HP Envy - Close to perfection. | Laptops

HP Envy - Close to perfection. - Benchmark continued

Tuesday, 29 December 2009 14:01 Laptopfreak

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Article Index
HP Envy - Close to perfection.
Specifications
Package contents
Construction & Design
Construction & Design continued
Construction & Design continued
Benchmark
Benchmark continued
OpenOffice – mostly for students
Gaming
Conclusion
All Pages

Page 8 of 11

RAM – SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth

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SiSoft Sandra’s Memory Bandwidth benchmark is used to measure the RAM performance. Bigger is better.

HP has ensured this model will last into the future by using a Windows 7 64-bit OS. You can put up to 8GB of RAM into this computer, but the old OS was unable to utilize so many for applications. Now, however, you can put in as many as you like and actually use them. They also perform better than the MBA here, and the new system is very fast.

Hard drive performance - SiSoft Sandra Harddisk Read

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SiSoft Sandra’s hard drive test module is used to measure the performance of the hard drive.
Huh, what is this? The MBA comes with a 4200RPM hard drive while HP Envy sports a 5400RPM one. For some reason though, the HP gets a poorer result on the hard drive test. That they decided to forgo a 7200RPM hard drive is in my opinion unwise. It is really a shame it performs so badly and is even beaten in this test by what should be a slower hard drive.

GPU performance - 3Dmark

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The 3Dmark tests show the performance in DirectX 9 and paints a picture of performance in newer games and applications. No tests are run in DirectX 10.1, which both cards support.

Here is one of the more interesting features of the HP Envy: it has two GPUs. It uses a combination of an integrated Intel GMA 4600MHD graphical chip and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics card that can be activated. This enables it to switch between optimal and power saving performance. This means that the tests run on battery used the integrated GPU, which is why there is such a large difference between the results on AC and battery.

What actually happens is that the display goes dark for 2-3 seconds while the computer switches GPUs. It works alright and seems to be a very clever solution. You can clearly see that compared to the MBA, Envy either outperforms or saves more power. Interesting.

Overall performance

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The PCMark05 results can be directly compared with other laptops that have run the same PCMark version. The program gives a score from a test that looks at the performance of the processor, RAM, hard drive, GPU and so on.

All in all we see the same tendency here as in the other benchmarks. HP Envy is a significantly better computer than the MacBook Air and outperforms. Unfortunately, Envy also compares itself with computers like the MacBook Pro, but lacks things like an optical and such to match.
I dare not forecast what will happen in the future, but it seems a little like HP has made an unfortunate and odd sort of hybrid with this product. However, there is no doubt it outperforms Apple’s Macbook Air.