HP EliteBook 8740w: IPS on the Go
by Dustin Sklavos on December 8, 2010 3:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- IT Computing
- Intel
- HP
- EliteBook
- Mobile Workstation
- Quadro
- NVIDIA
Application and Workstation Performance
Our review HP EliteBook 8740w leverages an Intel Core i7-820QM processor and a nigh obscene 16GB of DDR3, but keeps the storage conservative with the Western Digital Scorpio Black. In what may seem like an unfair fight, we've also included scores from some of our desktop review units to give you a feel for the kind of trade-off you're making in spending up for the mobile form factor.
What we find is a bit troubling: the 8740w seems to come in consistently behind in every test but Cinebench. That said, AVADirect is fond of sending us Clevo units equipped with SSDs, and we think there's a good chance that's what's making up the difference here: the Scorpio Black mechanical drive in the EliteBook just can't pick up the slack. With all that said, these numbers aren't bad by any stretch of the imagination and are still miles ahead of competing consumer notebooks.
Since this is a workstation and bred for workstation-based tasks, we also did a quick run with SPECviewperf 11.
A visit to the results page of SPEC's site reveals a healthy lead over the previous generation mobile workstation parts but still a far cry from desktop workstation kit.
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slacr - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
"Of course, being a Quadro it does bring all of the secret sauce that NVIDIA packages with its workstation class cards"What does this secret sauce do these days, the only documents i've found are rather old and talk of anti-aliasing in CAD software. Other "CUDA capable" cards offer GPU-assistance in for example Adobe CS and CAD software is no longer particularly bound by cpu so the only benefit i've seen is the larger video RAM which can be found on normal cards anyway, so what does the price premium actually buy?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
I believe it's line anti-aliasing, better OpenGL drivers (with ISV certification for various applications), and some 64-bit FP performance enhancements. To my knowledge, all of this stuff is available in the standard NVIDIA GPUs, but they only enable it on the Quadro drivers.DanNeely - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
FP64 is the big one. ATI's high end GPUs are limited to FP64 performance that's 1/5th of FP32. Nvidia's high end consumer cards only have 1/.8th, while GT100/110 quadro's are 1/2 (the highest possible without throttling FP32). For scientific computing this is enough to justify paying several times as much as a consumer card so nVidia hobbles the GeForces to support sales of Tesla boxes.mczak - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
FP64 is really for tesla though. Maybe workstation cards still have the full performance FP64 enabled, but honestly noone would care. It's pretty much line aa still I think, plus geforce cards also have artificial limitation on (non-tesselated) geometric throughput.carsandcomps - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
The secret sauce is overlay planes and 3D wireframe performance. Consumer cards are great for tesselated 3d with texture maps, but most are pretty horrible when there a hundreds of thousands of 3D wireframe edges in a view.You are correct about the drivers being better also. While a crazy "flareout" or glitch from a surface is no big deal in a game, it is a show stopper on a real 3D engineering model. Not that I am a Nvidia fanboy, but their workstation class drivers have always been better in my opinion.
sheltem - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
I'm pretty sure the Quadro 5000M is the same exact card as the 480M. The main difference is the drivers. You can either hack the driver files to trick it into a 480M (or vice versa) or mod the bios.I actually have the Elitebook 8740w, but with an AMD FirePro 7820. I hacked the Catalyst Mobility drivers to work with my FirePro 7820M.
Zan Lynx - Monday, December 13, 2010 - link
You can hack it, but there's more to it than just the drivers.The Quadro and Tesla hardware goes through a much more careful test process.
The gaming hardware will produce calculation errors fairly often.
The Quadro and Tesla hardware: hardly ever.
yakugo - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
How/what did you do to hack your 7820 drivers so catalyst control center would work? i have a dell m6500 with the m7820 card. Could you email me at mp3moeny@hotmail.comThanks,
-Aaron
mschira - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Well, I do appreciate a decent screen, and you know what I might even be ready to pay 550$ extra for it, but a 17" laptop?What's the point for that?
They never fit onto anything else but a desk. Even 15" laptops are a pain to carry around.
So why not get a decent all in one PC like an iMac ?
And why, oh why is there no smaller laptop that offers a decent screen?
M.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Why an iMac instead of the other oem machines?