Life with the HP EliteBook 8740w, Part 1

We’ve got a new HP EliteBook Mobile Workstation in house at fxguide and will be posting over the next month about our experiences with the notebook. With numerous high-end features, it seems built for our industry. In this post, we have our first overview of the hardware.

Before continuing, I want to mention that I spend a lot of my daily life working on Apple hardware — either my MacBook Pro or MacPro tower. So what am I doing reviewing this system? Well, I’ve always had a PC system alongside my Mac in order to run applications that aren’t available on OS X or for apps that ran better on Windows. A good example is that prior to CS4 and CS5 I’d run After Effects on the PC because it simply ran better. I’m a big tool for the job kind of guy and frankly not that interested in the PC vs. Mac wars. The fact is there is software I want to run and I need a solid machine on which to do so.

On the PC/Linux hardware side, I’ve been an owner of HP hardware since turning to them after owning several Dell systems. Their workstations are well made, support great, and I’ve had few problems with them. My Flame/Smoke system is an xw8400 and it’s been absolutely flawless in the three years I’ve owned it. My main reference display when working on the Mac or PC is an HP DreamColor monitor (we’ll be looking at calibration of the EliteBook’s monitor in a future article). So going into this experience, I don’t have a problem admitting I’ve been a huge fan of HP systems.

So what’s intriguing about this notebook? It’s quite simple. As the name says, it’s designed to be a mobile workstation. Take what’s included…it seems designed for our industry. With a built-in Dreamcolor display, the new NVIDIA Quadro FX 5000M graphics cards, and every port I can imagine you’d want (including a very welcome esata port), it’s ready to handle apps from The Foundry’s Mari to Adobe’s Premiere Pro.

The price of our system lists at $4,565 and the general features that are of interest to video/post pros include:

  • HP EliteBook 8740w Mobile Workstation – Quad
  • Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit
  • Intel® Core™ i7-740QM Processor (1.73 GHz, 6 MB L3 cache)
  • 17.0-inch diagonal LED-backlit DreamColor® WUXGA WVA anti-glare (1920 x 1200) with camera
  • NVIDIA Quadro 5000M graphics with 2 GB dedicated GDDR5 video memory
  • 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM (2D)
  • 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
  • DVD+/-RW SuperMulti with Double Layer LightScribe Drive

I fly over 100,000 miles each year for shoot supervision, fxguide, and fxphd — so my equipment gets some serious wear and tear. Ever dropped your notebook taking it out when passing through airport security? I have…several times.

The unit actually goes through stress testing utilizing the U.S. military’s guidelines — making sure it can handle high temperature operation (140 degrees F/60 degrees C), dusty conditions, and vibration shock tests. The case has an anodized aluminum surface to resist scratching. The top has multiple latches to keep it from mistakenly opening up and damaging the screen. HP even says their case protected the display from up to 1,000 pounds of force placed on the case by a vehicle tire, and the notebook continued to operate attached to an external display when subjected to up to 1,800 pounds of force.

You can note all these catch phrases, but the bottom line is you add all these stress tests together and it means that the 8740w was designed with field use in mind. It can travel with you and withstand much of the wear and tear that happens when on the road. I seriously beat things up when I travel, so it’s nice to know the hardware had an eye to this when it was developed. In the month I’ve had my hands on the unit, the EliteBook has already qualified for elite frequent flier status on United. It’s traveled over 30,000 miles…from Chicago to Seoul for SIGGRAPH Asia to Colorado and Sydney. It’s reassuring to know I don’t need to treat it with kid gloves….it’s a far different experience than traveling with my Apple MacBook Pro.

Over the coming month, we’ll be looking at more of the features that make it ideal for our industry. This includes examining Dreamcolor display calibration, performing CUDA benchmarks, and running it through its paces in various apps.

A quick note before we close out this first post. HP has provided fxguide with not only our loaner test machine, but another brand-new workstation that we’ll be giving away to one of our lucky readers in the coming month. Yes — we’ll be giving away a machine that is new and in-box — exactly like the one we’ll be covering in future articles. We mention this because while we’ll be giving our honest opinions about the product, we don’t want to hide that it was supplied to us. The fact is, this is a serious, solid, professional portable workstation — not your grandmother’s notebook. We feel it could fit into any high end remote production workflow…and will be taking it through its paces to find out.

Regarding the giveaway — details coming soon. Stay tuned.

8 thoughts on “Life with the HP EliteBook 8740w, Part 1”

  1. I guess its a touch too early to get the Sandy Bridge second gen core i7 PSU. It should be said that your PSU ramps up to 2.93GHz in turbo mode, otherwise it sound like its slow.

  2. What’s up with the red drop shadow on the the comments? Looks much better with grey.

    #comments .comment.byuser {
    -moz-box-shadow: 0 6px 15px #777777;
    }

    1. What? You don’t like it? 😉

      Basically — a mistake on our end. A version push to the site will fix it

  3. I’m not interested in the PC vs. Mac wars, either, so I was glad you stated that right off the bat. The HP EliteBook sounds like a solid machine. I don’t have to tell you how important that is for someone who not only travels around the world but also her neighborhood.

  4. Can’t get this model with Dreamcolor display to work under Linux. Display panel goes dark as soon as the NVidia driver loads. External display works fine

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