HP Envy 15-1030ef

Taking your first look at the HP Envy 15, you can’t help comparing it to the 15'' MacBook Pro. It has the same stripped-down look as the Apple machine, with very handsome bronze and silver metallic effects. HP has finally moved back towards more restrained looks, and we congratulate them. Design-wise, the chassis isn’t made up of a single block of aluminium, as with the MacBook. The material used here is magnesium, which makes it possible to build a light but strong chassis. Only the display lid is aluminium, which strengthens the impression of quality this machine gives off. Build quality and finish are excellent.

The keyboard is wide and complete, with spaced, Chiclet-style keys. It’s very comfortable to use, with a nice feel and moderate typing noise. But the lack of backlighting is a big drawback for use in low-light conditions, especially given the arrangement of the multimedia keys. They’re set to the left of the keyboard, which may look good, but it’s not at all convenient to use. Your fingers naturally reach for certain important keys (Ctrl, Shift, Tab, etc.) at the far left of the keyboard, and the lack of a clear separation from the function keys is very disorienting.

The touchpad is truly excellent. It’s very wide (100 x 62 mm) and is impressively comfortable to use, precise and is very easy to slide your fingers across it. It has a matte surface and is multi-point and clickable over more than half its surface area. It would be nice to find this level of touchpad quality on other laptops.

The webcam is fairly good overall. It lacks definition and sharpness, and overexposed areas burn out. But the fluidity is excellent. And one very good point is that it’s night-vision enabled – it automatically switches to infrared mode when the ambient light decreases. Obviously you lose the colours since it shoots in black and white, but you can be seen in total darkness!

Unfortunately the Envy 15’s ventilation is noisy. There’s a continuous fan noise, and the fan ramps up to turbine mode during processor-intensive tasks and heavy file copying. The heat dissipates poorly, as you can feel if you place your hand under the machine.

Connectivity is very limited and the ports are all arranged along the right-hand edge of the machine, except for the power connector, which is on the left, and the 2-in-1 memory-card reader on the front. There are three USB 2.0 ports, including one e-SATA combo, one HDMI, one RJ45, the anti-theft connector, and one headphone/mic combo. So all the essentials are there – except that this model has no optical drive!

Only the battery is accessible from under the computer. There’s also a connector for docking a second long-life, extra-flat battery that the notebook sits on top of. Unfortunately we didn’t receive one of these batteries to test.

The Intel Core i7 720QM quad-core processor used in the HP Envy 15 outperforms all the other CPUs used in the machines we've tested. Compared to our reference computer, the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi3650, which has an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400, and is indexed to 100, the Envy 15 reached a score of 136 (excluding 3D). That’s an excellent score, and the processing speed will make a difference in everything you do with this very responsive machine.


The Core i7’s automatic Turbo mode no doubt accounts at least in part for the great performance. This feature lets the processor adapt its frequency (up to 2.8 GHz) to the application you’re running. For certain applications (like video encoding), the Core i7 720QM uses all four of its cores (multiplied by two thanks to Hyper-Threading), while for other tasks, including the majority of games, it will use only two cores, but at a higher frequency. It's a clever technique, and a very effective one in practice. Performance can sometimes more than double compared to a dual-core model.


Playing 1080p HD (Blu-ray equivalent) video is no problem at all for a machine like this. It could easily be handled by the processor alone, though it’s preferable to leave the task to the GPU. Using the graphics processor, CPU usage drops from approximately 17% to under 1%, and power use drops from 68 to 55 W. While idle, the machine consumes 46 W with the display brightness at 94 cd/m² and WiFi disabled.

The HD 4830 graphics processor used in the HP Envy 15 is a 'light' version of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860, but it still has plenty of power. It’ll let you play the latest games in native resolution (1366 x 768). Crysis is playable with the level of details set to high. It is a good idea to reduce the details a little to take some of the load off during heavy action scenes, which will let you stay beyond 20 frames per second most of the time. Race Driver: GRID played with no problem with the graphics options set to maximum. It was a pleasant surprise, because we didn’t really expect that from a machine of this type.

The audio section of the Envy 15 is well above the sound quality of the average notebook. Naturally the bass leaves something to be desired in absolute terms, but the quality of the sound reproduction is surprisingly good. It’s clean and detailed. This is undoubtedly due to HP’s partnering with Beats Audio to use their sound solution. The headphone output is good, despite a slight hiss that was audible when no music was playing.

We didn’t expect the HP Envy 15 and its six-cell battery to break any battery life records. And sure enough, we were a little disappointed – the Envy clocked only 1 hour 42 minutes playing video with the display set to 100 cd/m², headphones plugged in, and Wi-Fi disabled. By comparison, the 15'' MacBook Pro managed 3 hours 19 minutes in the same test. Those figures do need to be taken with a pinch of salt, though, because Apple’s notebook has a larger battery.

Still, we’d have liked to see the HP top the 2 hour. mark. If you’re a true nomad, you’ll have to go for the additional battery, which increases the Envy’s thickness and weight.

 At 2.35 kg, the Envy is lightweight, despite its 15.6” display. It’s 140 g lighter than the 15'' MacBook Pro. However, the HP Envy 15 is 2.4 mm thicker. Nevertheless it’s still very thin.

The HP Envy 15 is equipped with Instant-On technology. This solution offers a mini OS that can boot in 10 seconds. With it, you can do basic tasks like browsing the web, read your e-mail or listen to music.

It comes in handy when you need to check on something quickly. However, whereas you’d think energy consumption would be low, the system uses just as much power, which reduces the advantage of the feature. Windows 7 started up in only 35 seconds (to the desktop). Shutdown took 16 seconds. Is 25 extra seconds really too long to wait to have access to all system functions?