This is the continuation of my in-depth look at the HP EliteBook 8740w Mobile Workstation. See days one, two, three and four to catch up.
As you know, I was down for a couple of days there. The original EliteBook that I was testing took a dump when it got hot. Apparently there was a manufacturing or assembly mistake, or a defective GPU; whenever the GPU got hot, thermal throttling kicked in and shut down the machine immediately.
If the computer was cold, I could get it booted for about five minutes before it got hot enough to shut down again.
So, stuff like that happens; sometimes you just get unlucky. No biggie. I’ve been in this game long enough to know that sometimes you just get a lemon, no matter who the manufacturer is. I’ve had super high-end enterprise hardware die on me, and had budget bargain-bin no-name hardware last for seven years. The real test is how well the manufacturer helps you out after your hardware dies.
I wish I could have tested the warranty support. As it was, this is a special case because the laptop was provided by Edelman (HP’s PR firm) and it wasn’t technically purchased by me at retail. Rather than go through the normal support channels, Edelman had me send the defective one back to them so they could handle warranty support. I opened up the second one I have, and began reinstalling everything. Don’t worry: Edelman will send me a replacement for when I’m ready to give one away.
So, let’s talk about the warranty for a moment, even though I didn’t get to use it firsthand. The EliteBook mobile workstation line comes with a three year on-site warranty, standard. If this were a normal situation, I would have placed a service request, they probably would have walked me through some diagnostic questions and steps to follow, and I would have most likely been escalated to level two support. At that point, they would have determined that the machine was indeed defective and they would have a technician come to my house the next business day, who would have either had the parts in stock to fix the machine, or been able to overnight new parts. Either way, I probably would have been down for about two days—about standard for major hardware failures in a laptop. It’s about the same as AppleCare (except with AppleCare you have to drive to an Apple Store and wait in the store for hours. I’m an old hat at that game.)
The three year on-site warranty is a seriously awesome perk that HP offers to all of their mobile workstation customers. Yet another reason why buying a workstation is very, very different from buying a desktop.
At any rate, back to the grind.
I had a couple of friends over and they were all marveling at the display. The viewable angle is intense (at least 170 degrees), and you can stand to either side of the screen and not lose color fidelity. I know I go on and on about this display, but … well, wowee zowee.
As I had mentioned a couple of days ago, I was really excited to see the 8740w run Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, which utilizes the Mercury Playback Engine to accelerate video editing tasks with the GPU (the ultra high-end NVIDIA Quadro 5000m.) Unfortunately, I didn’t have a copy of CS5 to do the testing with.
Adobe came through with a review copy of Creative Suite 5 Production Premium (I do have to disclose to you that I get to keep the software.) and I got to installing that last night.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was a retail, shrink-wrapped copy of software, and when I opened the box and pulled the first disk out, there was a pretty obvious gouge in the disk. As in, a manufacturing defect. I have terrible luck with this stuff, apparently.
I tried installing it anyway, because I was feeling optimistic. Sure enough, it bombed out at the 35% mark of Disk 1. I took the disk out and buffed it with toothpaste on the defect, and lo and behold: It worked. Carry on, sweet prince.
It’s been a long time since I’ve installed software from DVDs (three of them for the whole Production Premium suite.) It took close to half an hour, but I suppose that’s no slower than downloading the 12-15gb would have been. After installing, there was 1.2gb of patches to download, and then I was ready to go.
I fired up Premiere Pro CS5, super excited to see the Mercury Playback settings.
They were greyed out.
I ran Windows Update and the HP Advisor, both which came back clean (all drivers up-to-date.) The software was patched. What gives?
Then it occurred to me; this 5000m might be too new. The Adobe Creative Suite support site says that the Quadro 5000 is supported, but does not mention the 5000M. Well, I wasn’t going to wait for a patch. I did some research, and determined that by opening:
\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Pro CS5\cuda_supported_cards.txt
and adding the line “Quadro 5000M” to the bottom (case sensitive, no less,) I was able to get Mercury Playback Engine turned on. We are now good to go.
I’m going to start doing numbers tests shortly. I’ll have some solid benchmarks to throw your way soon. In the meantime, here’s a preliminary 3DMark Vantage run result for you:
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