HP EliteBook 8730w Review: Not Your Grandmother's Laptop

Andrew Farago interviews the directors of the five animated shorts nominees for the 2008 Academy Awards.

By Bryan Hoff | Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 12:00 am

Posted In | Magazines: VFXWorld

[Figure 2] The HP Mobile Display Assistant with sRGB color space.

In addition to Toxik, Max and Maya, the EliteBook is also perfectly suited to Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and any other program that demands processing power and color accuracy.

So, What About Performance?
Funny you should ask. As you can see in the comparisons below, the EliteBook beats the Opteron-based xw9400 hands-down. Not bad for a computer you can carry comfortably under one arm. Of course, the HP xw8400 quad had twice as many processors as the 8730w, so it's no surprise that it outperformed the laptop by a wide margin. That said, the 8400 is about as portable as Sisyphus' boulder. An acceptable trade-off if you ask me.

**Displacement & DOF.max**
System	Time
HP xw8400 (dual)	8:53
HP xw9400	11:27
HP xw8400 (quad)	6:01
HP 8730w	9:49

**Light Gallery**
System	Time
HP xw8400 (dual)	1:53
HP xw9400	2:32
HP xw8400 (quad)	1:07
HP 8730w	2:09

SpecViewPerf, Vista style
First, a couple of caveats: For the first time in any of my reviews, I'm using Vista as a benchmarking platform. I'm also using SpecViewPerf 10. With that in mind, remember that the resulting numbers may differ from previous test scores based upon those inconsistencies.

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Comments

I just reviewed this product myself. I must say it is a powerful notebook with impressive color display and graphic functionality.

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HP FN034UT (not verified) | Thu, 01/28/2010 - 15:40 | Permalink

Thanks for this valuable laptop info, I can surely use this daily.

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baby booties (not verified) | Thu, 11/26/2009 - 12:31 | Permalink

The swiveling monitor features a fast refresh rate that produces smooth motion for DVDs and games.

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cheap computers (not verified) | Sat, 11/14/2009 - 07:39 | Permalink

I own a 8730w with DreamColor display (but with the 2700FX card instead of the 3700 in the reviewed model) and I can say this "review" is full of inaccuracies, to say the best. The *Mobile* DreamColor is not at all a 30bit display. It's a 24 bit (8bit per channel) TN panel with RGBLED backlighting. The *desktop* DreamColor is 30bit, but that's another story. Regarding the Mobile Display Assistant, I'd like to know the procedure used by the reviewer to "calibrate" the display as I find the respective piece of software totally incompetent in this area. It doesn't offer the necessary options for adjustment, only allows you to use some presets, as shown at some place in the article. Did the reviewer actually used the system to do color correction and have an accurate color reproduction?