HP Envy 700-030qe review: It's the components that matter

HP’s Envy product line gives the company’s engineers an opportunity to break from building buttoned-down productivity machines and strut their stuff by crafting something that gamers and media mavens will appreciate. While you’ll never mistake the Envy 700-030qe’s cookie-cutter design for a custom-built rig from a boutique PC builder, this machine features the key components that enable it to run with that crowd, but at a far lower price point.

HP planted one of the world’s most powerful CPUs in its Envy 700-030qe: Intel’s Core i7-4770. A boutique vendor, on the other hand, would have sprung for the Core i7-4770K, the completely unlocked variant that begs to be overclocked. Actually, you can custom-order your Envy with that processor for an additional $150, but you’ll inevitably want to spend more cash after the machine arrives (no matter which processor you choose) to update its negligible cooling system: The chassis is equipped with just a single fan.

My enthusiasm for the Envy 700 wanes just a little on the gaming front.

Still, the Envy tore through our strenuous Desktop Worldbench 8.1 benchmark suite, producing a very good score of 352. That score not only marks the Envy 700-030qe as more than 3.5 times faster than our baseline system, Acer’s all-in-one Aspire U M5-583P-6428, but puts it in contention with—you guessed it—systems from boutique vendors that are based on Intel’s Core i7-4770K processor. Digital Storm’s Virtue, for instance, earned a Worldbench score of 399.

ROBERT CARDINHP's Envy 700-030qe isn't the sexiest rig I've seen (click to enlarge).

A PC needs more than just a fast processor to earn a high Worldbench score. The machine also needs plenty of memory, fast storage, and a strong video card. HP gets most of that right by packing in 12GB of DDR3/1600 memory, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 645 video card, and a 256GB SSD inside the Envy 700. The SSD is generously proportioned for a consumer rig, but that 256GB is all the storage HP provides. I’d recommend either springing for a second drive if you order one (you can order the Envy 700 with a 1TB drive as secondary storage for $90, if you want the entire system to be covered by HP’s two-year warranty), or adding a second drive as soon as you unpack it (you should be able to find a 2TB drive for a few bucks more than what HP is charging, plus tax and shipping).

ROBERT CARDINAnd its interior isn't remotely what we'd describe as tech porn (click to enlarge).

Our enthusiasm for the Envy 700 wanes just a little on the gaming front, which is ironic given the heritage of the Envy brand name (HP acquired it, along with the rest of the assets of luxury PC manufacturer Voodoo PC, back in 2006). The Envy 700’s Nvidia GeForce GTX 645 is a decidedly middle-of-the-road video card. It’s an OEM model with slightly better specs than the GeForce GTX 650 that you’ll find at retail (it has 576 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, versus the GTX 650's 384 CUDA cores and 1GB of GDDR5).

This GTX 645 doesn’t support Nvidia’s SLI dual-GPU technology, but that's a moot point because the Envy 700’s motherboard has just one PCIe x16 slot anyway. The Envy 700’s dinky 460-watt power supply unit might also get in the way of a future video card upgrade (you can order your system with an optional 600-watt PSU; that will add $70 to the system’s price tag but will improve your future upgrade options).

The Envy 700-030qe can't play games at high resolution, but comes closer to that objective than some other rigs we've benchmarked lately (click to enlarge).

With the resolution in Dirt Showdown set to 1920 by 1080 and visual quality at Ultra, the Envy delivered an unplayable 21 frames per second. Digital Storm’s Virtue, which is outfitted with a top-of-the-line Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 card, churned out 86 frames per second with that game at the same settings. (Our reference system, by the way, couldn’t play the game at all at that resolution because it lacks a discrete video card.) When we dialed the resolution down to 1024 by 768 and reduced visual quality to low, the HP delivered the game at 134.5 frames per second, more than twice the minimum we considerable to be playable. The system is pleasantly quiet, too.

And if you can dial back your expectations a bit, HP's system will deliver very good gaming performances (click to enlarge).

If your entertainment preferences run more to movies, HP has you covered with not just a Blu-ray drive, but an increasingly rare (with retail computers, anyway) Blu-ray burner. The Envy 700 also has an onboard 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, so you won’t need to hardwire the computer to your router (or buy an adapter to take advantage of that super-fast 802.11ac router you just bought). The back has two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, and two more of each in the front (along with a media-card reader and headphone and mic jacks).

But its hard to argue with a $1450 computer that delivers a Desktop Worldbench 8.1 score of 352.

The bundled USB mouse and keyboard (wireless options are available for an additional $40) are about what you’d expect: The mouse has a nice curve to fit the hand, and the keyboard is a basic black unit with no backlighting. The keyboard does have dedicated buttons for controlling media-player software.

The HP Envy 700-030qe is an above-average computer that’s reasonably priced at $1450. When we built out a comparable system based on Digital Storm’s Virtue (with an unlocked Core i7-4770K, 16GB of DDR/3 memory, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card, and a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD), that system’s price tag came out to $1713. That’s a not-insignificant bump of $263, even if it does buy you better components and a prettier, more easily upgradable machine.

Alex covers desktops, everything from fancy to practical. He's also an avid (addicted) gamer and loves following the industry.
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Hybrid hard drives: How they work and why they matter

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them, studied music at Julliard, and power mods his car for kicks.
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An SSD can read and write data many times faster than the best mechanical hard drive. On the downside, flash memory is many times more expensive than the innards of a typical hard drive, so manufacturers have limited their SSD capacities to hit reasonable price points: A 128GB SSD costs about $130, and for that same price tag, you can buy a 3.5-inch desktop hard drive that delivers 2TB of storage, or a 2.5-inch laptop drive that provides 1TB of storage.

Two years ago, Seagate (quickly followed by Samsung) introduced a drive that married a small SSD with a mechanical drive. The objective was to deliver the superior speed of an expensive SSD, while retaining the higher capacity and lower cost of a conventional hard drive. Now that Toshiba and Western Digital are joining the party, it's a great time to explain in more detail what hybrid drives are and how they operate.

Hybrid drives work much in the same way as the current dual-technology configurations in many gaming and power-user PCs, as well as some ultraportable laptops. Such systems have a small, discrete SSD to hold the operating system and frequently used data, augmented by a more capacious conventional hard drive for less frequently accessed data and large collections of documents and digital media.

Current hybrid drive designs, in contrast, deliver both technologies within a single physical unit, and they employ software caching algorithms (rather than relying on the user's brain) to decide which data belongs on the SSD portion and what goes on the drive’s platters.

These caching algorithms reside in the hybrid drive's firmware, not the device driver. To the computer’s operating system, a hybrid drive appears as a single unit with the SSD portion acting strictly as a large cache. The cache is nonvolatile, so the data doesn't disappear when power is absent.

You can find several hybrid designs on the market, but the most common is a 2.5-inch version meant for laptops, Seagate's Momentus XT SSHD. Seagate refers to the caching logic it uses on the Momentus XT drives as Adaptive Memory technology. The thinner 7mm, 2.5-inch drives that Toshiba and Western Digital recently announced are destined for Ultrabooks. They will likely use similar technologies with similarly suitable names, although either company might opt to skip caching and produce a dual SSD/hard drive in a single physical package.

In any case, a caching algorithm will track the files you load the most often (operating system files, applications, and the like), and store them on the SSD portion of the drive. From that point on, these files will load into memory much faster than they did from the mechanical drive, although some overhead will be involved as the computer determines whether the file in question resides on the SSD. No caching will have occurred the first time you use a hybrid drive, so its initial performance will be the same as that of a mechanical hard drive, but the speed will increase over time.

To test a current implementation and to determine how much improvement you can expect over the long term, we ran a special version of WorldBench 7 six times using a 750GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive with its 8GB internal SSD.

The WorldBench 7 score for Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid drive indicates that it's a little faster than a conventional hard drive, but much slower than a true SSD.

Over the course of the six runs, system boot times dropped from 35 seconds to 31 seconds, and the WorldBench 7 score rose from 112 to 116. That's about a 12 percent improvement in boot times, and a 4 percent jump in WorldBench. However, the WorldBench 7 score of a nonhybrid, 5400-rpm drive also climbed by 4 percent—most likely due to Windows 7's own caching technologies. The standard drive showed no decrease in boot times, so the current Seagate hybrid drives do offer some benefit.

WorldBench 7 measures application performance, not the load times of the applications themselves, though subjectively the load times seemed only slightly faster after the first pass in my hands-on tests when I eliminated the Windows prefetch and swap file. Let's call that further, marginal evidence that a hybrid can make a positive difference in your everyday computing. Just for comparison's sake, a good SSD scored more than 40 points higher on WorldBench 7 on the same system.

The specs for the upcoming Toshiba and Western Digital hybrid drives weren't available at the time of this writing; however, you might see models with 16GB or even 32GB SSD portions that provide a greater increase in performance. The larger the SSD in the hybrid drive, the more data you can cache and the less often you'll need to load data from the hybrid’s slower mechanical drive. Integration and interaction with operating systems could also boost hybrid performance, assuming of course that a significant drop in SSD prices doesn't render the technology moot.

As of October 10, 2012, a standard 750GB, 2.5-inch hard drive was about $80, a 750GB Momentus XT SSHD was about $130, and a brand-name 128GB SSD also cost about $130. Given those prices, current hybrid drives really make sense only in laptops, and only when you want high performance and more storage capacity than an SSD can provide.

In a desktop PC with unoccupied drive bays, you'll get much better bang for your buck with a stand-alone SSD combined with one or more mechanical hard drives. Even for a laptop, a smaller, more affordable SSD supplemented by an external conventional hard drive might better deliver the performance and the capacity you're looking for.

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Beyond Yelp: Which User Review Services Matter?

After Google, Twitter, and Facebook, Yelp is arguably the Internet company next in line to have its name converted into a verb. If you want to find a restaurant, a plumber, or even a lawyer, Yelp probably has you covered.

As a consumer, you likely use Yelp and similar services all the time; but as a business owner, you realize what a double-edged sword it is. Many restaurateurs have watched their free time vanish along with their hair as they tried to massage their Yelp star rating and appease every last customer unhappy with the crème brulee.

Today, however, Yelp is only part of the puzzle. Assorted competitors--some from the giants of the Web--also give consumers a soapbox upon which they can express their views about all manner of service providers. Navigating this landscape of user-review services is tricky, since it’s hard to tell at a glance how popular or comprehensive a site is. Many sites also license reviews: A site may look stuffed to the gills with user-written restaurant reviews, yet the posts are actually borrowed from Citysearch or OpenTable.

A full comparison of user-reviews sites.We analyzed the biggest, most popular websites that let users review service-based businesses. Read on for a sense of the size and relative reach of each of these sites, as well as a look at the costs and benefits of becoming a member, and the policies that protect the site from spam and shield the business owner from abuse.

Yelp

The 800-pound gorilla, Yelp has massive power in this industry. Restaurants and other service businesses go out of their way to cater to prolific Yelpers, to curry those coveted five-star reviews.

While Yelp is best known for its reviews of restaurants, it covers the gamut of the service industry. And although some small-town shops may not have any reviews, Yelp will often have those companies in its database.

Yelp has long been under fire, however, for a host of perceived slights, including accusations of phony reviews (both good and bad) and predatory practices that allegedly goad the recipients of negative reviews into upgrading to a higher tier of service. Yelp defends against these accusations by saying that it actively polices reviews through an automated filter system (which protects against both malicious content and shill reviews), and that all businesses can claim their account on the site free of charge. Business owners can respond to any review, as well.

But even paying members can’t remove negative reviews, and instead can only upgrade their pages and sponsor search results. Prices range from $300 to $1000 per month. A Groupon-style Yelp Deals service is available.

Yelp may not be the final word in customer-review sites, and upgrading can be exorbitantly expensive in comparison with the costs at other review sites, but its clout is undeniable. Ignore its reviews at your peril.

Google Places

Launched as Hotpot in November 2010, Google's review and rating service folded into Google Places in April 2011. It is now adding a million reviews a month, becoming one of the fastest-growing services on this list.

Tightly integrated with Google's search and map services, Google Places is free for both users and businesses, and results automatically show up during searches. Once businesses claim their Place, they can flesh out their information, and add interior photos and videos, as well as respond publicly to individual reviews (good or bad). But that’s where Places ends: To promote your business further, you’ll have to turn to AdWords.

Google acknowledges that it has work to do on curtailing abusive and spammy reviews, but the company notes that businesses can flag any bad or malicious content as inappropriate through links on every page.

Overall, given the popularity of Google in general--and Places’ zero-dollar price tag--there’s no reason not to claim your Google Place page, keep it updated with photos, and promptly address any concerns that users raise there.

Judy’s Book

Although this Yelp-like business reportedly has had financial trouble in recent years, Judy’s Book continues to operate on a national scale. The company covers the gamut of services, but is most popular for (its words) “businesses that serve moms and families.”

While the site has about a million user-written reviews, the vast majority of Judy’s Book’s content comes from partner sites, namely Citysearch and Demandforce. In fact, in a half-dozen sample searches in cities across the country, we didn’t find a single review originally written for the site.

It’s free for businesses to claim their page on the site, and upgrades ($50 to $150 per month) get you a deeper profile with no ads on it, submission to search engines, and other perks. If your store has multiple locations, you can list up to five addresses under a single name with an upgraded account. Upgraded users can also respond to reviews (via email to the site).

Considering its size, Judy’s Book may not offer a compelling argument for upgrading your account, but there’s no reason not to claim your business’s page for free.

Angie’s List

This Columbus, Ohio-based business started back in 1995 with the goal of building a clearinghouse for users to provide commentary and reviews on local service businesses. Unlike most of the sites in this roundup, Angie’s List doesn’t cover restaurants--the bread and butter of most user-review sites--and it isn’t free for users. Angie’s List turns the model on its head: Consumers have to pay a membership fee to access the site. Businesses do not (and cannot) pay a fee to be listed.

Businesses with good ratings (at least a B) can advertise, but only if they offer Angie’s List members a discount. The company says that anonymous reviews are not allowed, which minimizes spam. And companies registered with the site can respond to reviews, free of charge.

With 2 million members, Angie’s List isn’t huge, but since they are paying customers, they’re likely more engaged than casual Yelp or Google Places users. If you’re in Angie’s wheelhouse--especially if you operate any kind of home-repair business--it makes sense to keep tabs on your listing here.

Yahoo Local

Similar to Google Places, Yahoo Local automatically adds reviews to search results and maps that users generate through searches on the broader Yahoo network. As such, you don’t need a separate account on Yahoo Local to see reviews: They’re automatic for anyone using any Yahoo property.

Yahoo Local is huge, with more than 50 million reviews written on the site, and tens of millions more available via professionally curated partner content. Search for a restaurant, for example, and you’ll probably get dozens of user reviews, plus dozens more drawn from blogs and magazines.

Claiming your business’s listing is free. Upgrades (which give more information on your page, photos, and the option to add coupons) cost $10 per month, making Yahoo Local one of the best bargains in this roundup. Businesses, upgraded or not, can respond to user reviews on the site--but, uniquely, so can anyone else, simply by clicking the 'Comment on Review' button. This flexibility means that reviews have the potential to be full of back-and-forth chatter instead of simply standing alone. Spam is moderated by machine and by humans.

Yahoo may not be the typical searcher’s first stop for review content today, but Yahoo is still a major Web destination, and Yahoo Local is surprisingly busy, stuffed with user commentary. Even if you don’t upgrade, it’s probably worthwhile to take a look at the service from time to time, to make sure that your customers there are happy.

MerchantCircle

In our sample searches, MerchantCircle, a smaller site, turned up a few questionable results. A search for “dentist” in our zip code, for instance, offered a virtual-assistant service as the number one result and a daily-deal site as number three. In addition, few businesses listed on the site appear to have any reviews associated with them at all.

Claiming your business's page is free, and upgraded listings run just $10 per month. The company also offers search engine marketing (SEM) services, for $29 to $249 per month. Businesses can respond to negative reviews (presuming that they actually get reviewed). MerchantCircle blocks spam algorithmically, and through disallowing anonymous comments.

MerchantCircle bills itself more as a business-to-consumer social network than as a user-review website, but the lack of much activity here will make it a tertiary site for most businesses seeking to police their user reviews online. It is, however, a minimal investment for an upgraded account.

Citysearch

This venerable website is seemingly more involved with editorial content (and its popular “Best of Citysearch” polls) than with user reviews, and the volume of advertising on Citysearch can actually make it tough to find legitimate results among the chatter. Thirty percent of the site’s traffic comes from mobile devices.

As with Yelp, restaurants and bars are by far the biggest draw here. If you run another type of service business, chances are good that it won’t draw much attention from Citysearch.

Claiming your business's page is free. Upgrades let you enhance your listing page with the usual bio, photos, video, and extra verbiage. Upgraded accounts can also add deals and special offers, respond to reviews, and run targeted ads on the site. Pricing is performance based, and Citysearch does not release that information publicly. Spam is moderated via both humans and machine.

Altogether, Citysearch's site is a fairly typical offering for this category, but primarily worth a look only if you serve food or drink.

Insider Pages

Owned by the same company that owns Citysearch, Insider Pages offers features and policies that are the same as Citysearch’s. But this site is essentially geared toward filling the hole that Citysearch leaves, namely in coverage of service businesses that users of the larger site tend to ignore.

The biggest draw here is Doctor Finder, a fairly self-explanatory tool that lets you locate a nearby doctor who--most important--accepts your health insurance. Other services, including home repair, hair salons, and auto services, are also covered. Like Citysearch, Insider Pages does not disclose pricing. Physicians especially might want to consider a listing here.

TripAdvisor

If you’ve taken a vacation in the past few years, you’re probably familiar with TripAdvisor, which bills itself as the world’s largest travel site and travel community. The site’s coverage of this industry is massive: Its 60 million reviews make it nearly three times the size of Yelp, despite having fewer than 2 million businesses listed.

There’s no denying that if you operate a hotel, you need to be involved with TripAdvisor. Restaurants, particularly those that cater to tourists, are also popular here, but on a considerably lesser scale.

Hotels can claim their TripAdvisor page for free and respond to comments, and TripAdvisor says that it actively polices the site for fraudulent activity--with stiff penalties for businesses that try to game the system. Upgraded accounts let businesses add Web links, contact information, and special offers to their pages. Fees to upgrade to the Business Listings package depend on the number of rooms your hotel has, ranging from $40 per month for a single-room inn to hundreds of dollars per month if your establishment has more than about 25 rooms.

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