Mechanical Design test drives HP's impressive EliteBook 8730w. It's a laptop; no, it's a workstation... Could it be both?

Outside

It is very solidly made and HP has done a nice job on aesthetics – it feels like a business machine, but still manages to look "cool" even with its 'business suit' on. This is mainly thanks to a nice combination of brushed aluminium, magnesium alloy and black plastic, while some interesting LED colors add a bit of sparkle.

Screen: This is the first thing that hits you when you turn it on. The 1920x1200 LED uses DreamColor technology, the fruit of two-year's worth of research with DreamWorks, to produce something that is visually stunning. The technology supports one billion active colors – 64 times more than a normal LCD – and is configurable so the user can best match the display to their preferred color-space regimen. Even with the relatively simple graphics that ViewPerf chucks at it, the display really did look quite special.

Keyboard/mouse/UI: With a 17 inch screen, HP has been able to offer a full keyboard, which has a nice solid but tactile feel. When it comes to moving your cursor, users have a choice of a track pad below the keyboard or a point stick, both of which come with set of rubberized buttons. There is also a fingerprint reader which now seems to be par for the course with many high end machines.

Above the keyboard is an array of touch-sensitive buttons. From left to right, they are HP Info Center, wireless/Bluetooth toggle, presentation mode, mute, volume slider and, hinting at its business credentials, a calculator short cut.

Connectivity: As you would expect, there are plenty of places to plug plenty of things in. If we start on the left hand side of the unit, as well as the power socket and the ExpressCard/54 slot, there is an HDMI connector, a VGA connector, one of four USB sockets and a FireWire port. The front panel provides stereo speakers, headphone and microphone sockets alongside a multi-card reader; while on the right hand side we see an eSATA port, another three USB sockets and finally the RJ-45 and RJ-11 ports. The right hand side also plays host to the DVD+/-RW SuperMulti Double-Layer optical drive with LightScribe.

Inside

Processor: 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9600, with 6MB of Level 2 cache and a 1,066MHz front-side bus

Chipset: Intel PM45 Express

RAM: 1 x 4096 GB DDR2

HDD: 320GB 7,2000rpm

Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M with 512 MB of video memory

Battery: 8-cell (73 WHr) Lithium-Ion battery, optional HP (52 WHr) Extended-Life Battery, optional HP (95 WHr) Ultra-Capacity Battery

Independent software vendor (ISV) certification:

CAD: AutoDesk (AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, Alias Studio, Map 3D, Civil 3D), Bentley (In Roads XM, MicroStation, Navigator), CEI, CoCreate OneSpace, Dassault CATIA V5, ICEM Surf, Intelligent Light, MSC Software (MSC.Patran, SimXpert), PTC Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, Sensable, Siemans PLMS (NX, NX I-deas, Solid Edge, TeamCenter Visualisation and Solidworks

Digital Content Creation (DCC): Adobe (Premiere, After effects, Encore, Photoshop), AutoDesk (3DS MAX/Combustion, Maya), Avid (Xpress Pro, Media Composer) and SoftImage XSI

GIS: ESRI ArcGIS; Oil and Gas: Landmark R5000, Paradigm EPOS, GoCAD, Schlumberger (GeoFrame, Petrel) and SeismicMicro Technology

Thoughts and conclusion: I threw a few software packages at the 8730w to see if I could stress it and it took all of them at a gentle canter. Using one of the many off-the-shelf freeware diagnostic programmes I thought I might be able to benchmark it against other hardware, but due to its mightily impressive innards it also breezed these. So, using my initiative, I went to the Systems Requirement Lab on the Web to see if it could run 'Crysis'. It passed... with flying colors.

HP has developed an impressive machine here. Impressive innards combined with a magnificent display make the EliteBook 8730w a more than capable workstation and eminently more portable than the behemoths we see in many design offices.

If you find regular news, features and product announcements useful, why not sign up to the 'Mechanical Design' weekly newsletter. Simply click HERE to register.

Related links and articles:

HP workstations offer bigger appeal