Hp Envy 17t 17-u273cl Touchscreen Laptop - Intel Core I7 - 4gb Nvidia Graphics - 1080p Review
Desktop-replacement laptops are typically big and heavy, only they unremarkably make up for their lack of portability with roomy 17-inch screens, upgraded CPU and graphics functioning, and enough of ports to connect all of your peripherals. All of this is true of the HP Envy 17 (starts at $899.99; $1,439.99 every bit tested). It'due south a desktop-replacement blueprint that's been around for several years, merely it has been updated for 2020 with several leading-border features, notably some minimalist styling and an optional 4K display. But not everything about it is an evolution: The laptop is quite heavy by today's standards for a 17-incher that isn't a gaming machine, and it suffers from some build-quality bug, making it suitable only for buyers who will rarely movement information technology from their desks.
A Proficient-Looking 17.three-Inch 4K Screen
The Green-eyed 17'south star allure is its 17.3-inch LED-backlit brandish, available in either full-HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) or 4K (UHD) native resolutions. Our review configuration has the latter, with dimensions of iii,840 by 2,160 pixels. It'southward gorgeous, with razor-sharp text and not a hint of pixelation anywhere when your eyes are at a comfortable viewing altitude of a few feet. Such a large screen deserves a high resolution, and while it lacks support for high-dynamic range (HDR) color or OLED technology, it'due south even so an upgrade we'd highly recommend for the Green-eyed 17. Unfortunately, the panel lacks touch back up, a feature that is merely available on the full-HD model.
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Most mainstream laptops these days have screen sizes between 13 and 15 inches, and the 17-inch class is increasingly uncommon outside of gaming machines. You'd expect such a large display to require an every bit large and heavy chassis, and in the Green-eyed 17'southward case, you'd be right. The laptop measures 0.76 past 15.7 by 10.2 inches (HWD) and weighs a startling 6.02 pounds. I started to feel my wrists strain subsequently less than a minute of holding our test unit.
Tipping the scales at more than than 6 pounds isn't unheard of, specially for gaming laptops, but information technology'due south becoming increasingly rare. Fifty-fifty some 17-inch gaming rigs weigh significantly less, including the five.02-pound MSI GS75 Stealth. You tin even detect a non-gaming 17-incher that qualifies for ultraportable-laptop (nether-4-pound) status: the LG Gram 17.
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Then the Green-eyed 17's weight is a bit of a throwback, and it becomes fifty-fifty more anachronistic when you consider the laptop's internal components, which ought to require very lilliputian in the way of beefy cooling equipment. The configuration I tested includes a 10th Generation, quad-cadre Intel Cadre i7-1065G7 with a base clock speed of ane.3GHz, and a low-end Nvidia GeForce MX330 graphics card with 2GB of video memory. Even though the MSI GS75 Stealth is far more than expensive, it manages to fit a far more powerful Core i7-8750H and a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q into its thinner and lighter chassis. Consider this, and you really begin to question the need for the Envy 17's weight and girth.
Perhaps a bigger business organization, though: The lower portion of the Envy 17's case isn't particularly well-engineered. The laptop's base feels quite sturdy, but I noted some oddly behaved flex when you lift the laptop in certain spots: Information technology forces the touchpad to click by itself when you hold information technology near the edges with ane hand. Any laptop this large and heavy is going to have at least a small amount of flex, to be sure, so the touchpad design itself is likely responsible for the unwanted clicking. Information technology's especially abrasive if you happen to move the laptop to another location in the middle of a job—a motion picture could resume playing, or—much worse—you lot could make an unwanted edit to a document. I felt the touchpad click every fourth dimension I picked the Envy 17 upward with a unmarried hand grasping the lower left corner. This shouldn't be a concern on a laptop that costs near $1,500.
An Enviable Minimalist Aesthetic
Despite the weight and the build-quality issues, the Envy 17 is undeniably good-looking. HP has endowed it with a minimalist artful, which ways it will blend in with virtually any modernistic decor. The clean lines and squared edges complement the argent color scheme, and thoughtful design flourishes include hiding the cooling vents in the brandish hat then as not to mar the otherwise uncluttered surfaces.
I also capeesh the design of the backlit keyboard. The key switches aren't peculiarly sturdy, then the primal caps wobble a scrap, just there's satisfying travel altitude and the labels utilize a simple, big font that makes them easy to run into. The keyboard includes a numeric keypad, an essential characteristic for desktop-replacement laptops, and one that spreadsheet jockeys volition especially appreciate.
Nearly all of the Envy 17's coincident buttons and status lights are integrated into the keyboard besides, further enhancing the laptop'southward clean aesthetic. These include run-of-the-manufacturing plant controls similar the power push button and audio controls, too every bit the fingerprint reader to enable passwordless logins to your Windows account. There's even a groovy button that activates an automatic webcam privacy door. Press information technology and the door immediately clicks into place, shielding y'all from hackers and snoops.
The automatic camera privacy door is probably the Green-eyed 17'due south almost innovative feature, and it feels fancier than sliding the door closed yourself—equally is common on Lenovo laptops—and more reassuring than the power kill switch on other some HP laptops, which disconnects ability to the camera only doesn't physically block the lens. The buttons for the webcam door, the audio mute, the microphone mute, and the ability button all have built-in LED indicators to helpfully let you lot know when they're activated.
Check This Indicator Before Moving the Envy 17
In that location is one indicator that is rarely seen on laptops anymore, located all by itself on the laptop'south left edge: a bulldoze access LED. It tells you when the Envy 17 is reading or writing data to the kicking drive. This indicator could come up in handy if you lot configure the laptop with a platter-style hard drive (which is still an option here), so that yous can verify information technology'southward not in apply before you move the Envy 17. With the SSD-but configuration of our review unit, information technology'southward less useful, since an SSD has no moving parts that tin can exist damaged in transit by thumps and bumps.
In addition to the drive admission light, the Envy 17's left flank also includes a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, an HDMI two.0 output, a combo headphone/microphone connector, and a USB 3.ii Gen 2 Type-C port that supports DisplayPort video output. On the correct edge, yous'll observe a full-size SD card reader, two more USB Blazon-A ports, and a power port to have the barrel-style AC adapter. The port selection is generous past general laptop standards, though virtually boilerplate for such a large laptop. Support for Thunderbolt 3 is noticeably absent.
Even though the Envy 17's four-prison cell, 55-watt-hour battery can exist charged via the USB Type-C port, HP only includes the older barrel-mode ability adapter in the box. Ditching the dedicated ability port and adding a second USB Type-C port would make more than sense as more than and more than devices motility to USB Type-C for both information connections and power delivery.
Wireless connectivity on the Envy 17 includes Wi-Fi vi (802.11ax) and Bluetooth v.0.
The Envy 17 has plenty of room for a decent sound organization, with its dual speakers projecting audio up through a generously sized horizontal grille located betwixt the keyboard and the hinge. As on most midrange and premium HP laptops, the Envy 17 bears Bang & Olufsen branding. While the audio quality isn't particularly nuanced, it'due south plenty loud enough to fill a large family room with book to spare.
Entry-Level Configuration: Not Bad for $899
The entry-level Envy 17 configuration features an Intel Core i5-1035G1, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, which isn't bad for $899. In addition to the upgraded Core i7 and 4K display, our review unit as well features 16GB of RAM. Further upgrades include 32GB of RAM (overkill for most users), and a doubling of the video memory bachelor to the GeForce MX330 from 2GB to 4GB. You can also configure an Envy 17 with a 1TB SSD or a combination of a 1TB hard drive and a 256GB SSD.
Thank you to its discrete graphics card, the Envy 17 is better-equipped to handle 3D graphics and video editing than are virtually other mainstream laptops, which feature Intel'south integrated graphics solutions. While the GeForce MX330 doesn't qualify the Envy 17 as a gaming laptop, you should exist able to comfortably enjoy some demanding AAA titles equally long every bit you lot play at lower quality settings and screen resolutions.
To evaluate the Envy 17'due south functioning, I pitted it against a few other comparably-priced systems with large displays on our criterion tests. In addition to the 17-inch Gram 17, I'm as well comparison the 17-inch HP Omen 17 gaming laptop, the xv-inch Lenovo Yoga C940 2-in-i convertible, and the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop iii.
While I noticed no lag or languor during ordinary productivity tasks and installing apps, the Envy 17 did perform slightly lower on the PCMark x benchmark than its competitors did. PCMark 10 assesses overall organisation performance for role-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. (See how we test laptops.)
Thanks to its fast PCI Express NVMe SSD, the Envy 17 was more competitive on the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark.
When it comes to multimedia editing, the Envy 17 should perform similarly to other laptops equipped with Intel's tenth Generation "Ice Lake" processors, including the LG Gram 17, but significantly slower than those with upgraded H-series 9th Generation processors like those in the Omen 17 and the Yoga C940. The results of our multimedia editing tests behave this out, including rendering a 3D prototype in Maxon's Cinebench, applying a serial of filters and effects to an epitome in Adobe Photoshop, and converting a 4K video file to 1080p using Handbrake.
Our 3DMark and Superposition gaming benchmarks confirm the Green-eyed 17's mid-level gaming status. These benchmarks render and pan through detailed 3D scenes, measuring results in a proprietary score (for 3DMark) or in frames per 2nd (for Superposition). As expected, the Envy 17 performed slightly alee of the Gram 17 and the Surface Laptop 3, only significantly behind the Omen 17 and the Yoga C940, with their peppier (Yoga) or gaming-class (Omen) GPUs.
During many of these performance tests, the Envy 17's fan spooled upwardly, becoming clearly aural in a tranquility room. I inappreciably noticed the fan at all while browsing the web or performing other basic tasks, though. Via a pre-installed HP app, you lot can set the laptop to Condolement manner, which will tedious down the fans and throttle the CPU, simply could also affect performance. I left the laptop in the default Recommended mode during testing.
Lasting for nearly 9 hours on our bombardment rundown examination, the Envy 17 offers admirable battery life for a laptop equipped with a power-hungry, 17.3-inch 4K display. But since you're unlikely to travel much with this hefty laptop, or at least use it for long periods while in transit due to its size, it shouldn't devious far from a power outlet for besides long, rendering its battery life a secondary consideration.
A Decent Replacement for Your Desktop
The Envy 17 is a decent desktop replacement laptop. Our key quibbles with it (its bulk and its build quality) shouldn't be problems if it spends nigh of its time on your desk. Information technology as well offers typing condolement, an excellent optional 4K display, and acceptable performance and connectivity options. Once upon a time, all of this would have fabricated the Green-eyed 17 a no-brainer for fans of big-screen machines.
In 2020, however, you lot take better options than desktop-replacement shoppers of yesteryear did. If large-screen performance is what you're after, you can become more than blindside for your buck by choosing a 17-inch gaming laptop, some of which are thinner and lighter than the Green-eyed 17 (and a few of which will exist even cheaper than our test model, admitting minus the 4K display; take for example the 17-inch version of the Acer Nitro 5). Meanwhile, if you want a actually big screen only don't want to sacrifice portability, the comparably priced Gram 17 offers roughly the same size brandish at about half the deport weight.
Finally, if money's no object and you're after the ultimate large laptop, our current tiptop pick for high-end desktop-replacement machines is the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro. Its screen is slightly smaller, and it'southward considerably more expensive than the Green-eyed 17, but information technology's also far more capable, and the build is much more than solid.
HP Envy 17 (2020)
The Bottom Line
Attractive, minimalist styling and an optional 4K display are upsides, but the HP Envy 17 is a merely adequate desktop replacement laptop due to its overly heavy chassis and some quirks with the touchpad design.
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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/hp-envy-17-2020
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