arranged for an exchange. I'm willing to do this if need be, but I've invested lots of time into this machine (for example, just installed VMWare and several guest OSes last night) and don't want to wait a month and then redo all of the work.

So the question(s), should I just continue to ignore the ctrl key? and is there an explanation/fix for the freezes? Or should I bite the bullet and send it back?

Thanks for reading and for your advice.

 

I have experienced that a few times myself.

Things I have tried:
- Modify HP's power management
- Create entries for TDR
- Create a new power profile

So far, I have not had much success in preventing it, but I believe it is the GPU failing. The system is still running, so if you hit the Windows Key then the right arrow then enter you can shut down the computer safely.

 

I just tried turning "fan always on" to disabled in the bios. In that mode I keep getting no noise and then a "whoosh" and then no noise again. It actually is quieter with the fan always on. What are other peoples' impressions?