HP Envy 15 TouchSmart 15-j000 ‘Haswell’ Notebook Review

Introduction

Earlier this year, i got to review HP’s Envy 4 notebook which featured a third generation Ivy Bridge notebook. Today, i will be testing out HP’s latest HP Envy 15 notebook which is powered by Intel’s fourth generation of Haswell processor.

We reviewed Haswell back when it launched and the main improvements we saw with the

desktop Core series was its power efficient design and the new HD graphics core which delivers much improved performance  over the last generation integrated graphics processors. HP’s new Envy 15 lineup is also featuring their new Touch Smart technology which offers a fully integrated touch experience that goes well with the Windows 8 Metro design on Windows tablets but how does it performs on a notebook PC? Well that along with dozen other set of features and performance of the HP Envy 15 we are going to find out in this review.

Packaging and Accessories

The HP Envy 15 TouchSmart shipped inside a plain and large cardboard box with an HP and Beatsaudio logo embedded on it. Sides of the box had a specification sheet which details information regarding the hardware featured inside the notebook. Inside the box packaging the HP Envy 16 notebook was held by foam and bubble wraps to protect it from any kind of structural damage while carrying or traveling.

There wasn’t anything except the AC charging adapter inside the package and a few installation, warranty manuals. This is pretty much the standard packaging of any laptop commercially available but it would be a nice gesture if PC makers start offering some additional accessories with their notebooks and ultrabooks such as let’s say a USB stick? Now that might come in handy!

Design

The design scheme used by HP is quite elegant with an metallic silver coating on the top and keyboard sections. The front also has a large HP logo engraved in its center. From the sides, the notebook almost seems as if its less than 1-inch and that it is, the actual dimensions of the notebook are - 14.94 x 9.87 x 1.18 in. The screen is 15.6″ surrounded by thick black bezels with a glossy display and curved edges that provides a smoother feel.

The back is made up of plastic and is colored matte black. While holding, the HP Envy 15 does give a really good impression with the black and silver color scheme. A large portion of the backside is dedicated to the air cooling vents, some are even located at the left side to blow heat out of the internal body. While the design of HP’s Envy 15 looks good, it is however a bit heavy weighing in at over 2.5 Kilograms which is heavier than most of the note-books i have used recently.

HP Envy 15 Specifications

As i mentioned earlier, the HP Envy 15 is powered by Intel’s latest fourth generation ‘Haswell’ micro-architecture featuring the new 22nm 3D Tri-gate process technology which reduces the overall power consumption of the processor while maintaining better IPC performance.

The Haswell processor used in the notebook is codenamed Core i7-4700MQ which is Intel’s top mobile processor featuring a quad core multi-threaded design running at 2.4 GHz at stock and 3.4 GHz at turbo frequency. Intel’s Core i7-4700MQ features 6 MB of L3 cache and a 47W TDP. Instruction set extensions supported by the Core i7-4700MQ include SSE 4.1/4.2, AVX 2.0.

The Mainboard of the HP Envy 15 notebook is powered by the HM87 chipset, the CPU is shipped within a PGA package. The HP Envy 15 comes with 8 GB DDR3 SDRAM (4GB x 2) memory clocked at frequency of 1600 MHz operating in Dual Channel mode.

The graphics side is powered by Intel’s HD 4600 graphics die which is a GT2 class integrated graphics processors offering 20 Execution Units, 2 ROPs and 4 TMUs. The small die has 1400 million transistors integrated on it in an 177mm2 die size. The core clock for the GPU is maintained at 400 MHz at base and 1.15 GHz at its max dynamic clock speed. Although not comparable to the Iris and Iris Pro chips offered on the low power Haswell chips, the GT2 iGPU still offers a nice punch with performance just on par with AMD’s Trinity and Richland on-board GPUs.

For storage, the HP Envy 15 TouchSmart offers a 1 TB (5400 RPM) hard disk drive. The use of an HDD solution is a huge letdown and a major reason for the sluggish performance of the HP Envy 15 which i will go into details later in this article. I do want to mention that if HP had gone for a SSD or even an Hybrid solution than it would have been a better choice. With the technical details all sorted out, let’s head over to learn about the display quality.

	HP Envy 15 TouchSmart 15-j000
Processor	Intel Core i7-4700MQ Quad Core (2.4/3.4 GHz)
Graphics	Intel HD Graphics 4600 GT2
Memory	8 GB DDR3 (Dual Channel) @ 1600 MHz
Hard Drive	1 TB 5400 RPM HDD
Network Interface	Gigabit Ethernet LAN 802.11 b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth
Battery	6-Cell (47WHr) Li-ion
Ports	4 USB 3.0, 1 HDMI, 1 RJ45, 1 Headphone out
Expansion Slots	Mutli-Format Digital media card reader
Display	15.6-inch diagonal HD BrightView LED-backlit (1366×768)
Keyboard	Standard Keyboard (Non-Backlit)
Dimensions	14.94 x 9.87 x 1.18 in
Weight	5.62 lb
Webcam/Audio	HP TrueVision HD Webcam, Beats Audio 4 Speakers
Price	$899.99