My impression of the nw8440 after a couple of weeks

I have had the nw8440 for a couple of weeks now. The specs are as follows:

Intel® Core™ Duo processor T2500
ATI Mobility FireGL V5200
2048 MB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM
80GB hard drive (5400 rpm)
15.4-inch WSXGA+ WVA display

Back in February I bought an Acer 8204 and had more problems than I care to mention. Receiving the nw8440 was like a breath of fresh air. Straight away the build quality was light years ahead of the Acer. It feels solid as a rock, great screen hinges and not too flashy. The keyboard feels great, as do the rubber buttons at the touchpad. This notebook is light, I carry it to and from work, probably about 1hr 20 mins walk all together without much hassle.
Now to performance, I got a 3DMark05 of about 3785 with no tweaks straight out the box. It handles all of my high end apps, such as 3DS Max without any problems. I push my computers to the limit and so far the nw8440 has had no complaints. I find the hard drive fast enough, 7200 rpm would have been nice but the 5400 rpm does the job.
Now to the screen, which to me is very, very important. The main reason I got rid of the Acer 8204 was because the screen sucked. The nw8440 screen is good but not great, out of 10 I would give it 7. The colors are nice and the screen is sharp, there is slight rippling when I am on the train but very minor, almost indistinguishable. The only reason that the screen loses some points is there is faint light leakage at the bottom, which luckily is covered up by the taskbar. The other problem the screen has is that it kind of gradates in brightness when heading to the sides of the screen. I must stress though that this is a very nice screen, I am just very, very picky. It is not a Sony or Fujitsu screen, but it also doesn't have Sony and Fujitsu lack luster specs in terms of performance.
Overall I really love this notebook. It took me trying out a Sager, a Dell and an Acer until I found my perfect notebook. I highly recommend this laptop and if you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask.

 

Glad you liked the HP. About the screen losing brightness, I guess this depends on the viewing angle. Laptops in general do not have great viewing angles because they are supposed to be private .

 

Congratulations with your purchase!

I myself am very interested in purchasing the 8430. Since both notebooks are quite comparable I've two questions.

The screen resolution, what do you think of it. I heard many people saying 16x is too high to be able to use it for hours, fonts etc. should be too small.

Could you post some pictures? I haven't been able to see any real pictures yet, as it's hard to find any good reviews.

Thanks!

 

Vassil the screen losing brightness is not even on both sides, it is more predominant on the left side. Which leaves me to believe that this is not for privacy issues, in fact by the form it takes it is definitely designed to be like that, the screen just isn't great, it's good.
Empulse I really like the 1680x1050 resolution. The text is not too small, I work with very detailed models and interfaces and find it perfect. I will try and post some pictures tonight.

 

Please,I am going to buy the nc8430 or the nw8440 mainly for architecture renders, I would like to know the performance difference between the x1600 (in the acer 8204) and the fireglv5200 regarding the viewport speed in 3dsmax with complex scenes,is it big or isn't that much

 

kworld: The PCB's used in the 8400 series are very much all the same AFAIK. The reason for this is that the Fire GL V5200 uses the X1600 GPU, so the difference is that it got a different firmware. It could be some more difference, although I doubt it. Since we're talking about a different firmware only I don't think it's such a big difference. However, I'm not sure about that.

There were more differences in the 8200 series, where the NW8240 used a X700 GPU, and the other models the X600 (and less memory).
The same goes for the 9400 series, the NX9420 uses the X1600 and the NW9440 uses something faster, but I don't remember what (X1800 GPU??).

 

how does WVA option on HP makes a difference? compared it to a natural glossy, normal type of display? are the colors better, crisper?

considering the head moving on vertical axis, the wva is ok, you still get the natural colors 30deg up or/and down?