MSI MS-1651 Montevina BTO Notebook Barebone

Good point, but still my final question is this: What's the difference in battery life between running the 25 watt CPU and the 35 watt cpu. Is it noticeable?

 

Not really.

Some have calculated that it could make up to 20 minutes difference, but that is not accurate.

I would say at the most it would be less than half of that.

EDIT: Keep in mind that it is only the processor that is drawing less power, all the rest of the components are drawing the same amount of power regardless of which processor you use.

 

So when are you actually going to receive physical units in your warehouse/business? I know you have the 7 day burn-in but I would like to see other, non-stock pictures of this model.

 

As I have said a few times before in other threads (or maybe even this one) that is like asking when a baby will be born.

Until they come, you are never sure exactly when they will.

At this point we are hopeful that we will begin shipping by the 2nd full week of August.

 

I saw an earlier post saying that the power brick for this notebook is 90W...let's say that the system with the 35W processor draws a max of 90W, and one with the 25W processor will then draw 80W. That means one should get around 10% more battery life, which for 2-2.5 hours would work out to anywhere from 15-19 minutes. If the 35W model draws less than 90W, then the difference in battery life between the two models would then be higher than calculated, though not by very much. I'm not sure whether this calculation is correct (that's why I didn't major in math or engineering!) or the assumptions behind it are valid.

 

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Although seemingly logical, in real world usage it is highly unlikely that the difference of about 30% in power draw from the processor would make an overall 10% difference in battery life.

Without getting into deep Geekoid, let me just say that the difference between the power draw of the two processors, which is only part of the entire power draw of the laptop, when translated into battery life, will be more in the range of 5%.

However having said all that, what is a few minutes here or there among friends

 

i hope i ordered a good looking computer lol i've yet to see anything except like 3 low res pics off the msi site

 

Will the 7200 RPM 200 gig HD provide superior performance over the 320 5400 RPM HD? Or is it negligible. I've heard people on the forums say that for some reason, the 320 at 5400 RPM is just as fast.

 

Generally speaking density (the capacity of the hard drive) will overtake rotational speed at about 1.5:1

In other words a 5,400 RPM hard drive that is about 1.5 times larger than a 7,200 RPM drive (given that they are both either SATA I or both SATA II) will give you about the same performance in most applications. As the density difference increases so will the performance difference.

 

Hmm, it's a bit more than 1.5 times the size and it's 5400 RPM. But the important part I noticed about what you said is "most applications". Would that rule still apply for games? Would I see the same performance on a 320 gig 5400 in games as I would on a 200 gig 7200?

 

In true NBR fashion, we could turn this into a flame war with tens of posts over how the empirical results don't match the theory. Just let me know when we should begin

 

Yes.

Given hard drives of equal capacity, and equal SATA I or II, the faster rotational speed would only help when loading a game.

So, when you then increase the capacity by about 1.5 times or more you won't see the 7,200 RPM drive giving you any advantage in gaming. With the larger capacity 5,400 RPM drive you spend less, get equal or better performance, and a great deal more capacity.

 

Yikes! Let's not.

I apologize if I offended, that was certainly not my intent. I thought I answered without any flames at all, just information, and ended on a note of friendship.

 

No need to apologize - there was absolutely no offense taken. I was just bugging you

 

What...I'm being bugged

Where's the hidden microphone? :twitcy:

 

http://www.google.com/search?q=320G...avclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS245US245

Actually, there are differences still between a 5400RPM and 7200RPM, you can find HD Tune results on the net.
Also, there are 320GB 7200RPM SATA2 2.5" HDDs (Seagate & Hitachi) which had been released already and should hit the market soon for end-users. So we will see about these newer ones.

However, the disadvantages of 320GB 7200RPM 2.5" are:
1. Uses more power than previous 7200RPM drives (Approx. 5W-6W compares to 4W)
2. More electricity usage means more heat (and causes overall system temperature to rise)
3. Finally, of course, and lesser battery time.

If you have those 7.9" - 12" laptops, then you will have to use those 7200RPM HDDs carefully.

 

In your question about the 5,400 rpm vs. 7,200 rpm hard drive there is absolutely NO QUESTION in my mind that the hard drives are the bottlenecks of notebooks today. I doubt anyone would argue that fact. So considering which speed to get, unless you need to wring every last watt out of your battery should be easy.

Mechanical factors such as seek time (head movement) and RPM (disk movement) determine a large percentage of a hard drive’s performance. Of these two factors, an increase in rotational drive speed or RPM is more likely to bring about a significant gain in performance.

The reason for this is that rotational speed directly affects both access time and data transfer. The impact of disk drive movement on access time comes through a reduction in rotational latency. The data transfer rate is influenced by how fast the disks can spin past the fixed heads that read the data inside the hard drive. Drives with faster rotational speeds will have improved performance when accessing random data locations across the disk (random read/write) or streaming large, contiguous blocks of data (sequential read/write). Thus, increasing the rotational speed affects both rotational latency and the data transfer rate.

So what are the real world reasons that I should use a 7,200 rpm drive instead of a 5,400 rpm?

This comes from a variety of factors and one not mentioned here is that Microsoft is not afraid to make bigger more bloated OS's bundled with things like Windows Defender, pre-fetch, super-fetch, indexing etc. Programs you install just love having their tray- programs load at Windows start up and run in the background, antivirus programs aren't afraid to enable background checking for every cotton pickin' thing.

Now you may say, "Oh that's memory resident" or "CPU related" but remember that everything that takes up memory that something else wants or needs is going to eventually hit the swap file / pagefile that resides where. Ding, ding, ding... you guessed it, give this man a balloon, the hard drive. The faster the drive the more performance you're going to get... period.

This equates to a lot more hard drive access (as stated above) and aside from all the "will this game or this app be faster" this is going to produce an overall faster system at the OS level.

Why not get a 7,200 rpm drive?
They use more power and do get hotter because of it.

 

What's the battery life on the Sager though with its stock 9 cell battery?

 

It depends on how you're using it and what you have in it (5400 v 7200 rpm drive, cpu, wireless on or off, etc)

If you are pushing it to the limit, with the screen dimmed and all the extras off (maybe working on a spreadsheet on a plane), about 3.5 hours.

Normal use with power saving uitility--about 2-3 hours.

 

Man, I leave for the weekend and miss this golden opportunity. Allow me to delve into light Geekoid for a moment to explain WHY what Donald says would hold true:

The TDP of the T9400 vs the P9500 is giving the processor's MAXIMUM power draw. To run the T9400 at 35W, you would have to be pushing the processor to its limit (both cores). We don't have exact power usage specifications from each processor under varying levels of load, but suffice to say that not many people push their processor to 100% usage on a regular basis.

That said, if you ARE one of those people who can push both cores of your processor to 100% usage 100% of the time, you may well see that 15-20 minute increase in battery life. If you're an average user, my guess is that it's going to end up being closer to 5, MAYBE 10 minutes.

 

You don't check the forums on the weekend? Uh Donald, I think you need to have a chat with your employees about a lack of work ethic :laugh:

Tim's right. If you were trying to eke out every last bit of power, you would likely have Speedstep turned on, so the downclocking and downvolting would further reduce the differences in power draw (and consequently difference in battery life) between the two processors. In this scenario, the CPU would probably be in the lowest power state the majority of the time. I looked at the Intel spec sheets but couldn't find the power draw numbers for the sleep states of the T and P processors (I probably missed it among all the pages of numbers and tables).

So I did some new calculations for running at 100% TDP all the time, using a battery life of 1.5 hours and it works out to about an 11 minute difference if you are intending to run your CPU full throttle on battery. So my conclusion is that regardless of your processor usage, the difference in battery life is only going to be around 10±5 minutes.

 

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Sales and admin never works on Sunday...only our 24/7 support technicians do

Here are some better pictures of the standard colors for your enjoyment!

 

Unfortunately we can not make any generalizations like this.

The WD 320GB/7200rpm uses less power and stays cooler than the Seagate 320GB/5400rpm. ( Source.)

The WD 320GB/5400rpm is faster than a Seagate 320GB/7200rpm. ( Source.)

 

They missed Hitachi. Seagate drives I know for sure aren't top performers.
Hopefully to see some reviews to include Hitachi drives.

 

Does that just mean the Seagate 7k320 is a terrible drive?

I miss Hitachi too

 

7K320 is a Hitachi drive

 

Donald, if I ordered the Power Pro 15:3 from your site without an OS, does it come with a drivers disc? It's unclear in the site, it just has "No Operating System" as an option, with no mention of drivers.

 

All the MSI barebone models include the drivers and utilities cd..........

 

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What he said.

Yes, all of our laptops come with the drivers CD as well as the CD for your DVDRW drive...but there is no bloatware

 

no bloatware?? Then what the heck am I paying for?

 

Does anyone know whether this laptop (ms-1651) is available in the UK in either barebone or pre-built form and if so, from which dealer? thanks

 

XoticPC ships internationally(as a barebone and a prebuilt), but I don't know of any local resellers.

 

It's a good drive but it looks like the Western Digital 3200BEKT is the faster one.

 

Hi thanks for the info, can anyone tell me what the shipping charges are from xoticpc to the UK as I cannot find them on their site unless I complete the checkout (which im not ready to do yet).

Also has anyone tried overclocking the 9600m in this notebook yet? and if so what is the performance like?

Thanks for the help

 

This model is not available yet, eta is sometime mid-August.

 

hey guys, great thread. I have a question. Would it be possible to somehow put DDR3 SDRAM in this build? My only reasoning is that it has the Montevina platform like the NP8660, and that has DDR3. Just thinking out loud.

Thanks

 

No, although the basic platform is the same it depends on the chip that is used and the clevo tu series (sager np8660) has a different chip and also the ddr3 sodimm modules are physically different, e.g. they have more pins (204 for ddr3 and 182? or something for ddr2) so a ddr3 module wouldn't fit into a ddr2 slot, which is all the ms-1651 has.

This is not really a bad thing as the performance improvement in notebooks given by ddr3 is tiny, especially for gaming, and the ddr3 modules are considerably more expensive, in the UK 2gb of 1066mhz ddr3 costs ~£120 while 4gb of 800mhz ddr2 costs just £65.

 

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The second part is accurate, but not the first.

DDR3 is a 204 pin module and therefore takes a 204 pin socket to work, where as the DDR2 is a 200 pin module that will only fit in a 200 pin socket.

The chipset used by both models is the Intel PM45.

 

MSI GX620 is selling for $1779 here:

http://www.austin.net.au/ProductLis.../104/ProductCode/NBMSGX620P86324/Default.aspx

I'm guessing this is overclockable too. I'm a little confused about the specs because on some sites they mention that the GX620 has 2 usb ports but in that link it says it has 3 usb ports also. Not that it's a big deal or anything.

 

^^(paladin44) I have not held a DDR3 DIMM yet but are they in addition to different # of pins notched different? To prevent people from not letting a little thing like 4 pins get in the way of forcing it in? Then sending back to you and saying, "what's wrong, it won't work"? "No I didn't, I never touched the memory".

 

Yes, it is notched differently as well, but regardless, it is a little hard to put 204 pin memory into a 200 pin slot no matter how hard you try

 

I still don't know why you so desperately want to spend money for practically no improvement in performance.

 

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Who is the YOU to which you are referring??

 

Bah I misread the previous posts. Me no read so good.

 

Ah well, that's ok...you write beautifully

 

If i buy the barebones one, is it only going to be missing the CPU, WIFI, memory, and HD?

Thanks!

 

Yes, barebone models do not include: CPU, Memory, Wireless, HDD.

 

The saddest thing about ordering laptops like this in Canada is that you get to realize how bad our market is in terms of competition and available product. There are no companies in Canada that offer a customized 1651 like Xoticpc or Powernotebooks. I mean I configured a pretty sweet 1651 at xoticpc and factored in all the shipping taxes and duites and it still beats the end cost of ordering an inferior laptop (m1530) from Dell Canada.

Just an observation, thought you'd enjoy it.

 

It will also be missing the Optical Drive.

 

just wondering, but how much extra are us Canadians going to have to pay with the shipping and duties on this laptop....maybe 1350$ for the laptop itself.