HP ENVY 17-1011NR 17.3-Inch Laptop
- Intel Core i7-720QM processor 1.60GHz with Turbo Boost Technology up to 2.80 GHz; Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
- Laser-etched aluminum finish in carbon relic; HP TrueVision HD Webcam with integrated microphone; 5-in-1 integrated Digital Media Reader
- Integrated 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN (RJ-45 connector); Wireless LAN 802.11b/g/n WLAN & Bluetooth
- 1 SuperSpeed USB 3.0: Three USB 2.0, 3rd port shared with eSATA; mini-Display port; 1 HDMI; 1 Headphone-out/Microphone-in combo jack
- 17.3 inch diagonal Full HD Ultra BrightView Infinity LED Display; Slot-loading Blu-ray ROM with SuperMulti DVD±R/RW with Double Layer Support; Beats Audio and HP Triple Bas
- ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 Graphics with up to 4091MB total graphics memory with 1GB dedicated
Precision crafted performance. Engineered for power and designed with the latest materials, the ultra-thin, lightweight HP ENVY 17-1011NR laptop PC has a large widescreen display and can support up to three external displays. See and feel the differe
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(out of 24 reviews)
List Price: $ 1,649.99
Price: $ 1,499.99
Review by Ken Kerang for HP ENVY 17-1011NR 17.3-Inch Laptop
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At the end of the day performance is the most important measure of success to me and this machine lives up to expectations here – its definately snappy. In regards to games, I’ve installed Dragon Age, Borderlands, Crysis – all run great at maximum settings. I’m confident this machine will handle my gaming needs for the next couple of years.
Nice fit and finish. Lots of metal bits and overall solid feel. Its not exactly light but for a 17″ its respectable. It looks good enough to leave out when company is over. I had some concern buying site unseen because I know the previous envy models didn’t quite deliver in this are – but I think overall this version meets the bar. Its not a mac book – but it gets pretty close.
Battery life has been good so far – the extra 9 volt battery is an awesome bonus.
It does have a blu ray drive.
The screen is beautiful – super clear, detailed and bright.
So in the two primary areas that drove me to purchase this vs. other 17″ gaming machines – performance and aesthetic – this machine delivers.
I have a few usability complaints though..
The mouse pad. The problem here is that the click buttons are also part of the touch bad – so when go to click on things your clicking finger will move the cursor. This happens often enough to be very frustrating.. maybe a patch will come out that will address. In the meantime I’ve been having to plug in an external mouse because I can’t take it.
The PC does something strange when it sleeps – when you open the lid it will resume but the screen doesn’t come back so you have to open and close the lid once again and that will make the screen turn on. Not a big deal but a bug that bothers me. And the lid is a bit of pain to open – no real place to get a good grip and its tight and heavy. Its more like prying it open rather than the nice smooth lid opening experience of the mac book.
Too much cluttering software pre installed and Windows disk not included making a clean install difficult.
The Beats audio is not that exciting – but i didn’t expect it to be. Sounds like a laptop to me at the end of the day.
Review by Brian Adams for HP ENVY 17-1011NR 17.3-Inch Laptop
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I’ll be honest that a laptop from HP was far from my first choice. At the end of the day it was half the price of Apple and Alienware and way more stylish and feature packed than the Asus stealth fighter laptop. Every now and then I do want to transfer 10GB of movies and video’s around so USB 3 and ESata ports in a desktop replacement laptop matter, something that Apple and Asus don’t seem to care about. Heads up, this is a 17″ but with 1920X1080 instead of 1920X1200 that you may have been used to before. This makes the laptop wider than my prior 17″ Vaio I had owned… wide enough that it make the laptop feel massive. Enough so that I won’t be carrying it around in a backpack anytime soon.
This unit ships with dual 320GB hard drives. First thing I did was order a SSD to replace the boot drive, so my experience is based on that modification. I ended up doing a fresh windows install so I never worried about bloat ware. Fortunately the installation files for everything short of the O/S were in a nice setup folder on the c: drive I replaced, so I can always re-install anything I may decide I want later.
At the end of the day this laptop is FAST. The windows experience index for the machine after the SSD upgrade is 7.0 which is good thing. Supreme Commander 2, Assassins Creed 2 both run with full detail at 60fps. There have been reports of unbearably hot palm rests and sub par quality on the assemblies. I had none of those issues. I’m gaming and surfing on a plain table (no cooler) and heat has not been an issue. In a quiet room I can hear the fan but typing the keys on the keyboard is louder.
The extras I like include the backlit keyboard, the status led lights on the mute and wireless function buttons, the led that lights up the RJ45 network jack when plugged in, the tiny led lights in the front left for power and harddrive activity, only having to remove 2 screws to replace the primary harddrive.
The only criticism would have to be the track pad. I’ve used a macbook with bootcamp and the gestures made more sense. Since the left and right “buttons” are simulated, the act of holding a “mouse” button down and dragging the mouse (when selecting text for instance) makes the mouse move in fits and jerks. I don’t know if driver updates can ever fix that, but allowing us to simulate those interactions with just gestures (no physical clicks) would.
Review by Wossen Wyatt for HP ENVY 17-1011NR 17.3-Inch Laptop
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I’ve been using this notebook for a few weeks and I’m very pleased with it overall. The system feels powerful and responsive but that power comes at the expense of cooling. Under heavy load the right side becomes very hot. Too hot to touch in fact and you can even feel the heat through keys like caps lock, tab and the left shift and ctrl. That’s one of the few caveats of this system. The others are the lack of a FireWire port for capturing digital video and the lack of RAID support. Although the system uses two speedy Hitachi HTS725032A9A364 hard disks there’s no option in the BIOS to create a RAID 0 or 1 array with the disks. In my opinion HP missed an opportunity there to squeeze a few more drops of performance out of the system with RAID 0.
Many reviewers have complained about the clickpad being quirky and annoying. HP has released an updated driver that fixes the problem and it’s available on their web site. Once you install the update and familiarize yourself with the multi-touch gestures you realize they’re very cool and convenient.
Oddly, HP has chosen to make the secondary controls of the function keys active by default. Meaning that if you press the key shared by F7 and volume down, the volume down control will be triggered. You need to press the fn key (between the ctrl and windows log keys on the bottom row) to trigger F7. This is truly annoying at first but a quick trip to the BIOS lets you change it back to the way it should be so the function keys are triggered by default and the fn key is only needed for the secondary controls like volume, screen brightness, wireless toggle, etc.
On the software side, unlike what the PDF specsheet states, this system does NOT come with Office 2007 trial or any other office productivity software pre-installed. The Corel video and image editors are present and accounted for but you’ll either need to buy Office right away or install the free OpenOffice suite like I did.
Gaming is a pleasure on this system as you would expect. So far I’ve played Batman Arkham Asylum on it at 1920×1080 resolution with the quality settings turned all the way up and the game is beautifully detailed and frame rate is completely fluid. Of course the system gets hot as hell during gameplay, but such is life, I guess.
All things considered, I highly recommend the ENVY 17-1011NR to anyone who wants a powerful notebook.
Review by Nicole Wilson for HP ENVY 17-1011NR 17.3-Inch Laptop
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*Edited*
Pro 1: “In Depth Specs” The computer runs wonderfully with it’s i7 720Q 1.6GH~2.6GHz quad(octa/virtual)-core CPU, it’s 8GBs of DDR3 running @ max of 667MHz (Hynix brand DIMMs) (more below: Other) and a ATI Mobility HD 5850 with 1GB of DDR5 (not DDR3) running @ max 500MHz (more below: Other) and DDR5 runs max 900MHz. As for storage this contains 2x “WDC WD3200BEKT” 320GBs running @ 7.2K RPMs.
Pro 2: “Mild Gaming” I prefer to play my games windowed (1280×720) instead of a full screen so I can keep an eye out for computer stats and temperatures. I can run Crysis with Extreme Particles mod @ Ultra High 4xAA in 1280×720 and get 20~30fps. this goes pretty much the same for NFShift, and Starcraft 2. I couldn’t play Oblivion with these settings in a window, the same for Front Mission 5 and Metro 2033.
Pro 3: “Beats Audio Does Work!” Sounds wonderful (for the first 30 days) through the speakers and any set of headphones. I wish the Beat Audio control panel had more than 2 equalizer presets.
Con 1: “Bad Speaker, Bad” Nearly a month after getting mine in the mail the right speaker broke. I think it’s because of the 2 USB ports on the right hand side get hot. My Blue-Track mouse would keep disconnecting for no reason and finally the speaker went out.
Con 2: “Too Many Drives!?” OMG too many freaking partitions, I swear there was 4 drives. 2 Drives were obviously garbage so I removed those and extended the others.
Con 3: “Bloatware, HP’s Bloatware” Freaking annoying on how much crap they set up on these things now, Icon Packer (trial), Fences, Roxio (doesn’t work) and not to mention HP’s Netflix and Hulu apps (don’t work). I will give them props for giving away a 1 year subscription of Norton for free though.
Other 1: “RAM” The RAM is rated to run @ 667MHz but Everest reports that the max the Envy 17 will push it is 609MHz, so there’s another underclocked part here.
Other 2: “GPU” The ATI Mobility HD 5850 is underclocked from 650MHz to 500MHz which is just 10 or so fps extra and if you really want those frames you can use MSI’s Afterburner software to OC the GPU (I haven’t, neither should you).
Other 3: “Heat” during play time, running Crysis with above settings I only reach temperatures around 180f~190f, idle 145f~150f, and the HDDs never go about 150f. If you expect this too run cool, I’m sorry you’re retarded.
Other 4:”MiniOS” HP tried doing something pretty cool, run a small operating system before Win7 for music, photos, videos and web but it falls short and delivers half way through. Every 5 seconds the pointer stops moving for a second, the miniOS cant detect user music, video, photo folders. It’s sluggish and thankfully you can disable it.
*Edited*
Review by Rich HArkins for HP ENVY 17-1011NR 17.3-Inch Laptop
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Just the facts. or at least anecdotal opinions (from a non-gamer who uses this type of device as a portable development workhorse):
The good:
* Fast. I’ve seen some other i7 units and this definitely keeps pace if not surpasses them. The memory and drives are very fast (2 x 7,200 RPM makes for some nifty RAID 1). Note that the graphics chipset seems to be set at 500MHz, not 1GHz but it seems very snappy to me still.
* The display is great — crisp and clear.
* It’s VERY quiet. Amazingly the quietest laptop I’ve even owned.
* Virtualization works very well on this machine.
* I’m looking forward to using a USB 3.0 drive on this someday.
* Value for the money seems reasonable to me.
The bad:
* You can’t have 3+ displays without a display port device. I’m seeing some confusion over whether it has to be active or not, but right now I’m guessing it has to be an active adapter to VGA or a display port monitor. I can’t test the third display yet since I don’t have an adapter…
* I don’t like the mouse pad. The multi-touch function is a pain, especially since the mouse buttons are part of the pad. This makes resting your trigger thumb rather touchy. It’d be nice to be able to disable it entirely without having to screw with X11 but no Fn key seems to do that.
* The sound from the laptop speakers sucks. I’m a little biased on this since I’m going from the deep, epic sounds of the Harmon/Kardons of my Quasimodo to a set of speakers that have all the acoustic depth of a wet towel. When plugged into a more advanced system, they seem to work fine, but I don’t really understand why I’m supposed to get all jazzed over this “beats audio” thing. The only thing it seems to beat is
* It runs VERY hot when first purchased.
The unavoidably H.P.:
* Upgrade the BIOS and all the drivers right away. Doing that alone decreased heat output greatly for me. (I haven’t been to the hospital for palm burns since.)
* Battery life is not great, even with two batteries included. I’m estimating about 3-4 hours for BOTH TOGETHER. I capitalize not out of anger but to forewarn the wary shopper. This is a portable aircraft carrier, not a dingy. Higher heat levels = more power.
* Why oh why does Windows/HP feel the need to take all four primary partitions on their laptops. (Make your backup DVDs early. Especially if you’re a Linux user and are planning to repartition but might want to make sure they’re available for later. Just sayin’. You don’t want to be one of _those_ guys that has to dig out the recovery NTFS out of the partition table by hand because you accidentally turned on the dynamic drive looking for a way to get an extended partition.)
* When initially started, before the BIOS upgrade, the fn keys would do BOTH the regular operation + the HP operation. Normally you would hold “fn” and then press F1 or what not, but the default state didn’t seem to require the “fn” for whatever reason. The BIOS upgrade seems to have fixed that.
This would be 4.5 stars if possible since it fits my personal needs (if indeed I can get the third display), but since I can’t I have to rate 4 since the machine isn’t really perfect.