GearWERKZ TechBlog

I got an invite to a "special offer" today from HP for the latest revision of their Pavillion dv7t Select line. The offer was for prices starting at $950 for discount club and Employee Discount Club members. Of course, when I go to the website, prices for the dv7t Select start at $950 anyway, so I was not so sure what was special about my pricing.

At any rate, I thought I would check the system out and post what I thought of the configurations available and their pricing. My final assessment is that the offer is interesting, perhaps very interesting for some, but not out-and-out exciting.

If you are going to buy a 17" notebook for gaming, which is the only capability I would be willing to lug a 17" laptop around for, then it is questionable to buy one that is not equipped with one of the top-line GPUs on the market. The dv7T as I configured it tops out at the same GPU that my dv6t Select has. The Radeon 5650 is a good chip and is solid for gaming; it's just not as solid as the 5870, which many 17" laptops are equipped with.

You get Windows 7 Home Premium, and my rolled up price of $1303.99 included a System Recovery Disc (remember when you didn't have to pay for those?). The processor would be a 1.6GHz Core i7-720QM proc, which is the same as the CPU in my Asus G73, and is the common GPU for 17" performance and gaming notebooks these days.

The things that ARE nice about the current HP sale is some of the add-ons you get for free or at extremely reduced pricing. 6GB of DDR3 RAM and 640GB of HD space (in a 2 X 320GB 7200RPM configuration). For those of us concerned about power, a nice touch in the deal is the availability of a 6-cell + 9-cell combo at 50% off of the normal price (in this deal that runs you about $60).

So the add-ons are not a bad deal. There are some people who swear by HP, so for them this might be the right fit. I now own 2 HPs, which was never my plan, but it just worked out that way. If I were looking at something in this class, I would personally look at the Asus G73, which has a lot more gamer flashiness to it. But the G73 has a slightly larger footprint, and is a little more ornery about what bags it will go into. Asus still does not have a lot of accessories for the G73, and their extended battery, an 8-cell, runs $140. Another good option to consider would be the Toshiba Qosmio line.

From what I can see, the dvXt Select lines are borrowing a great deal of the construction and design factors from the Envy line. So for die-hard HP fans not willing to invest the money in an Envy (which will kick you up over $1600), who need 17" of real-estate for maybe video editing and less than the most recent and punishing round of PC Games, the dv7t might be a good fit. Especially if they are more concerned about battery life, hard drive space, and RAM than graphics performance. For others who are less tightly coupled to the brand-name of their next laptop, I would recommend looking elsewhere for slightly better deals.

I should also mention that the dv7t is avaialable with a Blu-Ray ROM drive. I have always questioned equipping a notebook that does less than 1080 resolution with Blu-Ray, but that, of course, is just me.
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