HP Envy 17 Review

The good: Slim, attractive design full-HD 1080p display USB 3. port.

The bad: Only 1 GPU choice clickpad still isn’t perfect brief battery life.

The bottom line: Though it’s still in the upper ranges of existing laptop prices, HP’s upscale-feeling Envy 17 presents excellent hardware at a decent price.

Evaluation:

In an era where genuinely upscale laptops appear like an endangered species, it is usually nice to run across a nicely-built method with few compromises, such as the HP Envy 17. We’ve usually liked the Envy line in general, and the two most-current models, the 14-inch Envy 14 and this 17-inch Envy 17, manage to surpass last year’s original 13- and 15-inch versions by coming in at significantly more reasonable costs.
The feature-packed Envy 17 includes a Blu-ray drive, each HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, and a USB three. port (even though quite small existing hardware can take benefit of it). As the slim (for its size) Envy 17 is one of the only laptops that looks and feels like a actual alternative to Apple’s 17-inch MacBook Pro, its $ 1,399 starting price is even a lot more appealing, as the 17-inch MacBook goes for $ 2,299 and up.

With a not-too-thick (but slightly too heavy) aluminum and magnesium chassis, the Envy 17 is less of a desk-hogging system than many of its 17- or 18-inch counterparts, hence our comparison to the (still slimmer) 17-inch MacBook Pro. The similarities extend to the backlit keyboard and oversize clickpad (the preferred term used for touch pads that integrate the mouse buttons into the pad itself), which both feel extremely Mac-like.
The exact same subtle pattern of imprinted squares covers the wrist rest and back of the lid as we’ve seen on other Envy laptops, and the construction feels rock solid and durable. Even far better, this is one of the few genuinely fingerprint-proof laptops we’ve ever run across.
The flat-topped, widely spaced island-style keys are regular across most of the laptop industry at this point, and this example is usually comfy and effortless to use. But even with a full number pad included on the right side, there’s still plenty of room in the keyboard tray, and the keyboard feels undersized relative to the system’s overall dimensions. We also ran into a mysterious, but faint, noise although typing, which we eventually traced to a slightly squeaky space bar. In the four Envy 17 laptops we’ve tested, this is the 1st such issue we discovered, but it’s distracting nonetheless.
The huge clickpad evokes Apple’s version, with the left and proper mouse buttons built appropriate into the clickable surface. The size is decent, but could easily be even larger, and the multitouch functionality cannot hold a candle to Apple’s (which is something that can at present be stated of any non-Mac laptop). We specifically missed handy Mac gestures such as two-finger right-click tapping and the four-finger swipe for hiding all open windows.
On of the system’s highlights is its big 1,920×1,080-pixel display. Under edge-to-edge glass, the full-HD screen looks excellent, and is exactly the appropriate resolution for Blu-ray and other HD video content. As in the other Envy laptops, HP has teamed with Beats Audio to contain special bass-boosting software program and hardware that purportedly works specially nicely with Beats-branded headphones, but definitely also sounds clear and hefty with other headphones or by means of the method speakers. It will not fill the room for your subsequent residence party, but it surely sounds extremely very good for laptop speakers.

The biggest selling point for the Envy’s ports and connections collection could be the inclusion of a still-rare USB three. jack. Although there are a handful of USB 3. portable hard drives out there, most of your hardware will not be able to take advantage of the faster information transfer speeds right now. In fact, 1 of our most-typically-used USB devices, Avid’s ProTools Mbox, just got a hardware refresh that moved it from USB 1.1 to USB two. support.

The Envy 17′s performance was on-par with other high-end Intel Core 17 laptops, even although this configuration had the lowest-end processor choice available, a 1.6GHz Intel Core i7 720QM. Upgrades to the Core i7-740QM and Core i7-840QM are available for $ 100 and $ 400, respectively. It is feasible to locate a faster laptop, such as the most recent Alienware M15x we reviewed, which had a more effective 2GHz Intel Core i7-920XM, but for practical purposes, it’s hard to envision any multitasking scenario where the Envy 17 would run into much slowdown or stuttering.
There is only one GPU option accessible, and that is the ATI Radeon HD5850. It’s more than fine for mid-to-high-end gaming, even with resolutions cranked up to 1,920×1,080 pixels. Our only genuine knock is that without having Nvidia’s Optimus method, the GPU cannot turn itself off automatically to save battery life. Playing Unreal Tournament three at the full 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution, we got 86.2 frames per second.

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