HP EliteBook 8740w Overview

When you edit on the road, it’s often a challenge finding the right machine to be your reliable road warrior. This is when it becomes time to bump your laptop up a notch into the mobile workstation class of machines. Mobile workstations are tough, durable and designed to be desktop replacements. As such they are larger and heavier than a small laptop or netbook, but that’s OK. They are meant to survive in challenging locations.

The HP EliteBook 8740w comes in with a hefty price tag, but for serious creative professionals, it comes with the territory. If you want the best, you have to lay down the cash for it. But I’m not making any final decisions yet. I have a long way to go before I give my final review. Come back for the second part of my review where I dive even further into the hardware and software in the HP EliteBook 8740w battery and show you it’s not all rainbows and unicorns in happy town. No, there are some donwnfalls, and maybe even some pitfalls, in this workstation. For the third part of the review, I will dive into the meat and potatoes of any motionographers life–render times. Oh, and we’ll give away one of these beasts to a lucky reader!

The Quadro 5000M card does support Premiere Pro CS5′s Mercury playback engine and hence one can expect realtime playback when working with multiple layers of native tapeless footage (eg, avchd, avcintra, xdcam, RED (R3d) , dslr etc). Even Neo3D which is a plugin for editing stereoscopic footage in Premiere Pro CS5 works quite well on this machine.

A high-end mobile workstation should offer the kind of performance speeds associated with a modest desktop computer. Or put another way, you might expect your new mobile workstation to perform much like your desktop workstation from a couple of years ago. Either description could apply to the 8740w. It’s very fast for a mobile workstation, but will likely feel somewhat slower than your recently purchased desktop workstation. On MAXON’s CineBench R10 benchmark test, the HP EliteBook 8740w AC adapter scored 10,235 points on the CPU render test and 7,380 points on the OpenGL render test. With the 3DMark Vantage benchmark, it scored a P8184 overall with 10,776 points for the CPU and 7,576 points for the GPU. If you’re not familiar with mobile workstations, don’t be put off if these scores are well below the scores for your current desktop. There are inherent design constraints that cause laptop computers to lag behind their desktop counterparts.

The HP EliteBook 8740w is a BEAST! It has a metal casing; very heavy, very well protected, very much like a tank, which is a good thing but with that said. It's also too heavy to take it on the go. The battery is also huge and heavy, like a giant brick. The combination of the laptop and the HP EliteBook 8740w battery would make it impossible to carry around all day.

I took the photos of the skull with the display in the background to test out the color settings and show how it looked in lighted conditions and at wide viewing angles. As you can see, you’ve got a nice wide viewing angle. No one works at that angle, but yeah, there is no visible darkening when moving about dodging things people are throwing at you. The light reflects on the screen, but it’s not as bright as a display with a shiny screen. It’s anti-glare, but not completely anti-glare. OK, I was going to finish the post a long time ago. I really wish you could see how these photos look on this display.

And that's not where the hefty aspect of the HP EliteBook 8740w ends - it will cost you around $3000 to get your hands on one of these, depending on configuration. But both build quality and specification are largely representative of a laptop at this price level.

The HP DreamColor LED-backlit screen is very bright and makes most graphics pop, it really is better than most desktop LCD displays which makes me very envious when I’m using my desktop computer.

If you're in the market for a mobile workstation with lots of CPU power, RAM and hard drive capacity, and most importantly, an excellent screen, the 8740W is definitely one to consider.

But that’s really not the whole story. We are talking about a mobile workstation with an NVIDIA Quadro 5000M inside. That’s quite a technology feat, especially considering that just a year ago we were going gaga over the Fermi architecture and the heat and power issues associated with it. They’ve chained the beast, so to speak, and have crammed it nicely into a quiet, tight little package that just hums along merrily while a HP EliteBook 8740w adapter nuclear blast furnace is raging inside, mere inches away from my fingers. Let’s not forget, we’re talking of a slightly less powerful version of the workstation monster that earned our coveted Golden Fedora (the only GPU to ever do so on Icrontic,) the Quadro 6000, which Bobby Miller called “the fastest workstation card alive“. My benchmarks in CAD/CAM performance are telling, and our friends over at SolidSmack also pushed the 8740W through some very specific GPU- and CPU-crushing tests.

The EliteBook 8740W is a big beast: it has a 17in screen, a base that's chock-a-block full of ports and slots, and it weighs over 3.6kg. Its LCD screen is one of HP's DreamColor panels and it's one of the best displays we've ever seen on a notebook. Colour reproduction was excellent during our tests and its viewing angles are wider than what you'll find with a typical notebook screen.

In After Effects, I had an old project with the usual solids, C4D movie files and a short list of effects that I felt would be a good starting point for a quick render test. On my old computer, the render took 5 minutes 31 seconds. On the HP 8740w, it took 13 seconds. Wow. I knew my old computer was slow, but I didn’t think it was that slow. Right away, I knew this was going to be an eye opening review. I proceded to move on to test number two.

I am getting picky here but on the outside of the machine, just under the screen, there are a whole bunch of flashing lights (volume, brightness, etc.) that I couldn’t seem to dim or turn off. They got quite distracting when working at night.

You might be thinking: "So where is HP's individual course?" – In the accessories. Two external HP AV08 battery solutions are offered for the largest workstation in the collection (link). They can be strapped to the base unit's bottom via an own interface. There is a 12 cell battery pack with a weight of about 0.8 kilograms and a capacity of 95 Wh (about 150 euro) or a somewhat weaker option, an 8 cell battery pack with 52 Wh and 450 grams (street price of 80 euro) available. The Dell WU946 battery life they reach can extend the recorded rates accordingly (+75% up to + 140%).

The main body of the laptop is covered in the "HP DuraCase" and "HP DuraFinish" which is essentially a hard plastic and strong magnesium alloy inner shell much like its predecessor strengthened by a brushed aluminum outer shell that is scratch resistant. HP uses a darker color on the outside of the mobile workstations and a lighter silver finish on the standard EliteBook series. The outer shell of the screen casing is made of metal, but the inner screen bezel is plastic. The entire chassis from the base to the screen lid feels exceptionally strong and resistant to flex. The keyboard is the only exception to that rule since it has a tendency to "bounce" under your fingertips when you type with heavy pressure.

The EliteBook 8740w also includes QuickLook 3, which offers instant access to your cached Outlook data, even from a powered-off state. Where older iterations of QuickLook could only show you what was already in your Outlook cache, such as e-mails, contacts, calendar events and task lists, the newest version allows you to edit and update this data on the fly, with updates synching automatically upon power up.

The 8740w would be an awfully expensive notebook to bring to a LAN party—but you could and you’d be glad you did. Where it’ll be more at home, however, is in the hands of a professional designer, architect, or technician who needs the high level of color accuracy of its display. Just make sure the purchase doesn’t overdraw your checking account and be sure to eat your Wheaties before you pick it up and start carting it around.

The beauty and strength of the HP EliteBook 8740w makes it look fine, but its real power is inside. The HP EliteBook 8740w  is no run-of-the-mill computer, and the novice user would probably never realize what is inside. It would feel like a first time driver, driving down the streets in a high-speed car. The seasoned computer user will realize how powerful this computer is because it has Intel Core i7 processor, 8 GB 1333 MHzDDR3 SDRAM, and NVIDIA Quadro 5000m. Additional features that can be found are a 17″ LED-backlit WXGA anti-glare HP DreamColor display, 500GB Hard drive, and a spill-resistant keyboard, that is full-sized and backlit. Other additional features are an external VGA monitor, a 2 MP built-in webcam, 4 USB ports, one eSATA port and also a Smart Card Reader, a mic, and headphones. This laptop is called the HP AV08 battery, and it does boast of elite features.

Overall, my first impressions of this machine are this machine, despite the small annoyances, are that it?s well built, quiet and way more power than I?ve ever had before. I opened up about 40 full size photos and didn?t even dent the processing or slow down the performance or responsiveness of the multiple programs running. I plan to apply a little more pressure to see just what it can handle. In the meantime, I leave you with photos of a meat skull posing with the HP EliteBook 8740W.

Pros:
Gorgeous screen
Business-rugged

Cons:
Artifacting and shimmering in high-def video
Touch buttons on top are not super-responsive

Bottom Line:
If you're looking for a business-rugged Dell WU946 battery that has all the power of a desktop and all the sexiness of a Mac, this is the notebook for you.