HP ENVY Intel Core i7, GT640 Desktop Price: $849.99 Shipping Options: $5 Standard Shipping Estimates: Ships in 2-3 business days (Monday, May 05 to Tuesday, May 06) + transit Condition: Factory Reconditioned
NVIDIA Surround with Up To Four Monitors1
Simultaneously drive up to four independent 1080p displays for the ultimate multimedia or productivity workspace and expand a single application across all three displays for an immersive viewing perspective.
I am going to nit pick on woots description where they say the i7 is better than the i5. This is not an absolute statement but rather a conditional one.
In reality the i7 is about .5-1% slower for the average user versus an i5 with the same clock speed. The i7 supports hyper threading which is faster only if you are running a multi threaded program or several programs simultaneously.
Graphics card is fine for general use and supports up multiple monitors as others have stated. It’s alright for light gaming, but it’s a low-end card so don’t expect much. The 4GB of memory on there is pretty much a sales gimmick since the GPU isn’t powerful enough for anything that would use that much memory.
32GB of RAM is way too much for most people. Unless you’re doing heavy video editing or using computation-heavy programs, 8GB is more than enough.
At this price range I would expect to see a SSD, especially since it’s a refurb.
WoW is not very demanding but out of the box I would say you’d be able to play it on lower settings. THE GPU(graphics card) on this machine is very weak for the price they are asking. If you wanted to max it out you’d need to replace the GPU and possibly the PSU. I would recommend going to ibuypower or cyberpower this weekend or the next coming holiday. They normally have sales even for the holidays you may or may not celebrate. You can pick the parts and they build it for you and ship it. They are normally cheaper and better for playing games. This machine has tons of waste on it, 4gb video card means nothing and 32gb of ram is even more wasteful. Also keep in mind not all ram is equal. Another option is if you know someone or have a store that builds computers for cheap you can go to tigerdirect and get a barebone kit for cheaper and have a friend or a business build it for you assuming you dont know how.
We bought a refurbished hp pc from woot and it was delivered by the shadiest delivery truck I’ve ever seen, the box was visibly damaged, the foam inserts holding the pc were obliterated. The pc would not power up. We wrote to woot, as longtime loyal customers, we figured it would be no problem to return. After waiting forever for a response to out email, woot refused us and I had to spend two hours on the phone with hp and send it back to get it repaired. It all worked out but we lost our confidence in Woot and would never buy anything but batteries and shirts from now on. But the shirts have been too cutsie lately anyway.
This basic model (configured differently) is currently $750 on HP’s website.
Changing it from 12GB to 32GB of RAM changes the price $600. However, a ram upgrade is pretty damn easy. You can buy 32GB of new RAM (4x8GB sticks) from Crucial (not usually even the cheapest brand) for $300. Or if you can live with 28GB instead (pretty sure you can) you can keep the two 2x6GB the box comes with and just pay $150 to Crucial for 2x8GB sticks. I can’t imagine many people need 28GB of RAM, much less 32GB. So, let’s put you down for $150.
The one on HP comes with 2TB hard drive, so double the space.
If you want blu-ray you’ll need to pay $80 for the upgrade to HP. I’ve never once put a blu-ray disc into my desktop computer, but maybe you do.
I’m not wild about the GT640 card, but if you want to upgrade to that, it’s $150. Personally, I’d go with the standard graphics card and drop $200-$250 on something badass, but for price comparison, we’ll add it in.
So, if you’re ok with popping in your own RAM and taking a downgrade to only 28GB of ram, while getting a hard drive that’s twice as big, you can get this machine brand new for: $1050 ($1130 if you watch blu-ray movies on your desktop)
I’m typing this on a woot HP refurb, and have had excellent luck with it…but I probably wouldn’t roll the refurb dice for a 20% discount (and less flexibility since I’m paying for a video card I’d want to upgrade). If you add in the square-trade warranty you’re almost back to breaking even, and new HPs come with a limited 2 year warranty.
![[Preview 1]](http://d3gqasl9vmjfd8.cloudfront.net/823ae694-410b-4212-b6bb-2fc0e371373c.jpg){kind=link}
![[Preview 2]](http://d3gqasl9vmjfd8.cloudfront.net/1116e1ec-f7b8-4b78-a79b-9d2da9bd0acf.jpg){kind=link}
![[Preview 3]](http://d3gqasl9vmjfd8.cloudfront.net/cb15e56a-108b-4f90-821c-ccd6d7166dd3.jpg){kind=link}
