*HP EliteBook 8740w Owners Lounge - PART 1*

[m8o]

My question is why is HP Business so stingy with their base options? The base Envy 14 comes with 4gb of RAM and 320gb harddrive!

I'm guessing HP is answering the expectation of larger volume buyers, corporations, having IT staff who tweek every machine from software to hardware before deploying it to the employees, who'd prefer the machine cost associated with the least amount of memory so they could add their own from the pool of mem chips they have at hand at greatly reduced per-unit cost. (?)

[RampageII]

A very interesting observation! I'll definitely keep an eye on the temps when switching to SSDs.

Update:
Temps are back to where they were with the HDDs. Maybe a couple degrees lower. So much for that I guess....
Fan still spins much lower than before, which is nice.

[m8o]

I may want to / need to go down the path of re-pasting my CPU (and by necessity, GPU too then). Core #0 and #2 are consistently a few degrees higher with similar CPU loading than the other cores, which isn't sitting well with me.

[Aikimox]

@Rampage||
Hmm... Probably your ambient temp fluctuates.

To all Elitebook owners:

Does anyone know what program reports the CPU fan speeds correctly?
This is very important! If we could find such an application, the creator of HWinfo32 could possibly write a standalone tool for manually changing the fan speeds. This would open much more room for gaming as well as utilizing the full potential of the extreme processors.

[Aikimox]

I may want to / need to go down the path of re-pasting my CPU (and by necessity, GPU too then). Core #0 and #2 are consistently a few degrees higher with similar CPU loading than the other cores, which isn't sitting well with me.

How high are they?
That doesn't mean the paste is applied in a wrong way, could just be a different core utilization/affinity.

[m8o]

How high are they?
That doesn't mean the paste is applied in a wrong way, could just be a different core utilization/affinity.

When applying all my PP work during export of 72 10 Meg RAWs into JPEG in Lightroom 3, where all Cores (and both threads per core) are showing evenly utilized at or near 100% by the several different monitoring tools I have running (Lightroom does a great job at keeping all the cores busy), core 0 and 2 had a high temp of 83, and the other two was I think 76 and 77 (was late last night and I didn't make a point to memorize the lower of the two for whatever reason). I'm too green to know if this could be hinting at a problem or not. But in addition, their transient temps were always higher over the course of hours.

[Aikimox]

When applying all my PP work during export of 72 10 Meg RAWs into JPEG in Lightroom 3, where all Cores (and both threads per core) are showing evenly utilized at or near 100% by the several different monitoring tools I have running (Lightroom does a great job at keeping all the cores busy), core 0 and 2 had a high temp of 83, and the other two was I think 76 and 77 (was late last night and I didn't make a point to memorize the lower of the two for whatever reason). I'm too green to know if this could be hinting at a problem or not. But in addition, their transient temps were always higher over the course of hours.

You're perfectly fine! Don't even worry about it. Normal difference between the cores can reach 10-15C at max load. I have the same difference with my 840QM (6-7C) .
If you had one core @60C and another @85C - that would probably mean a poor paste application.
Don't even bother re-applying the paste. Keep in mind, to do so, you'll have to also re-apply it on the GPU (you can't remove the CPU heatsink without removing the GPU one first) and that's a lot of mess.
As I said, the difference in temps is most likely affected by more processes assigned to the cores that heat up more. You can play with process affinity in the task manger, but that would also be a waste of your time

[HiddenUser]

Aikimox, I think you should report this issue to HP Support in order they fix it for new users. Thank you

I think it was reported already but will do it as well.

And I would appreciate if you let us know what they said you about this regard, if they have fixed the backlit kb issue or not, because it's likely I order a 8740w on day 16 or near that date. However, the system will not arrive until september. Thank you very much

[Aikimox]

BTW, here's the latest screenie (after 7 hours of browsing with 10 tabs open and working with code) and same ambient temp of 26C.
Looks like there was some curing period for the paste (OCZ Freeze).
Now, to turn the laptop into a true gaming rig, we need to adjust the fan temp tables to trigger it to the max at lower temps. I'd say 60C - medium, 70C - max. This way you'll never see 80C on the CPU or GPU during load, even though it would make the system noticeably louder.

Better yet, if we could have two modes:

Idle - same tables as now ( 70C - medium fan speed, 85C - max)

Gaming/Load - 60C - medium, 70C - max fan speed.

What do you say, guys? If enough people get interested in this - we might convince HP or a third party software developer to help us. I'd even pay for such a feature.
It will surely increase the long term stability of the system by significantly lowering the peak/max load temps.
BTW, it will not affect the life span of the fan since it will hit the max speed during load anyway. Plus, it's very cheap to replace in any case

[sgogeta4]

When applying all my PP work during export of 72 10 Meg RAWs into JPEG in Lightroom 3, where all Cores (and both threads per core) are showing evenly utilized at or near 100% by the several different monitoring tools I have running (Lightroom does a great job at keeping all the cores busy), core 0 and 2 had a high temp of 83, and the other two was I think 76 and 77 (was late last night and I didn't make a point to memorize the lower of the two for whatever reason). I'm too green to know if this could be hinting at a problem or not. But in addition, their transient temps were always higher over the course of hours.

That's perfectly normal, it's most likely due to the placement of the thermistors, where some are closer to the heat source than others.