Originally Posted by Gata
I caught the "waiting for Arrandale" virus, and finally got tired of waiting, looked up my options, and chose between these two.
Macbook Pro 15
2.8 GHZ C2D
4 GB of RAM
9400m+9600m GT
500 GB 7200 RPM HD
Internal Superdrive
Integrated Battery
1400x900
or
HP Envy 15
1.73 GHZ Core i7-720QM
6 GB of RAM
Mobility Radeon HD 5830
500 GB 7200 RPM HD
External BD-ROM USB Drive
6-cell+9-cell slice battery
1920x1080
Primary use (from highest to lowest): Web Browsing, MS Word/Excel/PPT, Gaming (Star Wars: The Force Unleashed only), Photoshop CS3 and Flash CS3 (soon to be CS5), and occasionally some video transcoding. When I work in Photoshop, a little less than half the time, I work at resolutions equal to or greater than 1920x1080. In Flash, I usually have a w/h of 1600x900 and 72 fps. I don't make long animations, just 5-20 sec. ones. Gaming performance doesn't really matter to me.
OS Preference: I am impartial, though I have mainly used windows in my computing experience.
So, which should I go with?
USB 3.0 is a pretty significant advantage for the Envy 15. I'm able to transfer 4-5GB DVD files within a ridiculously short period of time back and forth to drives sitting in my USB 3.0 external dock.
I purchased a custom Envy 15 with the following specs about 1 month ago:
i7-820QM
16GB DDR3 RAM 1333mHz
320GB SSD Raid0
1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD5830
USB 3.0 ports
It is the most lightning fast experience I have ever had working with large files in Photoshop and Illustrator (using CS4 64-bit versions). I can instantly Alt+Tab back and forth between various windows open with memory intensive tasks, such as huge poster files in Photoshop, DVD Studio Pro encoding, 3D games in fullHD 1080p resolution with high fps, such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, etc., with no lag whatsoever.
It does have several drawbacks, namely:
- runs extremely hot - i use Zalman nc1000 laptop cooler and that seems to do the trick
- low battery life - with the optional 9-cell slice battery it lasts about 4-5 hours, which is much longer than my previous laptop; however, not great. i think for any int'l flight I would need to take an extra slice battery. With the slice battery in, it is extremely heavy, but the slice battery is well designed so that it retains a relatively sleek shape. without the slice battery, forget it, you only get 2 hours max.
- the multi-touch trackpad is kind of a joke -- much less sensitive than the MBP trackpad. I often have to jiggle my fingers around in order to do 2-finger scrolling or special gestures
- horrible placement of special function keys on the keyboard - i often wind up hitting some moronic key to open a print menu or email application when i'm in the middle of working in photoshop or playing a game
- low 4k read speed - it is about 10x slower than it should be, even slower than the 4k write speed - many others have found the same problem with the Envy's - however, as I mentioned, it is so fast I cannot notice any difference. I'm not sure in what practical situation I would be using the 4k read speed, but the fact that it is lower than it should be concerns me.
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008
--------------------------------
Sequential Read : 469.045 MB/s
Sequential Write : 155.626 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 253.068 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 133.743 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 10.294 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 55.438 MB/s
Test Size : 100 MB Date : 2010/03/10 1:54:01
I need to run Final Cut Pro for work and I've been trying to decide whether to
(1) buy used MacPro desktop;
(2) buy used MBP;
(3) sell my Envy and buy new MBP; or
(4) install hackintosh'd OSX on my Envy
Any suggestions?
I noticed the new MBPs are using the i7-620QM, Nvidia Geforce 330M , no USB 3.0, no eSATA and cost around $1k more than comparable Envy 15 models.
I'm really interested to see some reviews from anyone who purchased a new MBP. It's funny someone mentioned that people are recommending the Envy on this Mac forum because I was on the HP Envy forum earlier and people are recommending MBPs ;-)