Formula.350
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2011
- Messages
- 1,102
UPDATED WITH PRELIMINARY BENCHMARKS AND AUDIO IMPRESSIONS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I decided that this was just far too much to post as a reply in the original thread and figured I might as well give it one of its own. Much of the context of this is written with having read --this post-- from that thread, at the very least.
Not sure if one can qualify this as a review, unboxing, first impressions, or just the mostly-coherent ramblings of a tech junkie (aka user-experience). For the purpose of it all I qualify it as a First Impressions + User Experience = Micro Review. (I've never been much of a writer when I 'had' to, but I have a couple under my belt from during my time as the Editor for Pro-Clockers once upon a time. Point is, there will of course be personal bias exhibited here! That, and me being less mindful of my grammar.. lol)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As an update to information I posted in the other thread: Seems I misquoted specs about the hard drive on the AMD model... I could have sworn it came with the 2TB and the Intel model came with a 1TB + 256GB m.2 SSD, to the point I feel a bit crazy now that the invoice and their site both show 1TB on the AMD model
After delays at customs, it arrived! One end of the box has definitely seen better days though, unfortunately that's the end with the laptop, not the end with only the charging brick (box is a thin rectangle vs more of the thin square that I'm used to them arriving in). So fingers crossed that no harm has came to it, as the only foam the thing incorporated was a thin (3/4in?) layer on top. Just cardboard with folds to keep it spaced apart, not even corrugated cardboard to absorb any rough ride. *grinding eye-roll*
Which upon removal from it's plastic bag and inspecting, I can't help but wonder if it was that rough ride or if it's the Grade-A craftsmanship to blame, but looks like the screen is slightly bent? With lid closed (as they come out of the box) one side has a significant gap compared to the other. Really do hope it isn't bent and opening/closing will sort it out, IOW praying it's hinge related... (And yes I've taken pictures of the box prior to opening, and the gap prior to ever lifting the screen, which the fabric sheet is still in place). Pic #1 is Left side with no gap (fabric visible), Pic #2 is Right side with gap. Pic #3 is close up which shows the gap and the screen bumper, which visible above the bumper is reflection, a reflection which wouldn't be there if it were touching (has some annotation).
No cracks on the screen, so that's good. Pretty sure I figured out why most of that gap was there, and feels as though it comes down to shit craftsmanship :\ The screen (digitizer?) wasn't seated completely in the lid all along the top edge. Took pics, then gently squeezed between my fingers in multiple spots which snapped it in to place. Still a slight gap on that same side when closed, so we'll see if there's any damage after powering up. Pic #1 shows the top edge of the lid where the screen isn't snapped into the frame, while Pic #1 is just zoomed in more and gives better detail of what is what (the rubberized lip does protrude on other sides). Pic #3 is a properly (I hope) recessed edge and is roughly the same amount indicated by the bottom line in #2...
The AMD FX sticker is cockeyed Even this shit Acer Netbook had straight stickers. Foreshame HP heh (Honestly though, it's the only sticker on the thing, which looks a helluva lot nicer than most new laptops with 10 square miles of "What's Inside!" stickers, so it does kinda bum ya out that those can be applied with enough care but this tiny sticker can't)
Onto the... um... USB PowerBrick Adapter? lmao Hope this doesn't mean it'll A) Take a month to charge. B) Not provide enough power to allow the system to charge while being used in any kind of meaningful capacity. I have honestly dealt with larger SMPS wall-warts for smaller devices than this, which as you can see how the Netbook's compares!
Left to Right... Circa-2001 Dell Inspiron power brick for an early P4 era laptop. Circa-2010(?) Acer Aspire One Atom-powered Netbook. Circa-Today HP ENVY x360 power adapter...
UPDATE: For those curious, it's a 45W (19.5V 2.3A) adapter. Charging does not take forever, YAY! While plugged in and light desktop usage, it took roughly 1hr 45min to charge from ~14% battery (50% screen brightness). HOWEVER, oh my... that little thing would make for one hell of a coffee warmer! I decided to stick a thermal probe to it and ... 53.5C That's nearly 130F for the rest of us... Ambient was 19C (66F) BTW and I do have decent airflow in my room, so it was kind cooling the thermal probe. I figure it was closer to 55-57C if the sensor wasn't being cooled, which I can only imagine what inside temps are. All I know is that's a lot of waste heat, which if [H] and other site's PSU reviews have taught me is that heat == inefficiency and the more efficient a conversion of voltage is, the cooler devices run. So 80+ I do not anticipate lol (If anyone is smart enough to figure out a very rough efficiency % estimate of going from 120V AC to 19.5V DC with roughly 55C waste heat, I'd be interested. lol)
Last gripe: The lid... Is OPENING a laptop's screen an afterthought these days? What exactly do they think about when designing this aspect? lol Sure they provided a little lip for you to get some purchase on with your finger but then what? The thing is light and all you end up doing is lifting the whole thing up! There's no edge around the bottom half to grab at all, it's contoured into a thin meeting point so unless you have a bit of fingernail to hook onto, you'd need a some sort of pry-bar heh I seriously may need to just go "Form over Function" and take some packaging tape to stick on the keyboard palm rest with a folded end just so I have something to hold onto
.....
And power up... Err... Ok it actually took me 2minutes to find the power button I feel like I'm using a giant cellphone, cuz it's on the side next to the Kensington Lock hole.
Anyways now we're powering up, and *whistles* ... that's some lovely light bleed along the top of the screen (naturally only noticeable on a black screen like during boot up). I sure do recommend to anyone setting up Windows 10 for the first time to not use the "Express Setup" and do Customize. That appears to be where a LOT of that tracking crap is enabled at Of the 12ish options to turn something On/Off, the only one I left "On" was the one to Send Error Reports to Microsoft! lol The rest were all of that "Send usage of this and that", "Make browsing better by pre-loading things we think you'll view", "Connect to this or that sort of hotspot, or because your contacts connect to it", etc etc.
In general, it works well so far. Something to keep in mind is that I'm old school, and am kinda set in my ways on certain things, so some of my opinions on this may be overly-critical. For example I love the keyboard on this Toshiba I'm replacing (and typing this on), as it has the rubber-nipple with scissor-lift keys. Granted, sometimes crap ends up getting in the scissor-lift mechanism which binds up and causes depressing to be tough (usually it's a dog hair, yay Huskies!) but it is very tactile and... well the keys you can tell you're on them because they have a bit of wobble, compared to this Chiclet keyboard on the HP and likely every other modern keyboard on laptops (maybe save for gaming models). Next is that I use a touchpad for it's most basic functions: move the pointing, right-click or left-click. I once again prefer the tactile physical button style touch pads, and not so much these multi-point touch modern variants.
For example: I had bought my mom a new Dell last year for Mother's Day, as she wanted something with a big enough screen and oomph to handle Photoshopping her DSLR pics. I picked up a 15" and had gave it a trial run while setting it up so that she could just turn it on w/o the setup. I tell you... that touchpad is unusable out of the box, and barely so after I futzed with the settings (Windows 8.1, if it matters). First off it would screw up with Palm Detection turned ON, so that had to go. Secondly the lack of physical buttons means clicking while selecting just is a pain due to touch detection. I don't know if it's the drivers, Synaptics software, or just the hardware, but I have SO many issues trying to click and drag to select things or drag and drop thing. If I'm trying to CTRL+Select multiple items it usually ends up unselecting everything when I click to drag said selected things, only dragging the one item. Also I've noticed a lot of times that when I had been typing, due to the style I developed, a lot of times the S or A won't register due to the Chiclet design, which I've never experienced with this Toshiba.
TOUCHPAD & KEYBOARD: That being said, I'll start by saying that the touchpad on this ENVY is like most modern laptops in it's multi-point, lacks L/R physical buttons and has a single center-click button behind the whole pad. There is a general "cheap" feeling to it when you tap-click on things, due to the fact it has that single button behind the entire touchpad. To be clear, this is a tap-click and not a depress of that button, so the cheap feel is due to a sort of hollow-sound combined with a little clunk as a result of my finger tapping the touchpad on account of the pad being physically free-moving (on 3 sides I think). Compared to this Toshiba which the actual touch section is built into the palm rest, tap-clicks have a understandably solid feel to them. Again this could just be that I'm being overly-critical and isn't really what I perceive it to be, so in the end I'll just have to get used to it. Typing on it seems OK so far, albeit the limited amount I've done on it, none of which has been typing anything beyond a few words for input boxes.
Pre-Posting update: Been using it a bit more and so far the keyboard is kinda hampering me. It's going to take quite a bit getting used to.I might also have to see if the Intel model's backlit keyboard (I think someone mentioned it has one?) will work on the AMD model as that'd help quite a lot in terms of getting my hands accustomed to landing on the right place. I'll be damned, it DOES have a backlit keyboard! Fn+F5 turns it on lol As for the touchpad, it's not anywhere near as bad as the Dell's, but I am rather annoyed with it's tap response :\ I'd say roughly 25-30% of my taps aren't registered as a click due to being a bit too soft, which is plenty enough of a tap for this Toshiba. Honestly I blame the fact that there's SO much software driving these newer touchpads that it comes down to interpretation of what is a click, what is an accidental brush, what's a palm, multi-touch response, etc etc which causes it to be less of a mousing surface and more of a bastardized touchscreen.
SCREEN: Is a 15.6" IPS 1080p Touch. The screen is decently bright on the max setting (though definitely not as bright as this Acer One netbook, holy crap is that thing blinding), and dims down fairly well at 0%. I feel 50% is a comfortable indoor-with-lights-on level. I'd say it's a semi-gloss but has no anti-reflection coating on it. View angles Up and Down, the brightness is retained well and doesn't appear to exhibit any quality degradation. Viewing Side to Side there is noticeable dimming but not too significant, retaining readability pretty much until you're looking right across the panel (I suppose that's what they consider 176deg?), in other words if you and someone else were not viewing directly on while watching a video I think both parties would be equally happy. Perhaps worth noting... While messing about in the settings for Resolution I noticed the Radeon control panel display a dialogue window on the corner, which first one I think mentioned the ability to connect to another screen wirelessly if you wanted, which is nice but not the "worth noting" point. The second popup I didn't get time to read fully but... I swear it said "something-something FreeSync display detected(enabled?) something-something display port(?) something-something" Checked out the Radeon Settings, looked at the notifications, and sure enough... "You have connected a AMD FreeSync™ technology (or DP Adaptive-Sync) supported monitor. Use Radeon Settings to enable FreeSync™" so WOOT! I mean sure, not a huge deal given this isn't going to be a gaming powerhouse (*grumbles* thanks to no dual-channel RAM), but to me it's a fairly decent selling point that they should've mentioned on the any number of the pages! When hovering over the FreeSync option it seems to have a range of "40 to 60 Hz", which is good enough for a laptop IMO.
PERFORMANCE: To be conducted Slight concern though, as I noticed when in the Radeon Settings that the memory was clocked at "933MHz", which equates to only DDR4-1866 and not the advertised DDR4-2133! May be a 2133 DIMM, but it doesn't seem to be clocked at that. I'll be sure to contact HP and request a BIOS update if it turns out to not be running at speed. Might need to request a secret DRAM menu to allow us to select the frequencies supported by Carrizo, given I had considered getting a 16GB stick of DDR4-2400.
First is Geekbench3 (BIOS F.09, in case I get them to update): HP HP ENVY x360 Convertible - Geekbench Browser
First up Next up is AIDA64. However, since I've reached the 10 image max on this post, I'll have to utilize the second one Here's the CPUID image though, which shows that it IS unfortunately running at DDR4-1866 Shame on you x2 HP!
BATTERY LIFE: Still running these tests... It did come with a 70% charge, and during my setup had jumped around between 3h 45m remaining and 7hr Xmin remaining. Screen brightness had defaulted to roughly 80% and I assume my having knocked it down to 50% will help a bit more. I also created a Balanced profile (to replace the "HP Recommended" labeled profile), otherwise having all the same settings as the HP but with a Passive fan setting on Battery (tweaked the Low/Critical % levels as well, seemed a bit higher than needed). As for anyone curious, it's a "4 Cell" with a capacity (AIDA reported) of 55,671 mWh, and I presume that it also will have no aftermarket extra-capacity batteries available, given the internal battery design.
Pre-Posting Update: Been using it for a few hours now. Still just general putzing about on the desktop, no internet or other stuff. It's down to 24% and reports roughly 2hr usage left. Figured I'd run it out before I connected it up to that beast of a charger... lol
Update: Watched Robin Williams - Live on Broadway on YouTube, which is 1h 40m long, albeit only in 360p quality. Decided I'd continue using battery instead of plugging it into AC, which when I started off there was roughly 35% remaining charge, giving me roughly a.... 1h 50m to 2h remaining time! (It was roughly 3.5hr before started watching) I also decided to keep the battery box open to keep and eye on how this all was effecting things. Again, this is with a "Balanced" profile which for Battery had Screen @ 25% Brightness, Min/Max CPU of 5%/100%, Passive Cooling, and basic other "Balanced" configured options. Worth noting was that for about 1/4 of the time I had the keyboard backlighting on. When it had trickle down to about 25% with 1h 16min batt left I decided I'd turn it off and while the % didn't change any, I was surprised to see the time rise to having 1h 24min left. At any rate, Windows only lets you set the "Critical Action" % as low as 7, which I wanted to run the thing out completely, since at 8% left it was reporting 34minutes of usage left by the time the show was over.
Whether or not one can consider this good or bad, I don't know really. However, I do plan on seeing how it does when watching something with a bit higher resolution.
AUDIO QUALITY: Preliminary results... Gave some music a listen last night and there is good news and bad news...
The BAD news is, either the laptop's speaker setup is lightly damaged, or "Bang & Olufsen" screwed the pooch on designing the audio for this thing. Usually when you listen to audio from something, unless it's mixed to have channel offset, you expect the audio to be received basically equal to each ear. On the ENVY that is not the case... The audio was extremely Right-heavy, and in order to actually make it sound somewhat balanced I had to change the balance to 66R | 44L! Even then, it could've probably gone down to 42 on the Left. There was a noticeable difference in what was being produced through the L channel compared to the R.
The GOOD news is, the audio that was delivered was very good! It was rich, and warm, neither are things I expected. I believe it has a "2.1" configuration, which the amount of bass produced would make me feel that there is indeed a lil Sub hiding out in there. Furthermore, listening through headphones (earbuds), I was quite astonished by the sound quality it delivered. Basically, it comes across as the same rich and warm audio as through the speakers. Also, confirmed that it isn't subsystem related as both channels came across perfectly normal.
I listened to How To Destroy Angel's "An Omen" 6-track EP (320Kbps MP3s) , which is sort of a mix between Pop and Industrial (fitting, given it IS Trent Reznor's wife singing, with Reznor, Atticus Ross, & Rob Sheridan). After that I gave The Chemical Brothers album "Dig Your Own Hole" a go (FLAC), which for anyone who doesn't know them you're living under a rock and are missing out, so go utilize YouTube!
Since I don't yet have Foobar2000 installed, I just used MediaPlayerClassic in an effort to have no sort of audio enhancements being used beyond whatever Bang & Olufsen have messed with through drivers. However, do note, that their audio control panel disables any of the 3 presets you can select when using headphones: Music, Voice, Movie, and none of which fixed the aforementioned speaker issue when disabled.
Overall I'm really happy with the audio output from this thing, so much so that I may be able to retire my old Galaxy S1 that I purposed as just a media player, as I loved the sound it delivered with VoodooSound enabled Kernel thanks to the Wolfson DAC. There was PLENTY of volume headroom while using earbuds, as I had it at 24 which I considered comfortable. I'll give the Sennheisers that came with the Xonar a go in a bit to see how they are handled, but I'm sure it'll be fine.
Anything else I've missed, or anyone is interested in, I'll add later. Keep in mind that running tests which require big downloads (like 3DMark) I'm going to have to decline on as that'll just eat up too much of my precious 18GB/mo :\ (plus, my internet is slow as hell most times, sometimes as fun as 20-30k/s)
Enjoy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I decided that this was just far too much to post as a reply in the original thread and figured I might as well give it one of its own. Much of the context of this is written with having read --this post-- from that thread, at the very least.
Not sure if one can qualify this as a review, unboxing, first impressions, or just the mostly-coherent ramblings of a tech junkie (aka user-experience). For the purpose of it all I qualify it as a First Impressions + User Experience = Micro Review. (I've never been much of a writer when I 'had' to, but I have a couple under my belt from during my time as the Editor for Pro-Clockers once upon a time. Point is, there will of course be personal bias exhibited here! That, and me being less mindful of my grammar.. lol)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As an update to information I posted in the other thread: Seems I misquoted specs about the hard drive on the AMD model... I could have sworn it came with the 2TB and the Intel model came with a 1TB + 256GB m.2 SSD, to the point I feel a bit crazy now that the invoice and their site both show 1TB on the AMD model
After delays at customs, it arrived! One end of the box has definitely seen better days though, unfortunately that's the end with the laptop, not the end with only the charging brick (box is a thin rectangle vs more of the thin square that I'm used to them arriving in). So fingers crossed that no harm has came to it, as the only foam the thing incorporated was a thin (3/4in?) layer on top. Just cardboard with folds to keep it spaced apart, not even corrugated cardboard to absorb any rough ride. *grinding eye-roll*
Which upon removal from it's plastic bag and inspecting, I can't help but wonder if it was that rough ride or if it's the Grade-A craftsmanship to blame, but looks like the screen is slightly bent? With lid closed (as they come out of the box) one side has a significant gap compared to the other. Really do hope it isn't bent and opening/closing will sort it out, IOW praying it's hinge related... (And yes I've taken pictures of the box prior to opening, and the gap prior to ever lifting the screen, which the fabric sheet is still in place). Pic #1 is Left side with no gap (fabric visible), Pic #2 is Right side with gap. Pic #3 is close up which shows the gap and the screen bumper, which visible above the bumper is reflection, a reflection which wouldn't be there if it were touching (has some annotation).
No cracks on the screen, so that's good. Pretty sure I figured out why most of that gap was there, and feels as though it comes down to shit craftsmanship :\ The screen (digitizer?) wasn't seated completely in the lid all along the top edge. Took pics, then gently squeezed between my fingers in multiple spots which snapped it in to place. Still a slight gap on that same side when closed, so we'll see if there's any damage after powering up. Pic #1 shows the top edge of the lid where the screen isn't snapped into the frame, while Pic #1 is just zoomed in more and gives better detail of what is what (the rubberized lip does protrude on other sides). Pic #3 is a properly (I hope) recessed edge and is roughly the same amount indicated by the bottom line in #2...
The AMD FX sticker is cockeyed Even this shit Acer Netbook had straight stickers. Foreshame HP heh (Honestly though, it's the only sticker on the thing, which looks a helluva lot nicer than most new laptops with 10 square miles of "What's Inside!" stickers, so it does kinda bum ya out that those can be applied with enough care but this tiny sticker can't)
Onto the... um... USB Power
Left to Right... Circa-2001 Dell Inspiron power brick for an early P4 era laptop. Circa-2010(?) Acer Aspire One Atom-powered Netbook. Circa-Today HP ENVY x360 power adapter...
UPDATE: For those curious, it's a 45W (19.5V 2.3A) adapter. Charging does not take forever, YAY! While plugged in and light desktop usage, it took roughly 1hr 45min to charge from ~14% battery (50% screen brightness). HOWEVER, oh my... that little thing would make for one hell of a coffee warmer! I decided to stick a thermal probe to it and ... 53.5C That's nearly 130F for the rest of us... Ambient was 19C (66F) BTW and I do have decent airflow in my room, so it was kind cooling the thermal probe. I figure it was closer to 55-57C if the sensor wasn't being cooled, which I can only imagine what inside temps are. All I know is that's a lot of waste heat, which if [H] and other site's PSU reviews have taught me is that heat == inefficiency and the more efficient a conversion of voltage is, the cooler devices run. So 80+ I do not anticipate lol (If anyone is smart enough to figure out a very rough efficiency % estimate of going from 120V AC to 19.5V DC with roughly 55C waste heat, I'd be interested. lol)
Last gripe: The lid... Is OPENING a laptop's screen an afterthought these days? What exactly do they think about when designing this aspect? lol Sure they provided a little lip for you to get some purchase on with your finger but then what? The thing is light and all you end up doing is lifting the whole thing up! There's no edge around the bottom half to grab at all, it's contoured into a thin meeting point so unless you have a bit of fingernail to hook onto, you'd need a some sort of pry-bar heh I seriously may need to just go "Form over Function" and take some packaging tape to stick on the keyboard palm rest with a folded end just so I have something to hold onto
.....
And power up... Err... Ok it actually took me 2minutes to find the power button I feel like I'm using a giant cellphone, cuz it's on the side next to the Kensington Lock hole.
Anyways now we're powering up, and *whistles* ... that's some lovely light bleed along the top of the screen (naturally only noticeable on a black screen like during boot up). I sure do recommend to anyone setting up Windows 10 for the first time to not use the "Express Setup" and do Customize. That appears to be where a LOT of that tracking crap is enabled at Of the 12ish options to turn something On/Off, the only one I left "On" was the one to Send Error Reports to Microsoft! lol The rest were all of that "Send usage of this and that", "Make browsing better by pre-loading things we think you'll view", "Connect to this or that sort of hotspot, or because your contacts connect to it", etc etc.
In general, it works well so far. Something to keep in mind is that I'm old school, and am kinda set in my ways on certain things, so some of my opinions on this may be overly-critical. For example I love the keyboard on this Toshiba I'm replacing (and typing this on), as it has the rubber-nipple with scissor-lift keys. Granted, sometimes crap ends up getting in the scissor-lift mechanism which binds up and causes depressing to be tough (usually it's a dog hair, yay Huskies!) but it is very tactile and... well the keys you can tell you're on them because they have a bit of wobble, compared to this Chiclet keyboard on the HP and likely every other modern keyboard on laptops (maybe save for gaming models). Next is that I use a touchpad for it's most basic functions: move the pointing, right-click or left-click. I once again prefer the tactile physical button style touch pads, and not so much these multi-point touch modern variants.
For example: I had bought my mom a new Dell last year for Mother's Day, as she wanted something with a big enough screen and oomph to handle Photoshopping her DSLR pics. I picked up a 15" and had gave it a trial run while setting it up so that she could just turn it on w/o the setup. I tell you... that touchpad is unusable out of the box, and barely so after I futzed with the settings (Windows 8.1, if it matters). First off it would screw up with Palm Detection turned ON, so that had to go. Secondly the lack of physical buttons means clicking while selecting just is a pain due to touch detection. I don't know if it's the drivers, Synaptics software, or just the hardware, but I have SO many issues trying to click and drag to select things or drag and drop thing. If I'm trying to CTRL+Select multiple items it usually ends up unselecting everything when I click to drag said selected things, only dragging the one item. Also I've noticed a lot of times that when I had been typing, due to the style I developed, a lot of times the S or A won't register due to the Chiclet design, which I've never experienced with this Toshiba.
TOUCHPAD & KEYBOARD: That being said, I'll start by saying that the touchpad on this ENVY is like most modern laptops in it's multi-point, lacks L/R physical buttons and has a single center-click button behind the whole pad. There is a general "cheap" feeling to it when you tap-click on things, due to the fact it has that single button behind the entire touchpad. To be clear, this is a tap-click and not a depress of that button, so the cheap feel is due to a sort of hollow-sound combined with a little clunk as a result of my finger tapping the touchpad on account of the pad being physically free-moving (on 3 sides I think). Compared to this Toshiba which the actual touch section is built into the palm rest, tap-clicks have a understandably solid feel to them. Again this could just be that I'm being overly-critical and isn't really what I perceive it to be, so in the end I'll just have to get used to it. Typing on it seems OK so far, albeit the limited amount I've done on it, none of which has been typing anything beyond a few words for input boxes.
Pre-Posting update: Been using it a bit more and so far the keyboard is kinda hampering me. It's going to take quite a bit getting used to.
SCREEN: Is a 15.6" IPS 1080p Touch. The screen is decently bright on the max setting (though definitely not as bright as this Acer One netbook, holy crap is that thing blinding), and dims down fairly well at 0%. I feel 50% is a comfortable indoor-with-lights-on level. I'd say it's a semi-gloss but has no anti-reflection coating on it. View angles Up and Down, the brightness is retained well and doesn't appear to exhibit any quality degradation. Viewing Side to Side there is noticeable dimming but not too significant, retaining readability pretty much until you're looking right across the panel (I suppose that's what they consider 176deg?), in other words if you and someone else were not viewing directly on while watching a video I think both parties would be equally happy. Perhaps worth noting... While messing about in the settings for Resolution I noticed the Radeon control panel display a dialogue window on the corner, which first one I think mentioned the ability to connect to another screen wirelessly if you wanted, which is nice but not the "worth noting" point. The second popup I didn't get time to read fully but... I swear it said "something-something FreeSync display detected(enabled?) something-something display port(?) something-something" Checked out the Radeon Settings, looked at the notifications, and sure enough... "You have connected a AMD FreeSync™ technology (or DP Adaptive-Sync) supported monitor. Use Radeon Settings to enable FreeSync™" so WOOT! I mean sure, not a huge deal given this isn't going to be a gaming powerhouse (*grumbles* thanks to no dual-channel RAM), but to me it's a fairly decent selling point that they should've mentioned on the any number of the pages! When hovering over the FreeSync option it seems to have a range of "40 to 60 Hz", which is good enough for a laptop IMO.
PERFORMANCE: To be conducted Slight concern though, as I noticed when in the Radeon Settings that the memory was clocked at "933MHz", which equates to only DDR4-1866 and not the advertised DDR4-2133! May be a 2133 DIMM, but it doesn't seem to be clocked at that. I'll be sure to contact HP and request a BIOS update if it turns out to not be running at speed. Might need to request a secret DRAM menu to allow us to select the frequencies supported by Carrizo, given I had considered getting a 16GB stick of DDR4-2400.
First is Geekbench3 (BIOS F.09, in case I get them to update): HP HP ENVY x360 Convertible - Geekbench Browser
BATTERY LIFE: Still running these tests... It did come with a 70% charge, and during my setup had jumped around between 3h 45m remaining and 7hr Xmin remaining. Screen brightness had defaulted to roughly 80% and I assume my having knocked it down to 50% will help a bit more. I also created a Balanced profile (to replace the "HP Recommended" labeled profile), otherwise having all the same settings as the HP but with a Passive fan setting on Battery (tweaked the Low/Critical % levels as well, seemed a bit higher than needed). As for anyone curious, it's a "4 Cell" with a capacity (AIDA reported) of 55,671 mWh, and I presume that it also will have no aftermarket extra-capacity batteries available, given the internal battery design.
Pre-Posting Update: Been using it for a few hours now. Still just general putzing about on the desktop, no internet or other stuff. It's down to 24% and reports roughly 2hr usage left. Figured I'd run it out before I connected it up to that beast of a charger... lol
Update: Watched Robin Williams - Live on Broadway on YouTube, which is 1h 40m long, albeit only in 360p quality. Decided I'd continue using battery instead of plugging it into AC, which when I started off there was roughly 35% remaining charge, giving me roughly a.... 1h 50m to 2h remaining time! (It was roughly 3.5hr before started watching) I also decided to keep the battery box open to keep and eye on how this all was effecting things. Again, this is with a "Balanced" profile which for Battery had Screen @ 25% Brightness, Min/Max CPU of 5%/100%, Passive Cooling, and basic other "Balanced" configured options. Worth noting was that for about 1/4 of the time I had the keyboard backlighting on. When it had trickle down to about 25% with 1h 16min batt left I decided I'd turn it off and while the % didn't change any, I was surprised to see the time rise to having 1h 24min left. At any rate, Windows only lets you set the "Critical Action" % as low as 7, which I wanted to run the thing out completely, since at 8% left it was reporting 34minutes of usage left by the time the show was over.
Whether or not one can consider this good or bad, I don't know really. However, I do plan on seeing how it does when watching something with a bit higher resolution.
AUDIO QUALITY: Preliminary results... Gave some music a listen last night and there is good news and bad news...
The BAD news is, either the laptop's speaker setup is lightly damaged, or "Bang & Olufsen" screwed the pooch on designing the audio for this thing. Usually when you listen to audio from something, unless it's mixed to have channel offset, you expect the audio to be received basically equal to each ear. On the ENVY that is not the case... The audio was extremely Right-heavy, and in order to actually make it sound somewhat balanced I had to change the balance to 66R | 44L! Even then, it could've probably gone down to 42 on the Left. There was a noticeable difference in what was being produced through the L channel compared to the R.
The GOOD news is, the audio that was delivered was very good! It was rich, and warm, neither are things I expected. I believe it has a "2.1" configuration, which the amount of bass produced would make me feel that there is indeed a lil Sub hiding out in there. Furthermore, listening through headphones (earbuds), I was quite astonished by the sound quality it delivered. Basically, it comes across as the same rich and warm audio as through the speakers. Also, confirmed that it isn't subsystem related as both channels came across perfectly normal.
I listened to How To Destroy Angel's "An Omen" 6-track EP (320Kbps MP3s) , which is sort of a mix between Pop and Industrial (fitting, given it IS Trent Reznor's wife singing, with Reznor, Atticus Ross, & Rob Sheridan). After that I gave The Chemical Brothers album "Dig Your Own Hole" a go (FLAC), which for anyone who doesn't know them you're living under a rock and are missing out, so go utilize YouTube!
Since I don't yet have Foobar2000 installed, I just used MediaPlayerClassic in an effort to have no sort of audio enhancements being used beyond whatever Bang & Olufsen have messed with through drivers. However, do note, that their audio control panel disables any of the 3 presets you can select when using headphones: Music, Voice, Movie, and none of which fixed the aforementioned speaker issue when disabled.
Overall I'm really happy with the audio output from this thing, so much so that I may be able to retire my old Galaxy S1 that I purposed as just a media player, as I loved the sound it delivered with VoodooSound enabled Kernel thanks to the Wolfson DAC. There was PLENTY of volume headroom while using earbuds, as I had it at 24 which I considered comfortable. I'll give the Sennheisers that came with the Xonar a go in a bit to see how they are handled, but I'm sure it'll be fine.
Anything else I've missed, or anyone is interested in, I'll add later. Keep in mind that running tests which require big downloads (like 3DMark) I'm going to have to decline on as that'll just eat up too much of my precious 18GB/mo :\ (plus, my internet is slow as hell most times, sometimes as fun as 20-30k/s)
Enjoy
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