HP ENVY Intel Core i7, GT640 Desktop

Thank you. It did not look right. This still is not a good deal on a desktop computer.

When you bought it did it have a 90 Day HP warranty? If so, and I’m pretty sure it did, why would you expect Woot to take care of it and not HP?

That does not excuse the packaging, etc. I understand that.

Show me some examples of this please.

You touched on hyperthreading but the cache on the i7 is higher than the i5 which helps with repetitive tasks.

Care to share any benchmark links?

What use do you have that isn’t multi-threaded or running several apps at once? You can also disable hyper-threading in the BIOS.

The last builds I did were i5’s and i7’s which were otherwise identical. The i5 was surely adequate for most uses but for the marginal price increase the i7 proved to be a better buy for flexibility alone, at least in my case.

Agreed, for the price point I would have expected a better graphics card and SSD. Like @benmason points out, the PSU is a bit underwhelming and to replace the graphics card you probably would want a stronger PSU (not to mention only one pci-express x16 slot).

Decent system but too expensive for specs, imho.

Yeah, Ibuypower event has better deals

I guess the term better deal is subjective…That CPU appears to have 35% less performance than the CPU in this deal.

For me, the CPU is the base of the system and everything else is easily upgraded (usually).

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-6300+Six-Core

It’s far from ideal. You could build a MUCH more capable gaming system for about half the cost. I built an entry-level gaming system for my buddy recently (haswell i3, 8GB RAM, GTX750, etc) for about $450, and that would run rings around this thing from a gaming standpoint.

The specs on this are frankly bizarre. Weak graphics (for gaming), and TOO much RAM.

32GB RAM - really? No SSD, 10/100 NIC, blue-ray ROM- but not a burner. This is one of the most poorly balanced systems I have ever seen come in 1 package. People need to get a hold on the whole RAM thing. Download a RAM gadget and monitor how much RAM you actually use. It’s pretty hard to pass 4gb unless you are running virtual OSs. I do a lot of video rendering and authoring and rarely get near 4gb especially when you have discreet graphics card. 8GB of RAM should be plenty for 99% of people, 16GB should cover most of the other 1% and less than 1 user in 2000 will ever need 32 GB. They should save the $$ on the RAM and equip this with an SSD- then you’ll realistically see a performance difference. Where did they manage to find the only motherboard that supports this processor yet doesn’t have a gigabit NIC? This has HP written all over it. I am not an HP hater, I buy plenty of their stuff, I’m just perplexed by the way they configure things.

I’ve got an SSD. Does anyone know if refurbished HPs come with the Windows install media? If not, is it hard to get from HP?

Thanks… I can build…but don’t care to :wink: I’ve been looking at cyberpower too… probalby will go that way.

You will NOT get restore media. The restore info is placed on a partition (section of the hard drive). To use an SSD you will need a separate (new) OS. And you will still need to make a boot disk in case of pc crash in order to reload the original OS.

Look for Win 7 or Win 8 from various vendors, I’m not going to name them here but not HP.

I totally agree with this poster. I had the same problem with a refurbished Kindle. I will not buy anything refurbished from Woot again.

I don’t know about this HP, but most companies stopped sending physical restore disks a few years ago. Most have the info on a partition in the HD and its easy enough to get support from the website.

As for this PC, its a ok deal. It is refurbished, new it goes for about $1400.

Pro’s - Lots of hardware for the money. It would almost be $ wise to buy it and strip it for parts. CPU - $309, RAM - $300, Video - $100, HD - $100, PSU - $50. Save on shipping costs. Aside from this, its a decent tower for normal home use. Will support several monitors.

Con’s - Not much room to upgrade with the 450W PSU. Video Card ok for light gaming/average user but not much wiggle room for future upgrades.

Bottom Line - There are “better” deals but this is a lot for the money. Another thing to remember, shipping is cheap. Other stores will charge $15-$50 extra for shipping. It will make a great household computer or secondary PC, the specs will be current for more than 1 year.

You won’t need install media- you can do this 1 of 2 ways.

  1. create your own install media- generally HP will usually have software and prompt you to create back-up DVDs in case of disaster. I believe that these should work fine as installation media for an SSD
    2)If you use the right software you can clone from a large disk to a smaller SSD. This will go through the steps, but you can probably skip some since when you get the computer it should easily fit onto a smaller disk (since you haven’t added any media,content or documents on it yet). Easeus is good free software.

If an item was damaged in shipping, which it sounds like it was, then it isn’t the manufacturer’s fault, its the shipping company and/or the seller who is at fault. Most manufacturers won’t allow you to do a warranty claim on an item that was damaged while being shipped from the retailer to the consumer.

My Gateway just died. So I’m in for one.

I would highly recommend using the restore media to reinstall rather than trying to migrate the existing install to an SSD, especially for a new system that doesn’t have a bunch of additional programs/settings/data on it yet. Migration software can often work, but why go through the extra hassle just to clone a mostly-untouched OS.

But yeah, moving to an SSD should be no problem at all, with a little extra effort. I still recommend the Crucial M500 (preferably 240GB or larger) as the best overall combination of reliability, value, and plenty-good-enough performance. It has built-in power protection and thermal protection, is mature enough to have all the bugs worked out, and has lots of flash over-provisioning for longer-term reliability. The Intel and Samsung drives are also nice, but have had some quirks (especially the 530 series) and are also often higher-priced.

A friend’s recent HP that came with Windows 8 even supported creating the restore “disk” onto a USB flash drive rather than DVDs. It was huge though, so it wouldn’t quite fit on a 16GB flash drive and had to use 32GB (which was more than it needed but the next larger available size). The other snag was that the HP restore disk creation tool only recognized flash drives that show up as “removable media” but the newer “Windows 8 Certified” flash drives now lie to the system and tell it they are fixed disks rather than removable media, which confused the HP tool so it didn’t recognize it. Maybe they fixed that in the meantime, but the workaround we found was just to ignore the HP tool and instead use the image creation tool built right into Windows that is documented at the following link:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&docname=c03529751
Just be sure to check the box that says “Copy the recovery partition from the PC to the recovery drive.” That should give you the full OS image on a bootable USB flash drive, ready to boot from and install a fresh OS onto the new SSD.

I agree with you on Woots lack of customer service after the sale. I purchased a memory foam mattress and it arrived damaged. Initially the return process seemed to be going well, although slow as all can get. Then the grief started once the damaged item was delivered on 4/2/2014. After multiple emails with the idiots Woot has handling returns/refunds I still haven’t received my $350 refund from Woot. Wound up going through the PayPal resolution process, which still takes time.
If everyone that has had problems like ours started informing others in these discussions, Woot would either get their stuff together, or shutdown. I’m okay with either…

For people who are saying 32GB is overkill. Sure, you don’t need that to check your Facebook, web surf, or run Word/Excel, but you also don’t need anything close to an i7-4770 or GT640 for that either. However, it comes in REALLY handy if you want to run multiple VMs on your system, or work with camera raw photos, or edit video, etc. In addition, Windows can automatically use some of your extra RAM for disk caching, so the system can run faster, even with a normal hard drive rather than an SSD. That won’t help improve boot time like an SSD would, but once you’ve booted up and opened your applications it can make a fairly noticeable difference in responsiveness.
I’m all for shoving as much RAM into a system as I can afford (within reason).