Laptop-Review.eu

Last time we reviewed an Envy from HP we almost reached perfection, so this time we are of course pretty excited to see if the larger edition can match or outdo its ‘younger brother’. The HP Envy 15 is here, with a lot of powerful hardware like Intel’s Core i7-720 Quadcore processor with Hyperthreading technology, 4 GB of PC3-10600 DDR3 RAM, along with an ATi Radeon 4830 GPU. Needless to say we expect very good benchmark results, and it is all wrapped in a very sleek package. Let us take a closer look at what HP has sent us.

The product was kindly lent to us by HP

Specifications

Category
Multimedia - Business

Processor
Intel Clarksfield Core i7-720 Quadcore Mobile - 1.6 GHz - 6 MB L3 cache

Chipset
Intel PM55 (IbexPeak-M)

RAM
2x 2048 MB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM
Up to 16 GB

GPU
ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4830 (M97)

Storage
Seagate ST9320423AS HDD - 320 GB - 7200 RPM

Display
15.6 inch HD LED 16:9 widescreen display - 1366 x 768px

Sound card
Intel 5 Series/34x0 Chipset PCH - High Definition Audio Controller

Optical drive
External drive included - connected via USB

Battery
HP Lithium Ion battery - 6 cells - 53280 mWh – 12.4V

Connectivity
Intel WiFi Link 5100 AGN - 300 mbps *(Draft-N1)
Atheros AR8131 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet - 1000 mbps

I/Os
2x USB 2.0
1x eSATA/USB 2.0
1x HDMI
1x RJ45
1x Audio jack-out
1x Kensington lock slot

Operating system
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (build 7600)
Splashtop OS

Software included

-    HP Support Assistant
-    HP PC Recovery
-    HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
-    Macromedia Shockwave
-    Microsoft Silverlight
-    Sun Java
-    Corel Video Studio Pro X2
-    Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2
-    HP MediaSmart Premium
-    Beats Audio
-    StarDock UI - HP Envy Theme
-    Adobe Reader
-    Adobe Flash
-    TheNextBench community DT Icon
-    HP Set Up
-    Microsoft Internet Explorer Toolbar
-    ENVY Instant On Solution
-    Windows Live Messenger
-    Windows Live Writer
-    Windows
-    Live Mail
-    HP-AOL Portal
-    Skype

Weight and dimensions

38.0 cm (W) x 24.4 cm (D) x 2.65 cm (H)

Weight
Depends on configuration; 2.35kg in the standard model

Price
About £1,200

Package contents

Along with the computer comes:

-    External optical drive with 2x USB 2.0 ports
-    2GB SD flash card
-    Driver and installation media
-    120 Watts charger
-    Manuals

The notebook ships with the standards like installation media, manuals and power supply. In addition to those you get an external DVD drive, which complements the notebook well as it has no integrated drive. As if that was not enough, there is also an SD card. What exactly HP intends with this is unknown – perhaps it would have been nicer with a USB key instead. 

Construction & Design

First impression











The notebook varies in shades from black to white, giving it a professional and purposeful look. It is nicely rounded when the lid is closed, but when opened the edges can seem a little sharp, which is something your wrists will notice.
One of the first things you discover is that the display cannot bend all that far back. It goes to maybe 110 degrees, so fair warning. Still, Envy is a sure eye-catcher on the go or at the office!
Otherwise there are no issues to speak of, and Windows 7 starts up nicely as expected.

The lid



The lid is designed with a lot of smaller rectangles, diamonds and dots that form plant-like patterns. You can also spot the HP logo down in the right corner, as seen on the picture.

The front



In the middle of the front we have the card reader which supports SD flash cards.

The rear



No ports or anything back here.

The bottom





At the bottom we can see the battery in the middle and some vents.

The right side



From the left we have the first stereo speaker, Kensington lock slot, headphones jack, combo eSATA/USB 2.0, 2x USB 2.0, HDMI output and an RJ-45 Ethernet LAN ports.

The left side



From the left we have the DC-in jack for the power supply, followed by a vent. At the far right is the second stereo speaker.

Buttons/Diodes



Above the keyboard you find the power button, which can be configured to boot either Windows or the SplashTop OS if you prefer. This can be done within the control panel in Windows.
There are no diodes, except a small one on the power button.

Keyboard and Touchpad



The keyboard responds very well, and there is generally no flex to speak of. The letters are written in a white font, except for 'æøå' (only an issue if you live in Scandinavia). The keyboard has an issue in the form of its ‘launch buttons’ as seen in the picture below along with the F-keys:



When you for example want to adjust the volume, full-screen applications tend to crash, which is quite a problem in games. This is because HP has made a graphical interface to make things look a little nicer, but this also results in games being crashed.





The touchpad looks very good on the outside, but it does not work all that well. The touchpad incorporates multi-gesture technology which sometimes works alright, but far from optimal. It is particularly hard to navigate with as there are sometimes small ‘jumps’. At other times it simply ceases to respond for a brief duration. All in all, not the best to work with.

Display









The display is a 15.6 inch HD LED 16:9 widescreener, running a native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. The brightness can be adjusted gradually via the F1 and F2 keys. It tends to suffer quite a bit from glare, but the screen is still reasonably visible.
The backlighting is homogenous, or evenly distributed all over the display. If you view it from the side, the picture is slightly discoloured but still quite crisp. View it from below or above and it is engulfed in brightness.
The panel itself is from AU Optronics and the model is: "B156XW02 V0".

I/Os



As can be seen, most of the ports are on the right side of the computer, which can be a disadvantage if you want to use a mouse with the computer since many of the wires can get in the way.

Special Features

SplashTop OS



SplashTop OS is a secondary operating system made for quickly handling communication applications like Skype, Firefox, Chat etc. It does not exactly look like the picture as HP have their own theme, but the functionality is exactly the same.

Heat emission
The computer is generally quite warm and the fan runs most of the time. However, the fan activity is adjusted according to the chosen Windows power profile, which makes a big difference to the noise.

Benchmarks

CPU-Z & GPU-Z mm.







Task list and Windows Performance Monitor





The processor employs Hyperthreading technology, which means the OS can treat every single core as two virtual and individual cores, making the computer capable of using up those unused ‘resources’ that a core has available. This allows for increased performance in the applications that are able to use this technology.
The program wPrime is one of those, which can also be seen in the two pictures above.

Comparison

For comparison we chose HP Envy 15’s little brother, HP Envy 13, to show the performance difference between Envy 15 and the £100-200 dearer Envy 13.

HP Envy has been reviewed earlier right here:

http://www.laptop-review.eu/

HP Envy 13 has the following specifications:
Intel® Core™2 Duo-processor SL9400 1.86 GHz, Level-2-cache 6 MB
GS45-based chipset
1 x 1024 MB + 1 x 2048 MB DDR3
250 GB 5400 RPM SATA
13.1-inch High-Definition LED BrightView Radiance - 1366 x 768 pixel
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4330-graphics
4-cells and 6-cells Lithium ion battery (Li-Ion)

Windows Experience Index



The computer has obtained a base score of 5.9 points, established by the lowest sub-score: "Primary hard disk – Disk data transfer rate". The highest score is "Memory (RAM)" which gets a whopping 7.1 points, followed by "Processor" with 7 points. These results are pretty good and most likely a good deal above average.  

Boot times and out of standby



The computer starts up in about 45 seconds, which is quite acceptable. However, it does take some 6 seconds to get out of standby.

Battery life



Idle test settings
Brightness: minimum, HDD standby after 10 minutes and WiFi active.
Classic test settings.
Brightness: maximum, HDD standby after 10 minutes and WiFi active.

HP Envy 15 managed to go for almost two hours in idle, and just over 1 hour in classic. These are not very impressive results. The hardware simply eats up too much power, making it inappropriate for longer trips and such.

Processor

wPrime 2.0



The computer gets through the wPrime test in 15.478 seconds, which is really quick compared to most computers, both laptops and desktops. The multiple cores are really used to their full potential here.

CineBench 10



CineBench outputs two results – one in which only one core is used, and one with all the cores. This illustrates the performance enhancement rather well, which can also be seen on the graph, and the result the computer gets in the “Multiple CPU” test is good too.

SisSandra Processor Arithmetic & Multi-Media



In the Arithmetic test, the application calculates in MIPS per second (Million instructions per second) and in Mega Flops per second (One million floating point operations per second) in the Multi-Media test. In both, a higher score is better.

As can be derived, Envy 15 does incredibly well. In “Arithmetic: DRY” it reached twice as many points as Envy 13. Once again, the i7 processor is completely superior.
Graphics card

3DMark Vantage



Here Envy 15 scored a fine CPU result of 10434 points, whereas the GPU score was only 3408 points. That gave it a final score of 4098 points under the “Performance” setting, which is reasonable but not all that impressive.

RAM



The RAM modules in Envy 15 also beat those in Envy 13 here, with the lightning-fast PC3-10600 DDR3 RAM making the difference.

Overall

PCMark Vantage



The computer gets 5280 points in PCMark Vantage, which is both very decent and a lot more than Envy 13.

Hard drive



Envy 15 is considerably faster with its 7200RPM hard drive versus Envy 13’s 4200RPM drive.

Gaming

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2



The original Call of Duty (often abbreviated to CoD) was released October 29 2003 and is a first-person shooter game based on the Quake III engine. The game was developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision.



Lowest settings:



Highest settings:



With all settings at high you get an average FPS of 31, which is okay, but if you lower the settings to the bare minimum you get a decent FPS of 63. So, the game is perfectly playable if you adjust the settings.

Grand Theft Auto IV



Grand Theft Auto IV (also known as GTA IV or GTA 4) is a game in the Grand Theft Auto-series, released for consoles in North America and Europe April 29th 2008. The game has acquired a shoddy reputation for not being optimised for PCs, as it has been directly ported from the highly processor-reliant consoles. Here the multiple cores might help



The game reach an FPS of 36.4 at ’default’ settings, which were:



At lowest settings the game reach 48.53 while only 27.7 at highest settings. Since the gameplay itself is rather slow-paced, it actually feels smooth and is generally playable on most settings.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin



FEAR 2- Project Origin continues where the popular FEAR 1 ended. This time around there is a stronger foe, more powerful weapon as well as new areas and abilities. Project Origin resumes the gripping tale with the action and horror introduced in the previous FEAR. The game starts just before the end of the first game - the Special Forces team is on a routine assignment when the city of Auburn is shaken by a supernatural explosion. Alma has released her anger on the city.

The game ran with an average FPS of 58 at highest settings, so there is no need for compromising on details – the game is playable.

Conclusion

After reviewing these Envy model from HP, you are left with a weird taste in your mouth, because this is really HP’s chance to show competitors how to kick ass, but it just goes down the drain somewhere. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what the problem is. It is sort of like eating an incredibly juicy steak served with cold sauce – all the ingredients are there, but it just is not optimal.
HP Envy 15 is a computer that caters to people who tend to use more demanding multimedia applications. The powerful processor is particularly good for applications that can utilise multiple cores, and the relatively quick RAM are also great for handling data. Here we should note the computer supports up to 16GB of RAM, which is not something you see every day – or can afford. The GPU is not best in the world but is well-suited for a bit of gaming and the like.
Overall, the computer is well built, but it just has these minor details dragging it down. The touchpad is far from the best, since it does not always respond as you might expect. In addition to this most ports are located on the right, making it potentially more troublesome to use an external mouse. If you work with multimedia applications, precise navigation is very important. The display also suffers way too much from glare for our taste, turning it into a mirror even with little ambient lighting. A final criticism is the lack of a microphone input, though this may not matter to some.
HP Envy 15 is in truth a powerful computer, but possibly not made for private consumers, with the hardware catering more to enterprises who need the raw processing power of the Core i7 CPU. Furthermore, most games are still optimised on a dual core processor, so this processor adds little to gaming. It does help out, but not nearly as much as it should.
All in all a very sleek computer, though it does have its issues. If you have the need and can take advantage of its stronger suits, then it is definitely a good take on a multimedia notebook or an eye-catcher in the company.

Pros:
Powerful processor
Beautiful design
Weight
Design
Materials

Cons:
Shortcut key UI affect on stability
Ports on the right
Less than optimal touchpad
Glare display

Battery:	1,5 / 5
Graphics:	2 / 5
Construction:	4 / 5
Mobility:	4 / 5
Software:	3 / 5
CPU Performance:	5 / 5
Innovation:	3,5 / 5
Connectionspeed:	3,5 / 5
Price:	3 / 5
Accessories:	4,5 / 5
Design:	4 / 5
Weight:	4 / 5
Performance:	4,5 / 5
Overall:	4 / 5