Battery, Noise, and Heat - HP Envy 17: HP's MacBook Pro Killer?

Battery, Noise, and Heat

Given the high-end components in the HP Envy 17, this notebook clearly wasn't designed to live off the mains for too long. Still, HP has equipped it with a fairly robust six-cell, 62Whr battery and the parts are all capable of being somewhat power efficient.

And the expected mediocre battery life is pretty much what we get here. It should come as no surprise, and it's still a nice step up from the glorified UPS systems in the high-end Clevo notebooks. HP offers a nine-cell battery as an upgrade for the Envy 17 and that should push the unit's idle running time at least over two hours.

Temperatures

If HP brought the clocks down on the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5850 to keep heat at a reasonable level, it seems like they may have cut a little too deep. The Envy 17 posts generally excellent thermals and the only part of the notebook that gets hot to the touch is near the exhaust in the top left. Unfortunately this is near the W-A-S-D cluster, and your palm may get slightly sweaty while gaming on the Envy 17, but it's nowhere near as bad as we've seen on other notebooks (the Gateway ID49C, for example, was uncomfortably hot.)

Unfortunately, the character of the noise by the fan is less than ideal. The notebook remains fairly quiet in normal use, but when the fan kicks on it falls on the high-pitched side. While running thermal tests I was able to mask it with the sound of music playing and so by extension, a good pair of headphones or even the Beats audio speakers built into the notebook should take a lot of the stank off, but this is the price you pay for performance and good thermals with a slimmer design.

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