Series 7 versus Envy 15 - thoughts?

So, all you unbiased series 7 owners...

I've been looking at all sorts of laptops over the past few weeks, starting with clevo gaming rigs, then going to the envy 15, and finally to the samsung series 7.

as far as notebooks go, i am primarily debating between the series 7 and the envy 15. I want a balanced, portable rig as I travel a lot for work. dedicated graphics is a must as I plan to play diablo 3 religiously.

I've read through a lot of these NBR forums and read reviews online. They seem like very similar rigs, but I'm leaning towards the series 7 because its slimmer, lighter, with a better battery life. the GPU is basically the same as far as I understand.

For those of you who have researched (or own!) both the envy 15 and series 7, which would you recommend? which is better in terms of looks, build quality, reliability, customer service, performance? how about the screen?

i understand these may all be loaded questions and in the end it maybe a matter of opinion, but those opinions are what i'm looking for!

 

I once time had trouble to decide which one to pick because of the price and the identical components. As far as I know, the Envy offers more glossy screen and it betters in term of viewing angle and quality than the Series 7. Envy has Beat audio and speakers are better than Series 7, but if you use headphone, there is not much on those.

Battery life on Series 7 is very good. Watching a movie with decent brightness and on wifi can last about 4 hours or more so battery is a plus for Series 7. Performance on those should be the same, but Envy has better heat dispered than Series 7 because it has more ventilation and it is thick.

Another plus for the Envy is that HP managed to implement a way to force the laptop to choose which card can be default, so that there is no need for auto switching. Series 7 does not have that, but it has an update to fix auto switching issue. The Series 7 is more lighter and thinner than the HP.
Talk about gamming, I did test D3 with Series 7 and it is playable with medium settings. I got average around 50-60 Fps, although sometimes the FPS dropped suddenly. I might test on Ultra to see, but as far as I played it on my desktop, Ultra is really extreme despite I have GTX560 Ti card. Maybe the final version can be stable more than the beta.

About the warranty, Envy has 2 years warranty compares to 1 year of Series 7, although you will have 3 months extra after registration. I must say that HP customer service is better than Samsung . I contacted them about 3 times and the issue got solved quickly. A month ago, I chatted with Samsung to ask some questions and the guy was so busy that he asked me to wait for him to reply .

My suggestion is that go with the one you like and feel it necessary to own. If you travel alot, I prefer the Samsung.

 

I bought the Series 7 before I knew about the HP Envy 15. I ended up returning the Series 7 because of the switchable graphics issue. Afterwards, I ended up looking more into the HP Envy 15. It had almost every feature that I loved about the Series 7, and more! The audio is amazing in comparison, and HP did the bios update for the switchable graphics. The only downside is that the HP Envy 15 doesn't have the awesome backlit keyboard like the Series 7, but I can deal with that.

Right now I'm waiting on the rumored HP Envy 15 w/ Ivy Bridge and AMD HD 7750M 1GB. Couple that with HP's 30% off coupon and you can surpass the Series 7 at around the same price.

 

The think that kept me from buying the Envy is it is too big and almost like MBP. Honestly, I don't like Apple products . By the way, another option is to way for Ivy Bridge to come out or wait a little bit more when Windows 8 is releasing. By the time of Ivy and Windows 8, we should see some ultrabook that thin but powerful with discret video card. I saw the Gigabyte with Nvidia card and it looks really greate despite that I don't know about the quality of Gigabyte laptop. Rumors also said that HP Spectre will have 15" version with video card, so it could be another choice.

 

thanks for the replies guys. that helps my decision... now, the only question is do i want to wait for this envy refresh....

 

If you decide to wait for Ivy Bridge, the Dell XPS 15 refresh is another laptop to consider. It's another relatively thin, 15.6" 1080p notebook with a quadcore CPU and dedicated graphics.

 

that thing looks amazing... that would trump both of these depending on release timing

 

The xps 15 graphics card will be significantly worse than the one in the envy.
The xps will have the nvidia GT640m, while the envy should have amd 7750. We can assume the 7750m will be at least as good as the GT650m ddr5 since that is what hp is offering in their lower class dv6 laptop. The GT650m ddr 5 has performance slightly better than a GTX560m. If we compare the GT640m (dell xps card) to the GTX560m (almost certainly worse than the card in the new envy) on Starcraft 2 benchmarks on ultra/1080p (many people say this should be 'close' to Diablo 3 performance) we see that the envy should be 30% faster giving an acceptable 35fps. Comparing Battlefield 3 ultra/1080p we see that the envy should be about 58% faster. You can find these comparisions and more here.
NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

 

The current gaming benchmarks on notebookcheck do not accurately reflect the GT 640m's performance as the only tested GT 640m laptop has an ultra-low-voltage CPU that bottlenecks the GPU. In the synthetic GPU tests, the GT 640m w/DDR3 outperforms the HD 6770m/7690m and the GT 555m, but performs comparably worse in gaming tests due to the limitations of the CPU and memory bandwidth. The notebookcheck review of that particular laptop goes more in depth on that issue.

Moreover, the Dell XPS 15's GT 640m comes with GDDR5 and should be considerably faster than the tested GT 640m w/ DDR3..
The GT 640M w/ GDDR5 is essentially a GT 650M with reduced clocks, but it's likely that the GT 640M will have very good overclocking potential (that .77" Acer reaches 709mhz; stock is 625mhz), assuming that Dell doesn't screw up on the cooling.

I'd expect the HD 7750m to outperform the GT 650m (and the GT 640m by a larger margin), but I don't think the difference will be monumental.

 

Friend of mine has an Envy 17 (I have a Series 7). Even with speakers by Beats... The sound is still horrendous and not much better than my Samsung's.

 

lol are you listening to 64kbps music or something? There is a huge difference.