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Midrange mobile workstation offers excellent CAD performance for a reasonable price.
In October 2011, we reviewed the top-of-the-line HP Elite- book 8760w, which proved at the time to be the fastest mobile computer Cadalyst Labs had ever tested. For this review, HP sent the 8570w, its new midrange offering in the Elitebook series. We set out to answer the obvious question: How does today's midrange system compare - in terms of price and performance - with last year's king of the hill?
System Features
At the heart of the HP Elitebook 8570w is Intel's third- generation Core i7-3720QM mobile processor (four cores, eight threads) running at a clock speed of 2.6 GHz and jumping to 3.6 GHz in turbo mode for single-core operations. The machine arrived loaded with the Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit operating sys- tem. The four memory slots were filled with 4-GB DIMMs, providing 16 GB of 1,600-MHz DDR3 memory. The maximum memory for this system is an astounding 32 GB, achieved by substi- tuting 8-GB DIMMs.
On the graphics side, the HP Elitebook 8570w sports a 15.6" LED-backlit antiglare display that supports one billion colors at a native resolution of 1,920 χ 1,080. An AMD FirePro M4000 mobile GPU (with 1 GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory) powers the display. For the record, HP offers two other graph- ics card options for the HP Elitebook 8570w: the NVIDIA Quadro K1000M ($100 extra) and K2000M ($300 extra).
The HP Elitebook 8570w includes two internal drive bays. In our review system, the bays were outfitted with a Blu-ray ROM, SuperMulti DVD+/-RW optical drive (double-layer sup- port) and a 750-GB, 7,200-rpm SATA hard drive. You can substitute a 500-GB hard drive for the optical drive ($15 extra), providing a maximum of...