CPU: Intel Core i5 480M; RAM: 4 GB DDR3 1333 MHz; Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 5850; HDD: 640 GB, 7200 rpm; OS: Windows 7 Pro; display: 17-inches; Weight: 3.41 kgs.
Features
One of the most talked about features of the model we're looking at is the presence of 3D support. The display on the Envy supports up to 120 Hertz and that was enough to give us a hint,
in case the blatant bundling of 3D stereovision glasses wasn't enough. Then there's the high resolution display, which at 1920 x 1080 pixels is something gamers will like. For the 17" notebook, we were a little surprised to find only 3 USB ports though. Generally gamers who connect such notebooks to larger monitors will definitely use at least 2 ports - one each for an additional mouse and keyboard. One of the USB ports doubles as an E-SATA port. An HDMI port supporting the latest 1.4 version of HDMI and a Mini-Display Port for connecting to HDTVs and the like. We received this powerhouse with a 9-cell battery, although a lighter 6-cell one is also available.
The model we received came with a 640 GB hard drive, although HP allows the user to configure up to 2 hard drives, which gamers will salivate at, for speedy RAID 0 becomes a possibility. Alternatively for even more speed, you could consider an SSD and a hard drive for space. Incidentally, the Blu-ray drive that ships with the Envy 17" 3D is also a drive that supports 3D Blu-ray playback - kind of obvious, but essentially making this notebook an expensive, but high quality 3D Blu-ray playback device if you would like to use it thus. We tried a 3D copy of Avatar and needless to say this works pretty well. In fact, the colours are better than we've seen on some TVs, which doesn't mean the display on the Envy is better, but merely that it is implementing 3D better. While such a small display is not cinematic for viewing movies in 3D, it's a good display for the purpose.
Sadly, we couldn't get this to work with most games that we tried. AMD obviously has a few kinks in their 3D component to iron out given that NVIDIA has been doing 3D for awhile now. We tried games like Arcania: A Gothic Tale, Dragon Age 2, Call Of Pripyat, Lost Planet 2 and even Crysis 2, and none of these games worked in 3D! However, we don't blame HP for this, rather AMD is the culprit. If only the Envy 3D 17 came with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570...
The configuration we received was also one of the lower end ones. The Envy 3D 17 is available with a Core i7 quad core processor, 8 GB of RAM and two 750 GB hard drives, but we received one with a dual core processor, 4 GB of RAM and a single 640 GB hard drive. Given this, we found the stated MRP price a little on the higher side, but as we discovered later on, the Envy sells for a lot less on the street.