Battery life and thoughts
Battery LifeBattery life is a vitally important consideration. Intel's recent Centrino advertising has made users aware of just what kind of battery life its combination of CPU, motherboard and Wireless package offers. The Envy m:855 uses a powerful 14.8v / 6450mAh battery to good effect. The processor's voltage is knocked down to 1.1v and the speed to 800MHz. Battery testing was undertaken under three scenarios. The first was the most intensive, with the laptop set to loop 3DMark 2001SE until it went into standby mode. The second was to play a full-screen DVD (Full Metal Jacket) with sound turned up the maximum permissible until battery failure. Lastly, and the most unscientific, was general laptop usage, consisting of web browsing, Macromedia HomeSite use, e-mail retrieval and word processing - basic PC usage. The screen was set to the default brightness and any other resident programs were terminated. Power attributes were set to Portable/Laptop.
Pretty impressive results, really. At least 2 hours' worth of frenetic gaming is possible, most DVDs are watchable in a single sitting, and one can expect almost 4 hours from basic laptop usage. In contrast, the Dell Inspiron 5150 wasn't fond of modulating CPU speed when run in battery mode, and mobile performance was suitably poor.
Thoughts
It's been another eye-opening experience to see just how much technology can be packed into a relatively small chassis. Laptops used to be the desktop's poor cousin when evaluated on performance terms. That's no longer true, as the Voodoo PC Envy m:855 quite forcibly demonstrates. True top-end desktop PCs need not worry, for laptops' performance will always remain a notch or two behind cutting-edge gaming machines. It's still impossible to replicate, say, the Radeon 9800XT or GeForce FX 5950 Ultra into a form suitable for true mobility.
Nice touches are present everywhere, from the handy multicard reader and 54g Wireless technology to the excellent 7,200RPM hard drive. Battery life is surprisingly good, and gaming performance, be it mobile or mains-powered, is more than adequate. These are the kinds of features we look for in a true desktop replacement; power without real compromise. Voodoo PC has shown that the Athlon 64 CPU makes for an excellent platform on which to design a power notebook.
Specific to the Envy m:855, we're still miffed at the asking price of over £2,000. A custom paint finish isn't enough to elevate it from the very similar laptops Time are now distributing at a substantially lower price. The £1500+ realm necessitates all kinds of feature luxury. We'd like a 4x multiformat DVD ReWriter, a 1600x1200 screen, a 128MB MR 9600 graphics card, 1GB of PC3200 RAM, and, wholly subjectively speaking, a better keyboard.
The Voodoo PC Envy m:855 has shown us an impressive array of power in laptop form. Impressive enough for us to re-think the real use of a cumbersome desktop system. Our lack of recommendation stems from the steep price and nothing much else. If laptops continue to improve at the current rate, we might all be lugging around mini-monsters in the near future.
