Desktop replacements are usually large, larger, and largest, with power and performance of their driving factors. Rarely have we seen a laptop with a 17-inch screen that weighs as little as 7.5 pounds, the HP Envy 17 until the threshold of our labs. The sleek, like an Apple MacBook Pro, powerful as an Alienware, and relatively affordable as the Asus Republic of Gamers G73JH. This laptop does not break any price barriers on either the high end or low end. But considering everything you get, this is our new favorite choice for power users who refuse to sacrifice in the name of the prize or to make portability.
The Envy 1917 is slim enough that you could not think at first that he qualifies as a true desktop replacement machine. At just 1.25 inches thick and 7.5 pounds, this is an impressively sleek machine. The laser-etched lid and the chassis, both resisting aluminum bronze, shouting sustainability, fingerprints, and hint at the high-end components lurking underneath. The keyboard deck is clear aluminum, dark bronze, following the motive. As with the cover, it has a dotted texture that comes from an etching method we have seen only Envy notebooks. The left wrist rest gets very warm, however, even mild use. (On the right was cool.)
The backlit keyboard and Chiclet dedicated number pad are very comfortable and pleasant to type on. The well spread, flat-top keys to someone with slim-to-medium-sized fingers. (The keys might be a bit small for people with larger fingers, though.) The keys are hard plastic with a good vertical travel for a notebook and a nice tactile response. Also, we want the media playback and display functions are swapped with the Function features. (Not at all confusing, we know!) Translation: What this means is that instead of hitting a key combination of Fn + F7 to decrease the volume, so you just hit F7 to decrease the volume. If you ever need a system like the F7 key to activate, you then would use the key combo.
The huge touchpad (it measures nearly 5 inches diagonal) offered unparalleled precision with the cursor. The pad has an integrated mouse buttons, so the pad is actually a large button with lines painted on the button near it. We liked the large size and smooth feel, which does not produce any drag.
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The pad can also perform certain tasks, multi-finger, for example using two fingers to scroll. This worked well, but not great. The path does not inertia scrolling, like what Apple provides on its MacBooks and other products. (Inertia scrolling is when you quickly flick your fingers and watch the screen scroll quickly, depending on how fast you cut it.) We also had some trouble getting our two fingers to register on a web page so the page does not scroll when it should have. You can rotate pictures with two fingers, pinch-zoom, and this worked well in our tests. The Synaptics touchpad applet that HP bundled with the system indicated that we could three finger movements as possible, we tried but did not work. Generally we would classify the multi-touch experience as picky.
The full-HD screen was great for playing Blu-ray movies, and the viewing angles were simply the best we’ve ever seen in a laptop. In fact, we could see the whole picture no matter how far from the center of the viewing angle. If the front of the screen at all, you can see what’s playing on, without loss of color. Glare was very noticeable in this glossy screen, but that’s to be expected from a media-centric machine.
Listening to the media was a good experience in the Envy 17, thanks to the audio Beats (Beats high-end audio software used by the artist Dr. Dre, exclusive to HP notebooks.) Volume was very strong, and the speakers were much stronger than what you usually get from a notebook. As we heard more bass than usual from the laptop speakers, this system was a bit lacking in that department.
The port selection on the Envy 17 is generous. Along the left, you’ll find a VGA port, a mini DisplayPort, and an HDMI port, all for exporting to an external monitor. You can do all three at once, thanks Eyefinity ATI’s multi-display technology, which allows you to connect to three external displays, which is made possible by the onboard ATI Radeon graphics chipset. Also on the left is an eSATA / USB combo port for connecting an external hard drive, a USB 3.0 port and a headphone / microphone combo jack (for a headset when making VoIP calls), and a more standard headphone jack. That’s plenty of connectivity per se, but on the right, you’ll find two USB 2.0 ports, a five-format memory card slot, a power jack and a Kensington cable lock slot. We were also pleased to have a slot-loading Blu-ray drive, which is rarely seen in notebooks. (Almost all Blu-ray drives in laptops we’ve seen so far clunkier tray-loading drives.)
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Another nice extra is the HP TrueVision HD Webcam, which produced excellent images for video chats. On our side, skin tones the camera looked a little red, but the person on the other hand, said the picture is crystal clear (we were connected via Ethernet), and she did not think we looked at all red. The camera captures images at a maximum resolution of 640×480, which seemed low for an HD webcam. The images looked pretty good, though, even when blown up to full screen size. We did notice some noise and motion blur in the video recording, but not enough to really complain about. It handled low light surprisingly well, we could see fine with just the subject face the light of the screen.
Wireless connectivity options are a bit limited on this laptop with only Bluetooth and 802.11n radios included, but given the size of this notebook, support for mobile WiMAX broadband or probably would have been overkill. We do not expect a lot of 17-inch notebooks see daily commutes.
Now the fun part: the performance. The Envy 17-supported by its quad-core 1.6-GHz Intel Core i7 CPU Q72 and 6GB of DDR3 memory performed very well on our tests. On our PCMark Vantage test, a measure of the overall system performance, the Envy 17 fluctuated around the average scores we have seen from the desktop replacement laptops, with scores of 5.849 on the 32-bit version of the test (the average is 6289) and 6324 on the 64-bit Edition (6288 average). Perhaps more importantly, it helps beat two of its closest competitors, both priced just $ 100 less, the Acer Aspire 8943G (scored 5969 on the 64-bit version of the test), and the Asus Republic of Gamers G73JH (which yielded a much lower 3936 on the same test).
Specific testing the CPU, we run different encoding tests, which include the transcoding of a standard video clip in Windows Media Encoder (WME) and converting 11 standard MP3 files to AAC format in iTunes. The system did well on both tests. It took 3 minutes and 10 seconds to complete the test task in WME, the two competitors finished in 4:00 (for the Acer Aspire 8943G) and 3:53 (for Asus). In the iTunes test, the times were a little closer, with the Envy 17 completing the process in 2:59. Here, the Asus system beat it by 5 seconds (which is essentially a tie) and the Acer Aspire brought up the rear at 3:50.
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A final test we run is CPU Cinebench 10, all of the cores (in this case, four) of the processor load. Again, the Envy 17 beat the similarly priced competition, with scores of 8425 (on the 32-bit version of the test) and 10,250 (for 64-bit). The Asus Republic of Gamers system came in second in the 32-bit test (8134), but the Acer is second on the 64-bit test (9709). Generally these are very good scores. They indicate that you are able to handle large images, multi-tasking and doing a lot of productivity tasks without spending much time at all watching the little blue circle to do somersaults.
Moving from the CPU to the graphics chip: We run a series of graphical tests. Envy the 17′s powerful ATI Mobility Radeon 5850 chipset, with its own dedicated gigabyte of memory, thankfully blasted through our 3DMark06 test, DirectX 9 graphics performance measures. Here, the Envy 17 struggled to keep pace with the Asus Republic of Gamers system, but easily lost the Acer, providing scores of 11,986 to 1,024 x 768 resolution and 9368 at its native resolution of 1,920 x1, 080. (The Asus ROG edges of the Envy 17 with scores of 12,526 and 10,927 in the same resolution, the Acer never cracked 10,000.)
To get a better idea of how the Envy 17 would perform in a real-world gaming scenario, we put it through its paces with one of our standard test games, Company of Heroes. All we saw frame rates were very playable. In our DirectX 9 Company of Heroes run of the test, 140 frames per second (fps) managed at its native resolution. DirectX 10, the score dropped to 50.4fps, which is still excellent. That’s on a level with the Asus Republic of Gamers machine within 1fps was for both tests. The Acer Aspire did not come close to these scores. The numbers of Envy just the $ 4,000 configuration we tested Malibal Satori, who only managed 91.3fps and 31fps at these settings.
Typically for a large, powerful notebook, the Envy does not offer much in the way of battery life. It turned out unceremoniously when playing our test DVD (The Matrix) 1 hour and 42 minutes into the movie. That means you, Äôll want to travel with the power brick, which unfortunately is almost 6 inches long and about 3 inches wide. Remember that all it gets warm when the notebook is in heavy use.
HP loads the system with many useful software goodies and not much bloatware. Take the Synaptics touchpad applet, for example, lets you tweak various presets for the touchpad. There also HP aos, aos Beats control, and full versions of Corel PaintShop Pro and VideoStudio Pro X3 X3 for image and video editing. You also get Roxio, aos 2.0 CinemaNow for playback of DVDs and CyberLink DVD Suite. Oddly enough, our system did, AOT with the near-ubiquitous trial version of Microsoft Office, but you can get a copy of Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition, included at no extra cost to get. As for the warranty, HP supports the Envy 17 with an impressive two years limited hardware plan, Äîtwice as long as the industry standard.
HP Envy 1917 ISN, AOT the fastest or the most powerful notebook with a LAN party or an artist studio aos grace it, aos not a workstation or a gaming rig. It, aos an entertainment notebook that does a great job of entertaining. Playing music was very good, Blu-ray movies looked great, and high-end 3D gaming is more than possible on this notebook. Plus, you get so many extras, including slot-loading Blu-ray drive, the three-screen functionality with ports onboard, the HD webcam, some really good software that normally costs a few hundred dollars, and much more. What aos perhaps the most impressive, the system weighs only 7.5 pounds yet manages to fit into that beautiful 17-inch screen.
