HP Elitebook 8730w battery life numbers

Based on my extensive usage and testing of the HP Elitebook 8730w (2.53 GHz dual core, 4 GB RAM, 17 inch DreamColor screen, Windows Vista Business, Nvidia Quadro FX3700M 1GB workstation graphics) since November, I’ve come up with a list of battery life numbers that can be achieved using this Mobile Workstation notebook PC. Using the included primary battery:

• Gaming – 1 hour (Display at the brightest setting, high performance mode)
• Graphics rendering – 1 hour 30 minutes
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 continuous use – 1 hour 40 minutes
• High-definition movie playback – 1 hour 40 minutes (Display at the brightest setting)
• Documents, excel and casual web surfing – 2 hours 30 minutes
• Combined usage (Some documents and typing, music through headphones and Photoshop CS4) – 2 hours (Display at medium brightness, balanced power mode)

These numbers were recorded when the battery ran down to 3% and Windows went into sleep mode. The battery life numbers have also been rounded down to the nearest 10 minutes.

So there you have it; now you know what to expect from the HP Elitebook 8730w when performing specific tasks. Adding on a secondary battery, that is HP’s Extended Battery option, will effectively double those numbers listed above.

HP Mini 2140: Where are the speakers?!!

When I first saw the HP Mini 2140 with the bigger screen, and naturally, reduced bezel around it, I wondered to myself “Just where did the speakers go?”. From the initial press pictures and “virtual demo” on Hewlett Packard’s website, I couldn’t see the speakers in ANY of the press photos at all. And apparently, many of our readers’ enquiring minds wanted to know as well…

Thankfully, a HP Mini 2140 dropped into my hands about an hour after the official announcement and as soon as it did, I inspected the entire netbook for the speakers… just about everything, down to the arrangement of the various connectivity ports, was the same as on the Mini 2133. I lifted the Mini 2140 up (making it activate the 3D Drive Guard HDD protection system) but no speakers underneath either.

Within minutes of posting my hands on with the HP Mini 2140, my Outlook account became swamped with emails from people asking (and demanding to know) “where are the Mini 2140’s speakers?”.

Alright, enough with the suspense, the HP Mini 2140’s speakers are located just below its 10 inch screen – in the gap between the screen and battery so it’s not really visible (See the blue arrow in the picture above). Rest assured, there are TWO speakers (for those who cannot live without stereo sound).

Sound quality of the HP Mini 2140’s speakers were very good – I’ve played some movies and several albums of music on this netbook already. The speakers here are louder than most other netbooks; louder than its predecessor Mini 2133 even! The secret behind this is probably the speaker placement which I just mentioned – which allows the sound to be “bounced” off the battery to the screen to you (this also seems to give the sound more ‘depth’)… or maybe HP just put in better speakers in the Mini 2140.

Something worthy of note is that the HP Mini 2133 and HP Mini 2140 have speakers which are sensibly and strategically place; which aren’t blocked by anything. Most netbooks have their speakers in odd places, like on the underside of the netbook, which tends to muffle sound… yuck.

However, left-right stereo separation on the Mini 2140 is less noticeable compared to the HP Mini 2133 (Whose speakers were placed on the extreme edges of the screen). This shouldn’t be an issue for most people… if you want good and very noticeable stereo separation, you probably should be using headphones anyway, instead of your netbook’s built-in speakers.

Hey look, HP Mini 2140 hands on!

My hands on the HP Mini 2140 that is! For those who are thinking “huh? you mean Mini 2133″, HP just announced the successor to the 2133 last night, and it’s called the HP Mini 2140. From far, it looks just like the Mini 2133, but look closely and you’ll spot a couple of design differences in some areas as well as a larger, higher-resolution (yes!!) 10 inch LCD. Under the hood, the Mini 2140 packs Intel’s 1.6 GHz Atom processor like other netbooks (versus a VIA processor in the 2133).

Of course THIS IS THE (unofficial) HP FANSITE and I’ve got some hands on photos of the Mini 2140! I’m also glad to report that the HP Mini 2140 runs a LOT cooler than its VIA-processor sibling, the 2133.

I know these aren’t the best photos in the world, but hey, I’ve barely spent a few hours with the Mini 2140.

Look, it’s the HP Mini 2140! (Left: HP Mini 2133, right: HP Mini 2140) Note the screen size difference.

Probably one of the factors that contributes to the HP Mini 2140 being “cooler” than the Mini 2133, besides the obvious processor difference, is the new air vent design. The Mini 2140 (bottom) lacks the additional grills, which probably reduce air flow, found on the Mini 2133 (top).

There’s also some differences on the underside of the netbook – a whole lot more vents (apparently, the white sticker on the upper right side is covering another big airvent). Mini 2133 on the left, Mini 2140 on the right. Oh, and for those who are curious, the new HP Mini 2140 uses the exact same 3-cell and 6-cell battery units as the Mini 2133 (great news for those existing owners planning for an upgrade).

You can see over here how there’s less bezel and more screen on the HP Mini 2140 (Mini 2133 on left, Mini 2140 on right).

2 batteries, 2 hours

Here’s something I forgot to add to my Gaming with the Elitebook article I wrote this morning. The HP Elitebook 8730w chews through 2 batteries (the primary battery and an extended one) in 2 hours when gaming – brightness maxed, high performance mode on Windows Vista.

Yeah man! Compare that to 5 hours of Photoshop with music or 7 hours of Office 2007, web surfing and music using the same battery setup!

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…

HP Firefly “Mobile Blackbird”

If you thought huge notebooks like the HP Elitebook 8730w or HP HDX “Dragon” were huge, you can add another notebook from HP to the list: the HP+Voodoo Firefly concept aka the “Mobile Blackbird“. This thing features a main 17 inch display AND a secondary 4.3 inch display below the main one. In addition, the Mobile Blackbird packs a Core 2 Extreme processor, 5.1 speaker system, dual ATI graphics card and what looks like FOUR headphone jacks in photos. They’ve also moved the touchpad (which is multi-touch, by the way) to the right hand side of the notebook compared to the usual below-the-spacebar position… you know, where you’d normally find the numeric pad on other notebooks with lots of keyboard real estate.

Right now, this gaming notebook still remains a concept and probably won’t be released onto store shelves. But still, it looks like a solid concept and a sign of good things to come.