HP EliteBook project Day 8: Will it play Crysis?

Brian Ambrozy 4 Dec, 2010 at 2:15am ET Article published in Tech

This is part eight of a comprehensive look at HP’s EliteBook 8740W Mobile Workstation. If you’re new to this, please start at day one.

Ah, the age old question. For years and years now, whenever discussion about hardware upgrades came up, the question inevitably came up:

Will it play Crysis?

For the last few days, I’ve looked at DCC CAD/CAM performance, video rendering performance, and very basic OpenGL tests. That’s all well and good, but what happens when you want to unwind and play a game? It’d be a shame to let all this unbridled power (and stunningly bright display) go to waste with just boring old work stuff.

I loaded up a few of the games in our standard benchmark suite, as well as the classic Crysis just because.

In the Crysis benchmark, I cranked everything to max: 1920×1200, 2Xaa, “Very high” quality. It averaged about 12.5FPS. Not bad, if you’re familiar with the Crysis benchmarks.

After running that, I just fired up the game, set everything to “high” instead of “very high”, and played through for about 15 minutes. I got 30-40FPS throughout, and the game played very smoothly (and looked phenomenal.) I’m not used to gaming on a display with this kind of contrast ratio, so I saw new details and things I’ve never seen before. The Way It’s Meant To Be Played™, indeed…

BFBC2 running at 1920x1200

Next, I ran it through the H.A.W.X built-in benchmark run. Same settings: 1920×1200, 2xaa, ultra quality. Peak was 138fps and average was 60. Cake.

Third on my list was Battlefield Bad Company 2. 40fps. After 15 minutes of play, I was pushing 77C on the CPU and drawing 171W (a new high) so I decided to cut it out and let the poor kid cool down.

Despite being, you know, not a gaming GPU, you can very capably game on this machine. I’d make sure you have adequate ventilation if you plan on doing extended gaming, but overall, the 8740W equipped with the NVIDIA Quadro 5000M will get you through your gaming needs for the day, and will deftly play any current game.

And yes, It Will Play Crysis™

Continue on to Day 9, in which a Detroit filmmaker gives his impressions of the EliteBook 8740W.

Comments

6 Dec 2010 ~ 8:32am MAGIC So how long did you play before you were pushing 80*?

Seems like these things are having some thermal issues. Has HP responded to this?
6 Dec 2010 ~ 8:51am Thrax 80C is not at all uncommon for a laptop. Mobile CPUs, for example, are rated for over 100C.
6 Dec 2010 ~ 9:16am primesuspect Yeah, I've been gaming with it for a few days; I also ran GPU folding and CPU folding overnight. The GPU never got over 80, and the CPUs seem to max out at 76.

I wouldn't call it a thermal issue at all. Yeah, the exhaust is hot, but everything seems fine; the laptop has been running for three or four days now without being shut down.

As I said: I recommend proper ventilation.
6 Dec 2010 ~ 9:26am MAGIC

primesuspect wrote:

Yeah, I've been gaming with it for a few days; I also ran GPU folding and CPU folding overnight. The GPU never got over 80, and the CPUs seem to max out at 76.

I wouldn't call it a thermal issue at all. Yeah, the exhaust is hot, but everything seems fine; the laptop has been running for three or four days now without being shut down.

As I said: I recommend proper ventilation.

OK, that just seems really hot to me. As long as it can handle it the heat it sounds good performance wise.
6 Dec 2010 ~ 9:53am Kwitko But will it play WoW?
6 Dec 2010 ~ 10:54am mertesn

MAGIC wrote:

OK, that just seems really hot to me. As long as it can handle it the heat it sounds good performance wise.

Yeah, it's no worse than my similarly-equipped-w/gaming-GPU laptop.
6 Jan 2011 ~ 9:18pm Tim So who did get the laptop that was to be given away to an Icrontic member? I sort of expected that I would get it, but I have received no PM's or anything on the subject.
6 Jan 2011 ~ 10:08pm primesuspect Well, I picked you, Tim, but you didn't answer the phone that day, so I had to move on.
7 Jan 2011 ~ 1:36pm QCH Brian, thanks for calling me about the HP Laptop. I forgot to give you my address. I'll send you a PM so you can USPS it over...