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Gaming on the Elitebook 8730w

Besides running Photoshop CS4 and other heavy duty applications, I’ve found the HP Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation fairly adept at gaming, to a certain extent. That’s what I’ve been doing throughout most of last month: gaming on HP’s Elitebook 8730w.

Before I go on, let me give you guys a run down of the specifications on the one I managed to test out:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53 GHz
• 4 GB of RAM (2 X 2 GB)
• 17 inch Dream Color display (1920 X 1200 resolution!!)
• 160 GB SATA II Hard Disk
• NVIDIA Quadro FX3700M graphics card (1 GB of dedicated memory)

So this is sort of the middle child of the Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation line with top graphics and a really nice, but expensive, Dream Color display. Yet this isn’t the best processor it can take (there are configurations with Core 2 Extreme processors available) and larger hard drive options available (HP currently offers up to 320 GB).

Anyway, the Elitebook 8730w runs most games really smoothly, even at the highest settings. I say most games because I haven’t tried things like Crysis Warhead on it yet. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare runs fine (well, most of the time) at full 1920 x 1200 and everything else set at the highest/best quality settings; with frame rates going at around 60 to 90 frames per second.

Unfortunately, there are some shortcomings to using a workstation-class (!!!) graphics card for gaming. For those who aren’t familiar, workstation-class graphics cards like the Nvidia Quadro card on the 8730w are meant to deliver quality frames as opposed to quantity of frames on real gaming cards. Somebody told me that they’re both based on the same thing, only tweaked later for their respective purposes but we’ll save that debate for some other time.

So you can get an amazing amount of detail and fairly smooth frame rates, though you certainly won’t get  200 frames per second as you would on a real gaming PC. Enter very intense game scenes when using a workstation graphics card, and frame rate tends to choke. A good example is when somebody throws a smoke screen bomb or calls in an airstrike which lands in the area in front of you in Call of Duty 4, frame rate drops down to 20 FPS… and you don’t even need benchmarking software for that, for I could notice the frame rate drop noticeably with just my eyes.

It’s not HP’s or Nvidia’s fault for that by the way, blame me for maxing out all the textures and setting “soften smoke edges” to ON (LOL!). Again, I had maxed out literally everything in the game… if I had turned off or lowered some of the settings, perhaps the frames wouldn’t have dropped so drastically.

But really, a workstation graphics card, or a mobile workstation notebook for that matter, should NOT be used if you plan on doing some serious gaming. It’s fine if you’re doing some casual gaming (in my book, that means you don’t smash your head on your keyboard if you die because of choppy frame rates when someone calls in an airstrike) to unwind after a day of rendering Shrek 4 scenes. You could use the Elitebook 8730w at several LAN parties with friends, but you probably shouldn’t use it in gaming tournaments where the different between life-and-death matters…

My favorite HP trackpads

My all-time favorite notebook PC trackpad has gotta be the one on the HP Pavilion tx-series notebooks. The tactile feedback of the little dimples are absolutely fantastic and I have no problem finding the trackpad area, even when I’m not looking at it. And the thing still works great when using wet hands to touch. By the looks of it, I suppose the one on the Voodoo Envy 133 will offer the same, nice control as the HP tx-tablets. Next up is the ones on HP business notebooks, which always have a matte like finish to the trackpad area and rubberized buttons.

The vertical scroll zone has gotta be the best thing since sliced bread too since I don’t need to shift my hand to the arrow keys or page up/down controls, or move the mouse to the scrollbar on the side of the screen. Practically, minimum finger/hand movement. I don’t quite care for horizontal scroll zones on my trackpad though, as it somehow isn’t as precise or natural as vertical scrolling and it takes up precious real estate (Really now, with widescreens and high-resolution displays nowadays, how often does one need to do horizontal scrolling?).

I’m not a big fan of the slippery trackpads on the HP HDX, and some of the HP dv-series and Compaq Presario models, which make them hard to use with wet hands and the horizontal scroll zone makes things worse, in my opinion.

I can’t wait to see multi-touch on more notebook PC trackpads. The Voodoo Envy 133 already has one which supports multi-touch and chiral gestures. I’m sure this will trickle to high-end notebooks and other premium notebooks, before (sooner or later) becoming a standard feature on all notebook PCs.

The secret of the Elitebook 8730w’s middle button

I always had questioned the need for a “third mouse button” on a notebook PC but the middle button above/below the HP Elitebook 8730w’s touchpad is certainly more useful than it looks. Coming from some of HP’s smaller notebook PCs with your conventional two buttons, I really appreciate the extra button. The MAIN two things I like about it: It’s so easy to activate the “track and scroll” feature to move left/right and up/down just by moving the cursor and ESPECIALLY simple to open/close new tabs in Firefox.

On a two button mouse, I had to hover over an internet link and either 1) press both the left and right buttons together or 2) right click and “open in new tab”. Now I just hit the center button.

And oh, I managed to get my hands on and try out the new Apple MacBook Pro last weekend (you know, the one with the glass trackpad). Honestly, I don’t quite care at all for a “glass trackpad” which has no buttons, no tactile feedback as to “where” the button is. The entire trackpad is “clickable” but is more “clicky” towards the bottom – a design that supposedly gives you more space to move and scroll but I digress.

Call me old-school or “un-cool” but I’d rather have my two (or three) buttons back, thanks =) . If I wanted more “mouse power”, I’d attach an external mouse to one of the three (or four on the HP 8730w) USB ports on my Compaq notebook. The MacBook/MacBook Pro notebooks only have two USB ports, so an external mouse would take up a precious USB port, leaving just one more left… ah, that probably explains what’s up with the glass trackpad.

HP Elitebook 8730w and HP Mini 1000

Here we go again, sitting on the Elitebook 8730w’s lap. On Saturday it was the Elitebook 8730w and the Mini Note 2133. This time it’s the HP Mini 1000, pretty much the same as the comparison last week except the 2133 looked like a “mini-me” of the Elitebook 8730w in that picture – the aluminum design of the Mini Note is a whole lot like the 8730w’s magnesium alloy construction. The HP Mini 1000 isn’t switched on in the picture above; the battery was out of juice after roughly 2.5 hours of usage.

HP Elitebook 8730w and HP Mini Note 2133 together

Alright, you gotta admit – this is beautiful, a HP Mini Note 2133 netbook placed on the HP Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation. Just like a baby sitting on daddy’s lap. The perfect combo for anyone with hard core productivity in mind (ie photographers, script coders) – a small little netbook for working on the go and a big notebook at home or in the office for crunching data, graphics, photos and anything else you throw at it.

Let me give you a real life example of this perfect dual notebook set up. Let’s say you’re a photographer – maybe a sports photographer or you take wedding pictures – and you’ve just done with a photo shoot. The HP Mini Note 2133 is tiny enough to fit into your camera bag with ease to be brought along with you. You can display your photos on-the-go, straight out of the camera on the HP Mini Note 2133… either via a wireless transfer accessory that moves photos on the fly from the camera to your mini notebook while you take photos, or the old school way of using a card reader (the HP Mini Note 2133 has a built-in SD/SDHC card reader by the way).

Your clients will be impressed with the ability for them to choose which photos they like almost immediately after a shoot;  normally they would have to wait for a “samples selection disc” from the photographer then pick their photos. With that out of the way, you go back home, process the photos on that huge powerhouse Elitebook 8730w and deliver them to your clients quickly and effectively. There you have it, improved workflow.

Of course, it’s not only photographers who will benefit greatly from this setup… just be a little creative with suiting the two PC’s to your needs, the possibilities are endless.

Note 1: The HP Elitebook 8730w is a fantastic PC, but sadly, doesn’t belong to me.

Note 2: *Points at the Voodoo theme on the HP Mini 2133 and smiles proudly*