There are times when you just need a laptop with a big screen, and while the rise of 16-inch 16:10 laptops has diminished the advantage of a 17.3-inch 16:9 screen, big beasts still reign supreme for jobs like viewing spreadsheets. , graphic design work or video viewing/editing. HP's latest Envy 17 is a surprisingly affordable gateway to the world of capable, big-screen laptops.
The HP Envy 17 is available in several different form factors. At the entry level £999 inc VAT (you can have one with a Core i7 13700H chip, Iris For £1,199 ex VAT (on sale from £1,499), you get a 3,840 x 2,160 display, a Core i7-1335U processor, an Nvidia RTX 3050 GPU and a 512GB SSD.
Interestingly, you can't have the 4K/RTX 3050 machine with a 1TB SSD out of the box. Even stranger, our test machine came with a FullHD display, an i7-1355U chip and an RTX 3050 GPU which isn't even close to an option on sale through HP in the UK. Presumably, if you want this one, you'll have to sweet talk your HP sales rep.
HP Envy 17: Design
Given the price of the Envy 17, an all-metal chassis wasn't a given, but surprisingly, with the exception of the plastic motherboard, everything is made from recycled aluminum. That makes the Envy quite heavy at 2.49kg, but also very solid.
No 17.3-inch laptop can be described as small, but at 396 x 258.6 x 19.6mm, the Envy 17 isn't uncomfortably large. It fit into my regular backpack without any problem and transporting it for a week as my daily driver was no problem.
The base and, more importantly, the lid, which, by the way, is only angled at 140 degrees, are impressively rigid and resistant to all but the most brutal bending attempts. The matte silver finish and rounded profile make it a smart and discreet machine, resistant to fingerprints.
HP has given the Envy 17 a decent array of ports with two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the right along with an HDMI 2.1 video output and a 10Gbit/s USB-A port. On the left side, you'll find two more 10Gbit/s USB-A ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a full-size SD card reader.
Since you have to use one of the Type-C ports to charge the Envy 17, it would have been better to have one on each side to connect the 90W charger, but that's a slight inconvenience.
Wireless connectivity comes courtesy of an Intel AX211 card that supports 6Ghz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 so you can take full advantage of the former's increased bandwidth and the latter's reduced audio latency.
Getting the bottom plastic panel of the Envy 17 is a fairly easy process if you have a Torx screwdriver on hand. Inside you can easily access the two SODIMM RAM holders, each containing an 8GB DDR4-3200MHz drive, the wireless modem, the battery, and the 2280 SSD holder. Given the free space inside the case, It was quite disappointing to discover that there is no space for a second SSD.
HP Envy 17: keyboard, touchpad and webcam
There are many things I like about the keyboard. Firstly, the large, bold, white graphics on the keys are very easy to read and there is a two-stage white backlight. The numeric keypad consists of full-width keys, while the left and right cursor keys are equally full-size, but the up and down keys are half-height.
The keys are made of soft touch plastic and are very pleasant to the touch. Combined with a crisp and precise 1.5mm travel, it creates an enjoyable writing experience. There is a little bit of give in the keyboard deck in the middle, but it's nothing excessive and it didn't interfere with my work pace.
At 125 x 80mm, the touchpad is relatively small for such a large laptop, but the surface is perfectly smooth and reacts well to taps, swipes, and all the other Windows gestures you might want to try. The clicking action on the bottom half of the pad is precise, crisp, and not too loud.
Above the display is a 5MP webcam that can record videos at up to 1080p 30fs and has a physical privacy shutter. It also supports Windows Hello facial recognition. The camera's video transmission is impressive, with surprisingly low noise and good color balance, even in low-light environments. The microphone array also does a good job, picking up what is being said with little echo or distortion and good suppression of background noise.
HP Envy 17: Screen
The Full HD IPS display fitted to our review machine was fairly basic but competent – it's fully laminated and has a high-gloss finish. Peak brightness is a reasonable 300 cd/m2, while the contrast ratio is 1,361:1, helped by low black luminescence of just 0.22 cd/m2.
A 17.3-inch 1,920 x 1,080 display will never be the last word in sharpness with a pixel density of 127 ppi compared to 254 ppi on the 4K model. Look closely at the FullHD display and you can discern the pixel structure. That said, I didn't find it to be an issue in daily use, as the screen was significantly sharper than on the 27-inch HP 27 FullHD All-in-One I recently tested.
Range volumes were solid if unspectacular, at 99.6% sRGB, 68.8% AdobeRGB and 70.5% DCI-P3. There are no options to change the display's color profile, which wasn't unexpected given the lack of wide gamuts, and the Delta E variation against the sRGB profile was again 2.21.
That's a reasonable score and good enough for anything other than very color-critical work, which isn't a task the Envy 17 is really aimed at. Out of the box, the Envy 17's display recorded a gamma of 2.19 and a daylight visual temperature of 6542K, which is close to ideal.
Given the display's basic specs, it doesn't have anything close to HDR capability. The only refresh rate options are 60.06Hz and 40.04Hz, so motion fidelity is as lackluster as expected, with speckling and ghosting evident in test animations. The Envy 17 may have a discrete Nvidia GPU, but it's no more of a gaming machine than any other entry-level productivity laptop.
HP Envy 17: Specs and performance
The first thing to note is that the Nvidia RTX 3050 GPU inside the Envy 17 is tuned with a maximum TGP of 40W. It also has only 4 GB of vRAM. That is a combination that does not generate high levels of performance.
In it ITPro 4K multimedia test, the Envy 17 scored 251 points, which is better than many thin and light laptops we've tested, such as the Asus Zenbook S13 and MacBook Air M2, but well behind the Dell XPS 13 with Core i7- 1360P. Additionally, he obtained a score of 352.
That's the problem with the Envy 17's U-series i7 chip; It's designed for efficiency rather than power, and only 2 of its 10 cores are performance rather than efficiency compared to 4 of the i7-1360P's 12. Both processors have the same maximum turbo frequency of 5Ghz.
The industry-standard PCMark 10 Office and 3DMark Time Spy benchmark tests produced scores of 5,174 and 3,815 compared to 5,698 and 1,992 for the XPS 13 Plus. That suggests the Envy 17 should be able to show Dell a clean pair of heels when it comes to graphics work. And so it turned out.
The Envy 17 scored 43.4 on the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modeling benchmark test, which, if lower than the kind of score you'd get from a high-TGP RTX 4050 (around 73), is double what They can handle the latest integrated Intel Arc Graphics GPUs.
The Envy 17 doesn't have a multiplexer or MUX switch, so you can only override Windows' determination of which GPU to use through the Windows graphics menu or Nvidia control panel. After several experiences with Windows trying to run graphics tasks, including video rendering, on the integrated GPU, we turned to the latter option.
The Envy 17 has a 55Wh battery, small for a laptop with a discrete GPU. In our standard video downgrade test using the VLC video player, the Envy 17 lasted just seven hours and 18 minutes, which is well short of HP's claim of “up to 11 hours and 45 minutes.”
We never made it through a full work day without plugging in the Envy 17, which was a bit of a hassle. If the Envy 17 were a superlight machine, we'd be more forgiving of this flaw, but there's certainly enough room for a physically larger battery inside the chassis.
The Western Digital PCIe 4 SSD in our review unit proved to be fast enough, with average read and write speeds of 3,967 MB/s and 2,494 MB/s, respectively. We didn't expect anything more for this amount of money, and that's more than enough for most uses.
HP Envy 17: Is it worth it?
With the current discounts offered by HP ($390 off the price of the 4K model with the RTX 3050 GPU) bringing it down to $930, the Envy 17 is a very good value. It may not be a powerhouse thanks to that overclocked Nvidia GPU and U-series i7 processor. Still, it can perform even the most demanding graphics tasks faster than any machine that relies on an integrated GPU. However, the relatively poor battery life is a serious drawback.
Have we been a little generous in calling it a workstation replacement? Possibly, but the expansive screen and keyboard mean it's perfect for jobs that require a large viewing area and spacious interface, while the Nvidia GPU gives you graphics capability that few other laptops costing around $1,000 have. They can even dream.
HP Envy 17 Specification
| Show | 17.3 inches 1920 x 1080 IPS, 16:9 aspect ratio, 60 Hz refresh rate, 300 cd/m2 brightness |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-1355U |
| GPU | Nvidia RTX 3050, 4GB RAM, 40W TGP |
| RAM | 16GB DDR4 3200MHz |
| Ports | Thunderbolt 4 x 2, USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 x 3, HDMI 2.1 x 1 |
| 3.5mm audio jack | Yeah |
| Camera | 1080p webcam with privacy shutter |
| Storage | SSD 512 PCIe 4 |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), Bluetooth v5.3 |
| Weight | 2.49 kilograms |
| Dimensions | 396 x 258.6 x 19.6mm |
| Battery capacity | 55Wh |
| OS | Windows 11 Home |
