*HP dv6t & dv7t (70XX / 71XX series) IVY BRIDGE Owners Lounge*

[Blorzoga]

this is craaaazy!! I posted last night that I was being overly optimistic hoping that it shipped tomm and i'd get it late this week.

Got an email from HP this morning- Shipped today- Estimated delivery is May 10th! I guess I must of gotten upgraded to the express shipping even though I only did the free shipping!!

So excited!!

Mine too. Original shipping date was 5/8 on 5-7 day shipping. Confirm says shipping today, delivering by 5/10.

[sajaxom]

To be fair, you are technically correct, the cheaper RAM would bottleneck the system if and only IF you are bothering to do any GPU intensive task on the Intel IGP however, with the monster that is the GT650M, why in the hell would you bother doing anything intensive with the HD4000? The following is of course my personal opinion but, I personally don't care for any of Intel's IGP offerings as long as they don't choke while web browsing and typing out a document or two. I assume this is why we buy these monster laptops with the insanely powerful GPU's (laptop wise anyway). For the engineering (father?) son's laptop, 99% of the programs he'll use for engineering will be GPU intensive especially since all of them will use some OpenGL/OpenAL libraries, for that, the dedi GPU he'll be using.

I agree that he won't be using the Intel IGP - the board probably doesn't support it with the nVidia GPU. My point is - where is this GPU intensive program going to run? On the GPU's memory block? The program is going to run in primary system memory. It will pass off a large amount of the rendering work to the GPU and it's memory block, but the software itself has to run in the primary environment of the system. That means CPU and system memory. It can then generate new threads that can be processed on the GPU, but the primary thread will always reside on the CPU and it's data load will always reside in system memory. Otherwise CAD, Photoshop, etc. would require video cards with 2-8GBs of memory - and that's not going to be commonplace for some time yet. If anything, the argument could be made that his CPU is not very important in that matter with a powerful GPU, but the memory becomes more critical to performance.

[bjki1028]

Has anyone seen the Ivy Bridge DV7T that a seller is offering on eBay? They have tons of pictures including the backlit keyboard. I'm thinking of buying the 16GB configuration, but would like to know if it's worth it:

Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
3rd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM Processor (2.3 GHz, 6MB L3 Cache)
NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) GT 650M Graphics with 2GB GDDR5 memory [HDMI, VGA]
16GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
750GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
NO mSSD Hard Drive Acceleration Cache
Microsoft(R) Office Starter: reduced-functionality Word/Excel(R) only, No PowerPoint(R)/Outlook(R)
30% off 9 cell Lithium Ion Battery
17.3-inch diagonal Full HD Anti-glare LED-backlit Display (1920 x 1080)
FREE Upgrade to Blu-ray player & SuperMulti DVD burner
HP TrueVision HD Webcam
802.11b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth(R)
Backlit Keyboard
Included 2 Year Warranty

HP's price is $1,679.99 with the $300 current instant rebate and their price is $1450 shipped.

Any suggestions? Is this worth the price?

[Blorzoga]

Can someone explain to me what the Hybrid Hard drive option is on the HP Dv6t 7000? I'd didn't think it has an SSD in it. Is it much of an advantage over the 7200 HDD 750 gb HDD. I don't see anyone selecting the hybrid in their specs.

[kitsune556]

Any suggestions? Is this worth the price?

Don't buy the memory from HP. If you want 16 GB, buy 2x8GB aftermarket. It will cost $150 or less.

[sajaxom]

Can someone explain to me what the Hybrid Hard drive option is on the HP Dv6t 7000? I'd didn't think it has an SSD in it. Is it much of an advantage over the 7200 HDD 750 gb HDD. I don't see anyone selecting the hybrid in their specs.

Hybrid drives use a hard drive with a very large cache, often a small SSD. They are faster for reading commonly used files, and speedwise tend to fall between HDD's and SSD's. They are nice if you want the speed of the SSD, but with a lot of storage space. However, they still have the higher power consumption and heat, and only improve performance on commonly used files (which are stored in the cache). I don't personally recommend them, though they do have their uses.

[Dan37tz]

Does anybody know what RAM speed I should get? 1333mhz or 1600mhz?

I want to order 16GB 2x8, either crucial @ 1333mhz or corsair @ 1600mhz. Price is similar because the corsair is on sale at newegg.

[sigh]

Yes! We have shippage! And a day early at that. Now here's hoping they don't get stuck somewhere because of the large amount of orders. >.<

[Dan37tz]

The reason I asked is because I'm opening it up when I get it to install my 256GB M4 SSD, might as well kill two birds with one stone and do the RAM upgrade at once.

Oh by the way, my original ship date was the 15th also, but I got a shipment notification this morning that it will be here on the 10th. Yay...

[DirtyBob]

I purchased the last batch of dv7qte with the standard res of 1600x900 and thought the screen quality was excellent. I exchanged that one for the newest batch since I was still in the 21 day window and wanted to get the most for my money. After reading all the info on the web, it seems most people think you must be lacking a brain in order to NOT get the high def screen. So I started to regret my choice.. but I decided to do some of my own tests.

So I have a friend who has a sony VAIO with the "full hd" matte screen who brought over his machine and we compared a blu ray side by side. 1920x1080 and although the extra window space was nice I didn't see that much of a difference. The colors, gamma, contrast were about the same. The vertical/horizontal viewing angle was slightly better on his screen and I did enjoy the anti-glare of the matte but it made the picture look slightly "dull".

Where are all these people coming from that the other screen is VASTLY superior? Maybe this was true a year or so ago, im not sure. Any one have any valid reference to this claim?

I normally work on two 1600x1200 monitors. Trying to do software development on the non-HD screen is painful. Just not enough screen real estate.