HP Envy 6 review

Sound quality was a different story – although Beats Audio is little more than an equaliser preset, the small subwoofer on the bottom of the laptop gives a welcome boost to sound quality compared to other Ultrabooks. Bass has more presence, and even at full volume there was no sharpness or distortion during our test tracks. You’ll still get better sound from a pair of headphones, but the speakers provide audio good enough for more than just YouTube clips.

The Envy 6 is powered by an Intel Ivy Bridge processor, and is more than capable when it comes to desktop applications. The dual-core i5-3317U normally runs at 1.7GHz and can Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz. The laptop has a standard 4GB of RAM and completed our multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 51, so you should be able to run all your everyday applications smoothly.

The laptop’s main hard disk is a 500GB mechanical model rather than an SSD. HP has fitted a 32GB cache drive to the laptop, which stores frequently-accessed files to make the operating system feel snappier and to help speed up boot times. We could reach the Windows desktop in 14 seconds, so it was doing its job. We expected the mechanical hard disk and 15in display to have an impact on battery life, but the Envy 6 was simply superb away from the mains. In our light-use test, it managed almost ten hours on battery power alone – if you stick to light tasks, you’ll easily get a full day’s work out of a single charge.

Integrated graphics have come a long way in a few short years, to the point where the Envy 6’s Intel HD 4000 chipset is almost capable of playing modern games. Our Dirt 3 test, which uses 4x anti-aliasing, was a little too taxing – we only saw a stuttering 16.3fps at our standard settings. However, with anti-aliasing disabled and with most details set to medium, we saw a just-playable frame rate of between 28fps and 31fps.

For £700, the Envy 6 is a fantastic general-purpose laptop. It lacks dedicated graphics, even if Intel’s integrated GPU is an improvement over last year’s design, and the screen is a significant weakness, but the phenomenal battery life and excellent desktop performance make this a serious contender for the best mid-range Ultrabook we’ve seen. Other 15in ultra-portables, such as Samsung Series 9 (15in), cost almost double the price, so if you’re on a mid-range budget this is a superb choice.