This message: Sent from my Elitebook

Tweet

Hey everyone, guess what? A friend of mine got his Elitebook 8440p just last week equipped with the Intel Core i5 540M 2.53 GHz dual core processor and not-so-well known Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M graphics. While he’s still doing some hard disk spring cleaning and organizing data from his old Dell to be moved to their new home, he’s feeling nice enough to let me have a little spin with his new tech toy. So far, the Elitebook 8440p feels a whole lot like the Elitebook 8440w I reviewed when it first came out – including the nice, spill-proof, tactile partial-chiclet keyboard. There’s an odd change to the items above the display though: the webcam has been shifted slightly to the right (but now in a position more centralized than the 8440w’s webcam) and the HP Night Light is slightly more ‘right side’  biased than that of the 8440w.

I’ll be writing up a review on the Elitebook 8440p soon, once I spend more time with this thing; with opinions and user experience input from my friend once he starts using the notebook for real. What I can tell you so far is that gaming performance has been surprisingly underwhelming – compared to the 8440w, I had to tune down Left4Dead 2 to 1280 x 720 and Low settings in order to play at 20 FPS (8440w manages almost double the frame rate with higher settings). I’ll have to do more testing on this, maybe update a few drivers or something. EDIT: Turns out Core i5 is real picky on whether the notebook is plugged in when it comes to choosing either performance or power saving. With the charger plugged into the HP Elitebook 8440p, I managed to play Left4Dead 2 with a frame rate ranging from 24 to 40 FPS – frame rate only drops down to 10 FPS if you’re running off battery power.

5 Comments

• 

  By IsQb, February 19, 2010 @ 5:16 am

  Hi!
  Thanks for your first impressions! Sounds not bad
  I’m interested in buying a 8440p, but there are some questions no one could answer yet… You (or anyone else) would help me a lot if he could give a comment on those questions:
  - Is the graphics card (nVidia 3100M) switchable to the i5-integrated Intel HD graphics to save energy on the go?
  - Is there an “AlwaysOn-USB” port that charges devices even when the 8440p is shut down?
  - Can you turn the 8440p on by registering your finger at the fingerprintreader and the system will log on automatically (as known from the new Lenovos)?
  Once again: Thank you for your excellent work!

• 

  By Brad, February 19, 2010 @ 2:57 pm

  Hi, thank you for your kind words and comment.
  To answer your questions one by one:
  1. Nope, the system doesn’t seem to have hybrid or switchable graphics, regardless of Windows 7′s power options or HP’s own battery life software. The notebook is always on dedicated graphics, though it does go into some sort of ‘low power’ mode when it isn’t plugged in (same with the Core i5 processor)
  -The low power states of the processor/graphics card are proven by the frame rates of games and performance of some software applications dropping significantly (by half) when the notebook isn’t plugged in and on balanced/power saver mode.
  2. No, in the sense that the notebook’s USB ports are all off when the notebook is shut down. Yes, in the sense that when the notebook is in Sleep mode, all USB ports are active and can charge devices, without ‘waking’ the notebook up when you plug them in and out
  3. At the moment, no – the power on/off button is the only way to turn the notebook on, though I’m sure someone can/will come out with a BIOS/software mod to add such a feature you mentioned.

  Hope this helps – Brad

• 

  By IsQb, February 19, 2010 @ 6:27 pm

  I just got a notification by mail, that there’s an answer from Brad, but I can’t see it here so I’m gonna post it instead:
  “Hi, thank you for your kind words and comment.
  To answer your questions one by one:
  1. Nope, the system doesn’t seem to have hybrid or switchable graphics, regardless of Windows 7′s power options or HP’s own battery life software. The notebook is always on dedicated graphics, though it does go into some sort of ‘low power’ mode when it isn’t plugged in (same with the Core i5 processor) -The low power states of the processor/graphics card are proven by the frame rates of games and performance of some software applications dropping significantly (by half) when the notebook isn’t plugged in and on balanced/power saver mode.
  2. No, in the sense that the notebook’s USB ports are all off when the notebook is shut down. Yes, in the sense that when the notebook is in Sleep mode, all USB ports are active and can charge devices, without ‘waking’ the notebook up when you plug them in and out
  3. At the moment, no – the power on/off button is the only way to turn the notebook on, though I’m sure someone can/will come out with a BIOS/software mod to add such a feature you mentioned.

  Hope this helps – Brad”

  These aren’t good news, but thank you anyway

• 

  By Brad, February 19, 2010 @ 6:42 pm

  Sorry, sometimes it takes a while for some comments to appear because of server overload prevention measures. The comment is visible now =)

• 

  By IsQb, February 19, 2010 @ 7:06 pm

  Sorry, I didn’t want to mess up the comments

Other Links to this Post

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment