Best laptop ever produced IMHO. 12 years and still going strong. I had modified mine to run with Quadro P5200 with no problem. Mine is now equal or less to Zbook 17 G5.. maybe it's not the same, but it also costed me less than 300$ to make this work.
Mine specs are: i7 3740QM, Quadro P5200, 16GB DDR3L 1866 Mhz, 2x RAID 0 Samsung 1TB 870 Evo, DreamColor display and refurbished battery. Quality of this device is second to nothing and is also blazing fast.

I just got a new-to-me 8570w a few weeks ago.  Besides being an excellent machine in general, it has the hands down best chiclet keyboard I have ever used.  There's just an absolutely great feel to it, solid and firm.  Head and shoulders above Apple, Zbook and Thinkpad chiclet keyboards.  I have a first gen Zbook, too, and I have no idea why they moved to a crappier, flimsier keyboard setup.

I got my version off ebay for a reasonable rate, still in good shape. running a quadcore i7-3720 QM (4c,8th) and same K1000m reviewed here.

Battery sucks, i think its a standard 6cell, used and with no optimus, it guzzles it fast.

That said, did a few modifications:
took the memory from 8 to 32gb
swapped the 500gb hd for a 480gb SSD
Have a 72wh 8c battery on order to replace the 6c, and a 100wh battery slice to go on the bottom. this should make it mobile enough and provide the power.

scoping out a possibility of a fhd display and a k2000m gpu as future upgrades. handles adobe premiere quite nicely.

Powerfull laptop, only i write allot of documents for work and programming codes. the only issue what i have is that the backspace button and the Numlock button are very close.

just want to ask what is the best hard drive and the fastest that i can put on my hp elitebook 8570w i5??

[email protected]

thanks

Had mine for almost a year:

i7-3610QM @2.3GHz
8GB RAM
Put a 500GB SSD in it - 500MB/s Transfer!  Not 250 MB/s

This thing moves! 

Had an HP 8510w before this.  Lasted me four years and was still strong enough to be passed on the normal mortals in the office. 

Best machines around.

Had my 8570w for a year now bought at £1196 (i53360M, 1 SSD + 1HDD/ AMD graphics/16gb ram) - fantastic - never misses a beat.  A true workstation which runs CAD programs effortlessly (Solidworks, Catia, Inventor) and a host of other graphics and rendering programs.  The i5 with high clock speed is far better for Solidworks than the low speed quad core, it handles rendering on Keyshot fine too but I don't do much on it (I have a dedicated desktop for that).

Build quality is superb and it handles being chucked around in the workshop.

Really great laptop, I would also never trade it in!

So...purchased an Elitebook 8570w. 32GB RAM, i7-3840QM @ 2.8GHz, Nvidia Quadro K2000M, 750GB HD @ 7200rpm. Everything else standard.

Wasn't the main contention that it's not a good value for the money? I happened upon it, HP-refurbished (yes, not new, but still under warranty) with zero blemishes and zero issues, for $1480 (1140 Euro).

Liftoff achieved. No, not the fan - I changed the BIOS settings, hah.

I use one of these with 32GB Ram i7 and dual ssd's and it just about achieves lift off. I wouldn't trade this notebook for anything else out there.

there are 4 ram slots, not 2
The extra 2 are under the keyboard

Wow, I don't get how this laptop can get an 88% Very Good rating!  At the end of the day it's just a dual core CPU, a lowly 4GB RAM, no SSD, a professional graphics card based on the lowly 630M, no Optimus support, all wrapped up in a heavy 3kg case that seems unnecessarily heavy for a 15 inch portable laptop!  How they can charge 1840 euros for such hardware seems too steep to me.  I think you could get such hardware in a laptop for well less than a 1000 Euro easily.

The only good points I can see is the good screen, although a stuck pixel!  And I guess the build quality is good, so will have good longevity & resilience, and will feel good to use; but still, it's 3kg, too heavy for a 15inch portable laptop.

This laptop just feels like a rip off, and I don't think it should get such a high rating, especially in view of it's seemingly insane price.

The price is outrageous for what you get.