HP EliteBook 8570w Notebook Review: The Other Side of the Coin

Conclusion: Fifteen Inch DreamColor, But Is It Worth It?

As much as I adore the current aesthetic HP is employing with their enterprise class notebooks, their design may have run into a bit of a wall with the EliteBook 8570w. Build quality remains solid, the keyboard and touchpad are both excellent, and I still love how easy the access panel is to remove. There are a lot of really smart design cues included with the 8570w, and HP is the only company offering a 10-bit IPS panel in a 15.6" form factor.

Performance is for the most part there, and throttling doesn't seem to have really affected it in any of our benchmarks. Both SPEC workstation benchmarks take a long time to run, but they don't hit the CPU with quite the same sustained load as the AIDA64 stress test; in CPU bound situations, the results were pretty consistent with what we'd expect. Meanwhile, AMD's FirePro M4000 turns out to be an excellent budget alternative to the pricy mobile Quadro GPUs. Though AMD still has some work to do ekeing performance out of the GCN architecture, applications like Maya can benefit tremendously from it. The M4000 was able to perform as well as a Kepler GPU with more than twice its power budget in that test.

Unfortunately, the EliteBook 8570w has two major problems: heat, and price. Thermally, the CPU can get so hot it throttles. You'll see varying opinions around here as to how much of an issue this is. When he reviewed the original Razer Blade, Vivek was willing to overlook that notebook's heat issues on the CPU since the CPU is capable of protecting itself from thermal damage; it runs as fast as it can, then cuts speed to keep from cooking. I'm not as willing to overlook that kind of problem, especially in an enterprise notebook. Out of the box, the 8570w runs as well as it ever will. If it's throttling now, it stands to reason that as dust starts invariably starting to collect inside the notebook, thermal issues will only increase over time. That may or may not be an issue depending on how often the fan is cleaned out, but I'm not big on it.

As for price, you're really paying to be able to get a 15.6" DreamColor display. That may very well not be worth it. If you're willing to go for a more conventional 1080p display, Dell's Precision M4700 comes in at $400 less for roughly the same performance, and ditches potential SSD caching in favor of just flat out offering mSATA SSDs for storage. Meanwhile, Lenovo's ThinkPad W530 is able to undercut HP's offering by a brutal $800, but you do have to sacrifice the FirePro, blu-ray, and some storage to get there.

Where mobile workstations are concerned, I'm not convinced the 8570w is the way to go. In my opinion, the primary reason to buy it would be because you absolutely must have DreamColor at 15.6" instead of 17.3". If you're in the market for a mobile workstation and need a quality panel, I'd seriously consider spending up on either the Dell Precision M6700 or HP's own EliteBook 8770w. This isn't a bad notebook, but it's not a homerun either, and I think it asks too many compromises.