*HP EliteBook 8540w Owners Lounge!*

[Ralph.]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering whether the 8540w with an i7 720 qm, quadro FX 880M and 4 gb ram would be able to run Starcraft 2 at high settings in its native resolution of 1600 x 900?

My university supplies the laptop for an extremely reasonable price of 1000 euros and I am seriously contemplating on getting it. I know that the 8540w fares very well with CAD and other such applications, but now I need to know, as a gaming enthusiast, whether it will run Starcraft 2 at high settings.

I hope someone will be able to give me a definite and concrete answer, as I have traversed the murky waters of google without any success.

Thanking you kindly in advance,

Ralph
The Netherlands

[Exxo]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering whether the 8540w with an i7 720 qm, quadro FX 880M and 4 gb ram would be able to run Starcraft 2 at high settings in its native resolution of 1600 x 900?

My university supplies the laptop for an extremely reasonable price of 1000 euros and I am seriously contemplating on getting it. I know that the 8540w fares very well with CAD and other such applications, but now I need to know, as a gaming enthusiast, whether it will run Starcraft 2 at high settings.

I hope someone will be able to give me a definite and concrete answer, as I have traversed the murky waters of google without any success.

Thanking you kindly in advance,

Ralph
The Netherlands

My advice is to get the ATI FirePro 5800M instead, its cheaper and alot more powerful than the FX 880M. And yes it will run CAD very nicely and Starcraft 2 at high settings is easily attainable.

[Ralph.]

My advice is to get the ATI FirePro 5800M instead, its cheaper and alot more powerful than the FX 880M. And yes it will run CAD very nicely and Starcraft 2 at high settings is easily attainable.

I wish it was that easy Exxo.

The thing is, it's a packaged deal. We aren't allowed to alter parts.

I kind of need to know whether the 880m has the goods.

Or is there a chance to later on replace the gpu? Isn't it called mxm or something.

[Exxo]

I wish it was that easy Exxo.

The thing is, it's a packaged deal. We aren't allowed to alter parts.

I kind of need to know whether the 880m has the goods.

Or is there a chance to later on replace the gpu? Isn't it called mxm or something.

Thats a shame. Regarding your question about the FX 880M, here is a link to various laptop graphics cards: Notebookcheck: Computer Games on Laptop Graphic Cards

The FX 880M is based off the nVidia GeForce GT 330M (the ones found on the new macbooks). As far as starcraft 2 is concerned, low settings are a definite yes and medium settings are within reach. However the 880M will struggle at high settings especially at 1600x900. These are just my opinions, if you want to hear more opinions you can Google "starcraft 2 and macbook pro with GT 330M" and see what people with first hand experience have to say.

As far as replacing GPU, yes, you can remove the graphics card as it is an MXM slot (type II i think??). I would highly advise against doing this as it is quite risky, but if you were to replace the 880M, i would recommend only replacing it with the ones known to work with the 8540w (FX 1800M, FirePro 5800M) as there is a good chance the drivers will work. You can also find info about the FX 1800M and FirePro 5800M on the same link i posted above as well. It seems like the FirePro 5800M outperforms even the FX 1800M (not to mention leaving the 880M in the dust). Strange, since the FX 880M and FX 1800M both cost more than the FirePro 5800M, its a strange pattern i've noticed between ATI and nVidia (ATI = most bang for your buck).

[sgogeta4]

ATI has a smaller die size, which means they are cheaper to produce than the more complex nVidia GPUs. In the future you can only upgrade your GPU to the models that your HP model can be customized with (so as of right now only FX 1800M and FirePro M5800) - it's not the drivers but the BIOS typically whitelisting certain cards. I'd like to see more benchmarks of the latter two cards since in theory, the FX 1800M (GDDR5 version of GT 335M) should decimate the FirePro M5800 (HD 5730) w/ its 128-bit GDDR5 interface (over the 128-bit GDDR3 one). I suspect that at at lower resolutions, the M5800 would be better but at higher resolutions, the bandwidth would cripple the AMD/ATI card.

[Elite Cataphract]

Does anyone here have the HD+ 1600x900 anti-glare display on the 8540w? How is it in terms of quality? Is it better than the Envy's 1600x900 display in terms of color gamut and production? Is the DreamColor 2 display really worthy the premium?

Thanks!

[Cossack7V7]

The Dreamcolor2 display is rather expensive. Besides, it will make text barely readable on a 15.6" display. You should just stay with the standard HD+ display. It won't disappoint in terms of quality.

[Elite Cataphract]

I would really like to see a picture of the HD+ display before going for it. I don't want to make a mistake since this is my first notebook purchase!
Display quality is of utmost importance to me.
Thanks again.

[treydur]

Sata 6gb

Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1

does anyone know if the 8540w's will or can run these new SSD's at the full 6GB

[f4ding]

Obviously it won't. The 8540w is using SATA 2 which is half the speed or somewhere near that.