HP Envy 17 Late 2011 Unboxing and First Look

We just received our HP Envy 17 Late 2011 model, also known as the Envy 17-3000, it’s a smart looking desktop replacement style laptop that certainly has the capability to fulfill gamers needs or make a great workstation for 3D artists, animators or those that simply need a lot of rendering power from a computer.  The Envy is HP’s premium lineup and as such it gets the royal treatment in terms of packaging, making it worthy of some unboxing pictures and a first thoughts.

Unboxing

The outer box the HP comes in is a mere protective packaging, made to take the knocks and bruises that comes with being transported by FedEx all the way from Shanghai, China.  As such, there’s nothing impressive to mention about this box, but here’s a picture of how it arrives just for the record:

After you get past the packaging box there’s a much more presentable and sleek looking box inside that houses the Envy 17 itself.  The box is Black with a silver Envy 17 logo on one side and silver HP logo on the other:

Opening up the designer box reveals the Envy 17 enwrapped in a high quality cloth that can be used as a dust cover sleeve, then take that out and there’s a nice diagram of the laptop

Finally, after removing the cardboard with the Envy 17 diagram below that you’ll find a cloth bag with the power adapter and cord in it:

The unboxing experience of the Envy 17 is lot more special than your average laptop with a brown cardboard box and everything shoved into little cardboard cutout nooks.

Envy 17 Video Overview

Before moving onto the written first thoughts, and if you’re tired of reading already, you may want to get a quick video overview of the Envy 17 I did:

Envy 17-3000 First Thoughts

The specs for the Envy 17-3000 we’ll be reviewing soon and doing the first thoughts on now are as follows:

• Processor: 2nd generation Intel Core i7-2670QM (2.2 GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 GHz
• Graphics: 1GB AMD Radeon HD 7690M GDDR5 Discrete Graphics
• Memory: 6GB 1333MHz DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
• Storage: 750GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive
• OS: Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Battery: 6-Cell Lithium-Ion Battery
• Ports: 4 USB (1 USB 2.0 and 3 SuperSpeed USB 3.0), HDMI, RJ-45, 2 DisplayPort, 1 microphone, 2 headphone, 1 Ethernet RJ-45, Media Card reader
• Screen: 17.3-inch diagonal Radiance Full HD Infinity LED-backlit Display (1920×1080)
• Optical: Blu-ray player & SuperMulti DVD burner
• WebCam: HP TrueVision HD Webcam
• Weight: 7.38lbs
• Wireless: Intel 802.11a/b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth(R) with Wireless Display Support
• Keyboard: Full-size Radiance backlit keyboard
• Warranty: 2 year limited warranty included

After the whole ceremony of getting the Envy 17-3000 out of the box and actually getting to see and hold the laptop itself my first reaction was “wow, this thing feels solid”.  And heavy.  It’s been a while since I’ve used a 17.3” screen laptop and with the Envy 17 being built with a thick case of metal (aluminum) I was taken aback by the weight of 7.4lbs.  Those used to laptops of this size won’t flinch as it’s no heavier than other laptops in its class, but if you come from a background of using 15-inch and smaller laptops you’ve been warned.

After getting used to the size, the next stage was admiring the overall build quality.  The Envy 17 just feels solid all over, the lid looks and feels bullet proof.  Opening the lid is a chore simply because the hinge is so rigid.  Even though the screen is large, there’s no way the screen is going to wobble given the firmness of the hinges.   Once you do get the screen opened, you’ll find the keyboard covered by a protective layer for shipping, this is to prevent the keys from scratching the screen during any big bumps incurred while shipping.

After removing this protective keyboard cover the keyboard is revealed in its full glory, it’s very spacious and includes a number pad.  Also notable is the volume dial on the right side, it has a Beats Audio logo on it and makes for a quick and easy way to adjust volume on your multimedia powerhouse.

The palm rest areas of the keyboard are very solid, no flexing whatsoever there.  The entire keyboard felt solid during the hour or so I was using it.  One of my favorite features of the keyboard is the backlighting, it just makes it so much easier to find keys and also looks darn nice:

Moving onto the screen, I got the 1920 x 1080 Radiance screen, it’s not IPS like the Envy 15-3000 we reviewed, but it’s no slouch of a display even though it is TN-panel.  Colors are rich and vibrant and horizontal viewing angles are excellent.  Even if vertical viewing angles aren’t as wide as what you’d obviously get with IPS, I still found them to be decent:

HP Envy 17 Radiance Screen straight on	HP Envy 17 Radiance Screen tilted back
HP Envy 17 Radiance Screen tilted forward	HP Envy 17 Radiance screen horizontal view

There was a lot of concern with the color accuracy on the HP Envy 15 IPS screen, people were reporting reds displaying as orange, I can’t comment specifically on the Envy 15 as I haven’t used it, but to these eyes the default wallpaper appears to have a red circle in the middle:

The port selection on the Envy 17 is impressive, there’s no lack of display output options, you get two DisplayPort ports and HDMI.  If you like a couple of monitors alongside the laptop monitor itself then you are set.  Here’s a look at what you get on each side in terms of ports:

On the right: Media card reader, HDMI, 2 DisplayPorts, USB 3.0, USB 2.0, Ethernet, Power jack

On the left: 2 USB 3.0, microphone jack, dual headphone jacks

There a lot of nice little design touches on the Envy 17-3000.  I especially like the orange accents that can be found along the speaker grills and the Beats Audio logo on the volume dial and front of the laptop:

The nice design on the volume dial carries over to the actual system, check out this video of how the audio dial brings up a nice heads up display graphic on the screen to show where the volume level is:

Performance wise the Envy 17 is not going to let you down.  It comes with an AMD 7690M graphics card and Intel Core i7 Quad Core graphics.  There are dual hard drive bays so it’s easy to put in an SSD for improved performance as well.  I ran some benchmarks out of the box and got the following scores:

PCMark 7: 2,703 PCMarks

PCMark Vantage: 10,120 PCMarks

3DMark Vantage: 6970 3DMarks

Again, those scores were without any driver updates, performance tweaking or hardware upgrades – simply what you get out of the box.  To see how things look as far as graphics performance in 3DMark and the frame rates you get there I took this video:

We’ll certainly have more in depth benchmarks for the full review, but at least you get a taste with these results.

Overall the updated Envy 17 looks to be a very promising laptop.  It’s got a fantastic design, excellent build quality and a slew of features.  But the devil is in the details of course, and we haven’t combed to find those yet, so stay tuned and we’ll have a full review in the next couple of weeks!

[via Laptop Reviews]

Related posts:

1. HP Envy Series – late 2011 refresh (Video) The HP Envy is one of those Windows powered portable computers that actually looks good. The good news keep coming with upgrades being released by HP. More details below. The...
2. HP ENVY 15 Hands on and unboxing The ENVY series of laptops has defined HP’s high end for the last few years, and the trend continues with the newly remodeled ENVY 15. The high-powered series has become...
3. HP Envy 14 Spectre Teaser Video Released HP has released a teaser video for its upcoming Envy 14 Spectre release, you can view the video below: The video itself doesn’t give away a whole lot other than...