The Elitebook Mobile Workstation is HP’s top of the line business notebook, and the 8770w is at the top of that series. The Elitebook 8770w includes several upgrade from last years model, including a faster processor, better screen, and a better video card.

Features

• Built for Business

  Make no compromises on performance or durability with the HP EliteBook 8770w. Offering up to 4.75hrs battery life with a standard 8-cell lithium-ion battery, this top-of-the-line professional mobile workstation is our most powerful yet. Inspired by aerospace craftsmanship and materials, the HP EliteBook 8770w features a wear and smudge-resistant DuraFinish and an optional backlit keyboard for use in low-light environments.

• Performance to Meet Your Toughest Demands

  Benefit from incredible performance and responsiveness with the latest 3rd Generation Intel® quad core processors for the HP EliteBook 8770w. Run demanding applications with up to 32GB of RAM in four DIMM slots for improved performance speed. Benefit from system memory with up to three HDDs, and get faster response times with the new Intel Smart Response Technology for quick system boot and application startup.

• Stand Out with Professional Graphics

  Maximize performance on the 17.3″ diagonal HD display with the latest workstation-caliber graphics powered by AMD or NVIDIA. Featuring optimized visual computing, the HP EliteBook 8770w provides full Open GL and DirectX 11 support, and provides outstanding color matching from vision to production with optional HP DreamColor Technology. And with multi-display technology, you can view enlarged content or do five things at once on up to five screens, including the native display.

• Storage Solutions for Every Business

  Better your business with a variety of I/O options and up to 2TBs of storage space on the EliteBook 8770w. Get up to a 750GB 7200 rpm hard drive disk or a 320GB 7200 rpm Self Encrypted Drive. Or choose a 128GB-256GB Solid State Drive for faster, quieter and cooler performance on the go. The HP EliteBook 8770w also offers the Upgrade Bay, which enables configuration of a weight saver option, an optical drive, including the Blu-ray Combo, Blu-ray DVD+/-RW SuperMulti DL Drive or a third hard drive for additional storage.

Design

At 17″ the HP EliteBook 8770w is just a big machine. The 8770w is not designed for the road warrior, instead is sacrifices portability for power.

Because the 8770w is designed for the power user it is loaded with top of the line specs. The 8770w is the only mobile workstation in HP’s lineup that can have Nvidia Quadro K300M, K400M, or the K500M. It is also the only mobile workstation from HP that can have 2 hard drives.

The case is made out of HP’s DuraCase material which is a magnesium alloy with a scratch-resistant anodized aluminum surface. The laptop also has metal hinges with hardened steel pins in the axles.

The right side of the 8770w has a Headphone and microphone jack, 2 USB slots, DVD drive, and a VGA port.

Right

On the left side are a firewire port, a few more USB slots, eSATA, a display port, Ethernet port, and a kensington lock.

Left

On the back is the power plug, and telephone port.

Back

On the front is the SD/MMC card slot

Front

When you open up the 8770w you get a look at how it is laid out. I really like how the keyboard goes from edge to edge, but what is even more helpful is the separate number keypad that HP put in this. The keys also have a very nice feel, and they provide good feedback when pressed.

HP also includes both a pointing stick and a touchpad. The pointing stick does its job well by providing accurate navigation, but personally I don’t like them because they are not as precise as the touchpad, so I didn’t use it much. You will also notice that the touchpad is very large. I had not problem getting around the 17″ screen with with very generously sized touchpad. You will also notice 3 buttons on the top and bottom of the touchpad. The buttons on the top ar for the pointing stick, and those on the bottom are for the touchpad.

To the right of the touchpad is the fingerprint reader. This can be used for logging into the computer. However this is another piece of hardware that I would prefer to do without, it just ads cost without adding a lot of functionality.

The screen on the 8770w is a 17-inch HP DreamColor display. The Dreamcolor display is capable of displaying over 1 billion colors on its 30-bit LED balcklit, IPS, LCD panel. I know that is a lot of acronyms, but what it all means is that you are going to get very accurate colors in all your applications. I was also very excited to see that the screen has a matte finish. I really dislike the glossy screens that seem to have taken over consumer laptops. If you need more space then the 8770w supports an additional 4 screens with the HP Advance Docking Station and an AMD graphics card.

At this point I should mention that their is quite a bit of backlight bleeding from the screen along the bottom and right side of the screen. This is really only noticeable in the dark, and when working with dark images, but I would hope that a device as high quality as this would not suffer from such a problem.

Light Bleed

Above the screen is the usual webcam, and stereo microphones. The webcam supports upto 720p resolutions. HP includes some facial recognition software that allows you to log into the PC without having to type a password or swipe your finger. The software works fairly well and only gave me trouble a couple times.

The sound is adequate, but not great. The speakers are located at the front of the laptop on either side of the button that opens the lid. The speakers are small and because they are front facing they are aimed at your stomach. Having them face up would have been a much better choice. I could hear movies, but not clearly, and when I was in a noisy room the sounds were definitely harder to understand.

If you flip the laptop over so you can see the underside you will see two switches. The first one unlocks the battery so it can be removed or replaced. The second one opens the underside so that you can get access to the internals. I was totally surprised at how easy HP made it to get access to the hard drives and memory. Normally you have to get out a screwdriver, but not with the 8770w, it is as easy as flipping a switch.

One last note before we get into the performance testing. Normally on a workstation class machine the manufacturer does not load it up with a lot of extra software like they do on consumer level machines. So I was disappointed to see that this machine had several pieces of questionable software. These include but are not limited to Office Starter 2010, Winzip basic, PDF Complete, and Bing bar.

Performance

To test the performance of this machine I am going to run several tests. These tests include a battery, graphics, and full system test. However, before I get to that lets take a quick look at the specs of the EliteBook 8770w.