Sager NP9261 Quad Core Notebook Review

<!-- Generated by XStandard version 1.7.1.0 on 2007-11-19T09:06:07 -->

by Sinan Karaca

The Clevo D901C is the world's first quad core laptop. It is based on a desktop chipset in a laptop form factor and features processing power, storage capacity, and cutting-edge graphics not available before. It is an update of the earlier D900C model which is very similar and based on the same chipset, but lacked the power plant to supply enough juice for the quad core processor.

/assets/28536.jpg
(view large image)

The test unit specifications are as follows:

• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (self-installed)
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 (2.66GHz, 8MBL2, 1066MHz FSB)
• 17-inch WUXGA display
• Dual nVIDIA GeForce 8700M-GT in SLI mode (512MB each)
• Triple 200GB 7200RPM Hitachi hard drives in RAID 0 performance mode
• 4GB DDR2-800MHz
• Intel Wireless 4965AGN
• 8X DVD Dual Layer Burner
• 12-cell integrated UPS

/assets/28538.jpg
(view large image)

Reasons for Buying

I have always enjoyed working with Sager because of the personalized service and the rapid turnaround. I also find that Sager offers better prices compared to other similarly configured systems. I was very much undecided between getting the Sager or the new Dell XPS M1730 with SSDs, but when Dell called me and told me that they couldn't ship my order until 3rd of February 2008, the keeper was clear.

It did take a while for Sager to ship me this unit as well - which is atypical given their historical performance - but they attributed this to some last minute testing on the graphics rig. Apparently there were some driver issues with the nVIDIA cards running under 64-bit Vista, which were resolved in about a week and then I finally received my unit.

Build &amp; Design

While Sager units may never win beauty contests, and this unit is not an exception, I have to admit that their design has come a long way. The laptop would not be an eye-catcher but it does have a nice black design, instead of Sager's previous &quot;industry gray&quot; colors.

/assets/28526.jpg
(view large image)

The machine is quite heavy and large, it weighs in at 11.55 pounds and is more than two inches thick. The build quality does leave a little bit to be desired - this is basically plastic and iron, don't expect to see any advanced composite materials here. The case does have a little bit of flex and the display latches are a little on the brittle side. Over time I have learned that the most vulnerable part of a Sager notebook are its latches - which can snap easily if one is not careful. I always close and open the lid with both hands to make sure nothing breaks.

Display

The 17-inch glossy 1920x1200 pixel display is wonderful, in fact I have always thought that Sager has the best screens. There is no light leakage, color reproduction is perfect, and view angles are superb. You can look from any direction you like and the picture is crystal clear.

There were unfortunately two dead pixels on the screen, which is unusual for Sager systems. I guess I was bound to get unlucky at some point - this is the first time for me a Sager laptop has had any dead pixels in it at all. Sager does offer a zero dead-pixel guarantee, so if you want to make sure your unit is free of dead pixels, be sure to take advantage of it!

Speakers

The unit has four speakers for surround sound effect - two on each side of the keyboard and two in the front of the laptop. There is no subwoofer available - I guess most manufacturers have stopped putting them in these days, as the net effect they have on sound quality is negligible. The four speakers do a great job of reproducing sound across all levels of the spectrum; high and low notes are accurately reproduced. Having four speakers does help boost music power and adds a nice surround touch.

There are four sound jacks in front of the unit between the two speakers. I like how these can be custom-configured based on the kind of jack you plug-in. Ever plugged in external speakers to a headphone jack, because your laptop didn't have a line-out? You probably cringed at the crappy sound coming out of your speakers. Well worry no more. This system detects each insertion and allows you to customize each of the available slots for a particular kind of input/output. This lets you re-use the same jack for multiple purposes, and does wonders for sound quality. You'll have good music coming out of your speakers now, and still keep headphone support.

Heat &amp; Noise

This Sager is actually unusually quiet, compared to any other Sager I've seen (except its cousin, the D900C). Unless the fans have been kicked on full-blast using the Fn+1 key combination, the laptop is always quiet. Even when the CPU is fully utilized, the fans aren't too loud, and they turn off very promptly as soon as the system cools down. This is a great thing actually, because I have worked with many laptops in the past which remain quiet until the fan kicks in for the first time, and then never goes off, even if the laptop idles for hours afterwords.

/assets/28524.jpg
(view large image)

Keyboard &amp; Touchpad

/assets/28522.jpg
(view large image)

The palmrest is comfortable at all times - without excessive heating or other problems (although the touch pad can get a little warm from time to time). There is a full numeric keypad on the keyboard which is a must-have for 17&quot; systems in my opinion, and the keys have no flex. There are a few extra programmable keys - called &quot;gaming buttons&quot; - these can essentially be used to launch custom applications inside Windows.

Input &amp; Output Ports

The system offers an ample offering of ports. DVI and power ports are both available at the back, 4 USB ports are on the right side, 4 audio jacks are in the front, and CRT, LAN, modem and Express Card slots are on the left side.

Left side view

/assets/28586.jpg
(view large image)

Right side view

/assets/28588.jpg
(view large image)

Back side view

/assets/28590.jpg
(view large image)

Wireless &amp; Bluetooth

To its credit, even though the unit probably won't be moved around too much, the wireless and Bluetooth work very well, and their range is excellent. Having the latest &quot;N&quot; wireless technology helps, as I can connect to stations with the Sager that I don't even get to see with the other laptops that are sitting on the same desk!

Battery Life &amp; Power Adapter

What? Battery? That's just a 30 minute UPS, silly! The power adapter is also massive, and probably weighs more than some ultra-portables out there.

Performance Analysis

4: The most exciting thing about this laptop is its quad core processor. It's the only laptop to feature a quad core processor. Intel doesn't currently ship a mobile quad core processor (this will be available in 2008), but Sager nonetheless crammed in a full desktop chipset into this beast and brings us the first truly portable - if not light and durable - quad core laptop.

3: Also equally exciting, and again a feature available only with Sager laptops for now, is the three hard drive capacity of the laptop. While dual hard drive laptops have been available for quite some time, and some even offer RAID, Sager is the first to market with three hard drives. Together with the options of RAID0 (performance), RAID1 (security), and RAID5 (a blend of performance and security), this does wonders for hard disk performance.

2: Last but not least, dual video cards complement the offering. The total memory available in this SLI system is 1GB, being powered by two nVIDIA DirectX 10 mobile graphics parts each with 512MB discrete graphics memory. This enables very high frame rates in games which are able to benefit from SLI technology - while not all, most games actually work very well with nVIDIA's scalable link interface.

I call this laptop a 4-3-2 pleaser because of its unique combination of multiple cores, hard drives, and graphics cards!

Windows Experience Index

The system originally arrived pre-installed with Windows Vista, and on all counts the system scored 5.9, which is the maximum available score; with the exception of memory, which scored 5.5. Vista likes this machine!

However, I must say that one of the first things I did was to remove Vista. I have often thought of starting a blog called &quot;vistagripeoftheday.com&quot; because at least twice every week, like clockwork, my Vista Tablet PC gives me a headache. My preferred operating system is still Server 2003 - which is Windows NT 5.2 (XP is Windows NT 5.1, so 2003 is as new as it gets without going Vista, which is Windows NT 6.0). Server 2003 also has other advantages, such as:

• An advanced disk cache which is not available with Windows XP
• A newer kernel and more streamlined performance
• Full workstation capabilities once the server features are turned off
• Ability to support a full 4GB of memory with a 32bit operating system

/assets/28598.jpg
(view large image)

/assets/28596.jpg
(view large image)

Yes, you read that last one right - on Server 2003, 32-bit edition, you get to see and use all of your 4GB memory. I know, I know...the web is full of literature saying why a 32bit O/S cannot use all of its 4GB memory. Well go figure...I really have 4GB of memory on this thing in 32bit mode, as evidenced by the Task Manager, and it really works just great! I don't need to worry about application/driver compatibility or anything else like that.

So mainly for performance and reliability reasons, I always stick to Server 2003 - and it makes one mean gaming machine, as you will see from the benchmarks below.

PCMark05

The system scored very well in PCMark05 results. Results could have been better however - we can only conclude that PCMark05 does not fully exercise multi-processor capabilities. That makes sense since back in 2005 the multi-core revolution hadn't started yet - those were the painful and hot Pentium 4 days with hyperthreading - a fake kind of multi-processing which often lowered performance!

Notebook	PCMark05 Score
Sager NP9261 (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz, Dual Nvidia 8700M-GT 512MB)	7,369 PCMarks
Dell XPS M1730 (Core 2 Extreme X7900 2.8GHz, Dual Nvidia 8700M-GT 512MB)	7,148 PCMarks
Sager NP9260 (2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700, 2x Nvidia GeForce Go 7950GTX video cards with 512MB DDR3)	6,871 PCMarks
Alienware m5790 (1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo, ATI X1800 256MB)	4,411 PCMarks
Fujtisu Siemens Amilo Xi1554 Review (2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, ATI X1900, Windows XP)	5,066 PCMarks
Fujitsu LifeBook N6420 (2.00GHz Core 2 Duo, ATI X1600)	4,621 PCMarks
Sony Vaio SZ-110B in Speed Mode (Using Nvidia GeForce Go 7400)	3,637 PCMarks
Asus V6J (1.86GHz Core Duo T2400)	3,646 PCMarks
Alienware M7700 (AMD Athlon FX-60, Nvidia Go 7800GTX)	5,597 PCMarks

Processor Performance (the &quot;4&quot

For accurate sampling, I used both wPrime and SuperPI in the tests.

SuperPI utilizes a single processor core, just like the majority of software applications out there today, which have not yet been re-written to distribute workload across all the cores available on a system. As you can see, the quad-core D901C's SuperPI score is actually lower than its higher-clocked dual-core D900C cousin. This is because when only a single core is used, 2.93GHz is better than 2.66GHz, even though 10.64GHz would be faster than 5.86GHz if all core speeds were individually added up. Of course, the SuperPI score, though not record-setting, is still extremely impressive.

SuperPi Comparison Results

Notebook	Time
Sager NP9261 (2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700)	46s
Sager NP9260 (2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700)	46s
MSI M677 (1.8 GHz Turion X2)	1m 53s
Fujitsu LifeBook N6420 (2.00GHz Core 2 Duo)	1m 02s
LG S1 (2.16 GHz Core Duo)	1m 11s
Dell Inspiron e1505 (2.0GHz Core Duo)	1m 16s
Lenovo ThinkPad T60 (2.0GHz Core Duo)	1m 18s
Toshiba Satellite M100 (2.00GHz Core Duo)	1m 18s
Samsung X60 (1.66GHz Core Duo)	1m 29s
Sony VAIO FS680 (1.86 GHz Pentium M)	1m 53s

Looking at wPrime, however, we see the D901C smokes away all the competition. Yes, this is a record-setting result, at least for the laptop world. wPrime does use all available processor cores at once, and so there is no laptop that can challenge Sager's wPrime scores today, simply because of its quad core processor.

Notebook / CPU	wPrime 32M time
Sager NP9261 (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz)	19.453 sec
Dell XPS M1730 (Core 2 Extreme X7900 2.8GHz)	29.477s
Sony VAIO NR (Core 2 Duo T5250 @ 1.5GHz)	58.233s
Toshiba Tecra A9 (Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz)	38.343s
Toshiba Tecra M9 (Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz)	37.299s
HP Compaq 6910p (Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2GHz)	40.965s
Sony VAIO TZ (Core 2 Duo U7600 @ 1.20GHz)	76.240s
Zepto 6024W (Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2GHz)	42.385s
Lenovo T61 (Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz)	37.705s
Alienware M5750 (Core 2 Duo T7600 @ 2.33GHz)	38.327s
Samsung Q70 (Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2.0GHz)	42.218s
Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi (Core Duo T2500 @ 2.0GHz)	42.947s
Samsung R20 (Core Duo T2250 @ 1.73GHz)	47.563s
Dell Inspiron 2650 (Pentium 4 Mobile 1.6GHz)	231.714s

What this means for &quot;real world&quot; usage is that the Sager unit is unbeatably fast for new applications and still very fast for old applications. When using older applications, just to make sure you're maxing out your CPU, start 3 or 4 of them on lengthy operations at once. This way you'll be keeping each core busy and getting things done 4 times as fast without any system degradation!

Rendering Performance

/assets/28600.jpg
(view large image)

The Cinebench results clearly indicate the gains experienced from using the quad core processor. Again, you could find a laptop with faster single core results, due to sheer GHz speed; but the quad core performance is outstanding and record-setting. Cinebench itself measures multi-core performance gains and reports the quad core speed increase to be 3.43x better than a single-core (and nearly twice better than a dual core).

Hard Drive Performance (the &quot;3&quot

I originally ordered the system with 3 160GB 7200rpm SATA300 hard drives. Sager recommends these over the 200GB 7200rpm SATA150 drives, because of the increased bandwidth (SATA300 vs. SATA150) and how it actually has a meaningful impact on systems with RAID configuration. Unfortunately, one of the hard drives failed right after I received the system, which Sager promptly replaced to their credit. Alas, about a week later while I was preparing the benchmarks for this review, it looked like another hard drive was about to break down.

This time I decided to go for capacity instead and placed a new order for 3 200GB 7200 rpm SATA150 hard drives, just in case I did experience a breakdown. The breakdown regretfully did happen two days later, but not before my NewEgg.com disks arrived in perfect timing! While the SATA150 interface does become a little bit of a handicap in a RAID setup, due to the reduced bandwidth; the difference is not extreme - only about 10mb/sec, which I can live with. And while it's unfortunate that I got a brand new system with two lemon disks in it, Sager was at least prompt about replacing one (and I still need to talk to them about the other). This has never happened before with them and I can only assume I just had bad luck this time round, with the bad pixels and everything.

With the working disks in place, the hard drive results are absolutely mind-blowing. Just take a look at the HDTune results and see for yourself. Keep in mind that this review unit is not equipped with solid state drives (link to SSD performance analysis article)! These amazing results are due to the fact that Sager has fitted 3 hard drives - and not just 2 - inside the casing; whereas most other RAID laptops fit only 2 hard drives. A RAID0 array with 2 hard drives is good, nearly doubling the performance compared to a single hard drive; a RAID0 array with 3 hard drives is better, nearly tripling performance!

The first HDTune chart gives us something we've never seen before (and probably never will see) with mechanical hard disks, the performance graph is actually going UP - yes up, not down - instead of deteriorating over time, unlike what mechanical hard disks normally do. This is completely owing to the RAID0 with the 3 hard disks, a similar RAID0 array with 2 hard disks still deteriorates over time. This HDTune chart also beats most solid state disks - due to the sheer power of the RAID stripe being distributed across 3 disks. Sager's RAID0 array coupled with 3 ordinary disks brings you solid state disk performance without the cost.

/assets/28608.jpg
(view large image)

The Intel driver for the RAID array also offers a built-in write cache option. With the write cache enabled, the performance simply sky-rocketed out of this world. While the graph now assumed typical mechanical disk characteristics (i.e. deteriorates over time as expected), even the lowest speed is still extremely fast, and above both solid state disk performance and the performance of the RAID0 array without the cache. This makes enabling the cache the natural choice; since this laptop has a &quot;UPS&quot; losing power is not an issue and the cache is safe to use.

I cannot imagine what this RAID0 array would do if I could connect three solid state disks to it, instead of mechanical drives. As soon as the Mtron 64GB solid states are available, I'll try it out and be sure to let you know! Until then, I'll enjoy my 600GB of legroom.

I should note that I did not test either of the RAID5 or RAID1 modes, because these would not provide performance gains on par with the RAID0 mode. RAID0 can of course be risky, because if one drive fails, all our data is lost. RAID1 is the other extreme where all data is mirrored on all drives, so you could suffer two drive failures and still retain your data. However, that doesn't make as much sense when you can connect three drives - you're really wasting some space there. RAID5 actually offers a good tradeoff between performance and reliability, the failure of one drive does not destroy the whole array, and there is still some performance benefit. It's worth it to mention that the Sager is the only notebook offering a RAID5 option, which as its pre-requisite has three drives anyways, so you can see why no other notebook can offer it at this time.

Gaming Performance (the &quot;2&quot

Another record setter is found in this category. The Sager exceeds 10,000 in the 3D Mark 06 scores! I ran benchmarks using the latest nVIDIA drivers - version 169.04 from laptopvideo2go.com. The ones that shipped with the system were junk, and never crossed 7k in 3D Mark 06 scores, for some reason (like I said, I haven't been lucky with this system out of the box). I also installed nVIDIA's overclocking tool (insert link) and found that a 1GHz memory clock and 750MHz core clock were stable in gaming. With these results, the Sager broke the 10k barrier in 3D Mark 06 scores, yet another record which I don't believe any other portable system can match today.

I ran a series of four tests in total - in combinations with/without SLI and with/without overclocking. As you can see, the results in each case are remarkable, and the net effect of overclocking is really pronounced, equally with or without SLI. The Sager has a very nice &quot;fan&quot; switch on the keyboard - Fn+1 (not F1, just the numeral 1) - and with the fans blasting at full speed, you can overclock in confidence.

3DMark06 Results and Comparison:

Notebook	3D Mark 06 Results
Sager NP9261 (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz, Single Nvidia 8700M-GT)	5,586
Sager NP9261 (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz, Single Nvidia 8700M-GT Overclocked)	6,660
Sager NP9261 (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz, Dual Nvidia 8700M-GT)	9,145
Sager NP9261 (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz, Dual Nvidia 8700M-GT Overclocked)	10,397
Dell XPS M1730 (Core 2 Extreme X7900 2.8GHz, Dual Nvidia GeForce 8700M-GT 512MB)	8,536
Dell XPS M1730 (Core 2 Extreme X7900 overclocked to 3.2GHz, Dual Nvidia GeForce 8700M-GT 512MB)	8,572
Sager NP5791 (Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 2.20GHz, Nvidia GeForce 8700M-GT 512MB)	4,941
Alienware M9750 (Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 2.33GHz, Nvidia go 7950 GTX video cards with 512MB)	7,308
Sager NP9260 (2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700, 2x Nvidia GeForce Go 7950GTX video cards with 512MB DDR3)	9,097
Alienware m5790 (1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo, ATI X1800 256MB)	2,625
WidowPC Sting D517D (Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz, Nvidia 7900GTX 512MB)	4,833
Apple MacBook Pro (2.00GHz Core Duo, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 128MB)	1,528
Alienware Area 51 m5550 (2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, nVidia GeForce Go 7600 256MB)	2,183
ASUS A8Ja (1.66GHz Core Duo, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 512MB)	1,973

SLI itself is of course a major benefit. Most real-world games experience a dramatic performance gain from SLI technology. Frame rates in World in Conflict, for instance, more than doubled when SLI was enabled. The only odd-ball in this category was Flight Simulator X, which even after its second service pack, leaves a lot to be desired. Enabling SLI on this game absolutely killed performance! I won't blame this on SLI or nVIDIA drivers but simply Microsoft, who really need to get around to fixing their Flight Simulator line soon! Other games I tried were Bioshock (great SLI benefits), and Crysis - Crysis was a little skippy, but at full details, running under 1920x1200 resolution, I was OK with a few skips here and there, given that Crysis has still not been officially released.

One unfortunate caveat of using Server 2003 with SLI is that, nVIDIA, for some time now, has been artificially preventing using SLI on Server 2003 systems without premium Quadro cards. I know it used to work before - when I reviewed the 20&quot; Sager earlier this year, SLI worked just fine under Server 2003, with its pedestrian GeForce cards. Only the latest of their drivers artificially prevent turning this option on under Server 2003, which is very frustrating because it's a completely artificial limitation. After some searching around on forums, I found a tool called TweakNT which switches the &quot;mode&quot; of your Windows installation from Server to Workstation, and vice-versa. I ran the tool on my Server 2003 installation, rebooted, and Windows thought it was XP now (even though the kernel version was still 5.2, the boot screens and other elements were all branded for XP). Lo and behold, even without re-installing the driver, SLI was working now! So anybody who suggests this SLI issue is a technological limitation is...not being technically accurate!

Of course, now that I was in &quot;XP&quot; mode, it was interesting to see my total memory drop down to 2.75GB from 4GB. This leads me to conclude that Microsoft's memory limitation on 32 bit operating systems itself is also a completely artificial limitation...but that's another story. Using TweakNT, I am able to easily move in and out of the Server/Workstation modes on the system; so when I need SLI, I turn on the XP switch; when I need 4GB memory, I go back to Server 2003. Of course, I wish nVIDIA would simply make SLI available on the Server 2003 platform for all their graphics cards, even the pedestrian GeForce ones, which would make all this custom tweaking unnecessary.

Conclusion

This system actually delivers great performance and offers great value - not only for gaming, but for heavy-duty business use as well. The 4-3-2 formula works very well. This is the kind of system where you can burn a DVD in the background, leave all your applications and mail client running all the time, and still go play an amazing 3D game without so much as a hiccup in your FPS or a coaster in the process. The price is also right - unlike most other gaming systems which have very inflated pricing - this boutique brand has got it just perfect.

Pros:

• Best processing power with quad core
• Best hard disk performance with triple drive RAID
• Best graphics with the latest DX10 solution
• Good service

Cons:

• Questionable quality assurance
• Poor out-of-the-box drivers
• Poor build quality

 

nice review, and very nice laptop

 

Holy crap... that thing is powerful

how much did it cost you?

 

Thanks for the review. Quite a powerhouse!

 

Nice and quick review.

If you have any issues (like dead pixels), you do not need to buy the guarantee.

Just contact your Sager vendor, and they will replace the screen or system for you without additional costs.... due to the 30 full-satisfaction guarantee thats already in place.

I think the build quality is pretty top-notch from my tests with this model... as compared with my D900K. Very sturdy and solid.

 

That thing sure is a monster . . . powerful . . ..

Nice review!!

 

Nice review! Although I wish there were some quad-core temperature readings and/or GPU FRAPS benchmarks in there.

 

Men i made a wise decision on ordering one of them. I am just waiting for it to be deliver.

 

Fantastic review. Really great insights to the issue of ram availability and SLi functionality. I would like to hear more about both of these issues-- specifically using Server 2003 and any additional insights that others may have on artifical limits set on GPUs by Intel and operating systems by Microsoft.

 

[Sarcasm] No SLI 8800M GTS, No Care! [/Sarcasm]

Insane. That thing probably has more power that a few of the older servers here.

 

this system will soon have SLI 8800M GTX's..... I will try to get a hold of a system for review when those cards are available.

 

Awesome review, I tested the NP9260 in July this year and it was beautiful inside and out.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this machine is the way it handles heat. Can't beat its quietness nor coolness.

Congratulations and enjoy. This is the fastest notebook ever tested on NBR.

 

ahh nice review, nice 'lappie'... But not too hot... and the battery life
i dont think its very portable, tho i like the specs...

I think the performance is blazin, but i dont really like the design

 

It's a great laptop for the money. The best you can get in specs right now.

 

That thing is a monster in all the benchmarks! Really strange to see that HDTune on a non SSD drive.

If I wanted to have a laptop to replace my laptop, this is definitely the way to go! Dock it, hook it up to a 30", and you're golden!

 

What the hell man?! I want something like this too

Excellent review =D

 

why do you think it has poor build quality? i have the older version d900t and the materials used are fairly top notch with little keyboard flex and a relativley solid case.

i am sure the build quality does not compare to the alienware m9750 but very few laptops even come close to the d900 series notebooks.

 

Gday
The Clevo resellers in the UK are Rock , dpctech (- which incidentally sells the D9261 as well ) evesham and novatech. Rock has it with a baseline price of 1750 with the single 8800M GTX plus T75. dcptech have it with a price of 1410 pounds with single 8800M plus T75 but it doesn't come with an operating system , they only give you windows vista ultimate at a cost of 92 pounds 32bit so it comes to 1500 quid. Novatech should getting it in as well as it was mentioned in the Nvidia release notes , don't know about evesham bur you can assume they will at some stage as well in the future.

 

Holy Jupiter!!!!!
This is a Monster..
Want one too... but 17in lappie's wont work for me.
Wish it was a 14in....impossible, impossiple......
This tells me the future of laptop-dom will be amazing..
How much was it again?????

 

WHAT IS WUXGA?? Why do you waste our time making us look this up instead of just providing resolution in pixels?

 

its a standard format, so there almost no need to say anything else.

 

Now Dell XPS 1730 and Alienware are only kids compare to this Sager... LOL.
Nice review !!!

 

is that battery life really true 30 Minutes only..?? can anyone else confirm that.?? i know i have ordered one of these too. but i thought it was atleast an 1hr -1.5hrs on the battery

 

on idle/basic use on battery, these units get about 1-1.5 hours.... from previous reviews and my tests.

 

awesome thanks Gophn.

 

I think the 30 minutes makes sense since the CPU is quad core now...I don't think it can archive any higher than that.

 

these notebooks have low-level throttling in place for the CPU.

It will not be running the CPU at full clock speed when its not needed.

Same goes for previous D900 models.

 

But I still think it's hard to reach over 1 hour. Too much power..

 

nope its true.... my notebook runs down the full 12-cell battery in 35-40 min if I switch the throttle of CPU to full speed.

but it usually hangs around 1000mhz when on battery and not doing much.

 

Great review. Nice to finally see some benchmarks on the system i'm getting.
Ofcourse the battery life does sound like a worry, as i was expecting to use it on flights, but then again, i wasn't expecting a 1½ hour.
I'll test it out myself when i recieve my laptop. Playing games and being idle. Only need the wire transfer to go trough now. But again. Thanks for the review

 

Don't know if you are serious or not

This is a great power notebook but portability and decent battery life is not to be expected when it is that powerful. Weighing about twice as much as a "lightweight" 17 inch notebook and being as thick as it is, I hope you are not a frequent traveler or sitting in coach

Having said that, you'll probably get a bit more battery life since yours doesn't have dual graphics cards.

 

kool review, yeh bout the battery life i know u are not gonna get much of the 12 cell battery 1hr tops, most of the time i know its gonna be plugged in, but as i do travel sometimes i will probably get my self one of these

http://www.specialtech.co.uk/spshop/customer/product.php?productid=4387&cat=0&page=1

to supplement the battery life when on the go

 

Well, the thing with the battery is, I have three hard drives, two video cards, and four cores on this system...that's actually three times the power drain on a typical laptop which has one to two cores, one video card, and one hard drive. Keep in mind that to get good battery life people choose systems without dedicated graphics, so they can save power. So its only natural that this beast doesn't last too long on battery!

The way I look at it, this is my portable desktop - its so much easier to carry around compared to a desktop, and its extremely powerful. The lack of portability is well justified compared to the power it gives you. For instance, the Dell XPS 1730 appears as heavy and short-lasting on the battery; but it falls very short of giving you the performance that the Sager provides. The Sager beats most desktops today flat out, and accepts no competition from any other notebook in the market today!

As for daily carrying around...I use a tablet PC. They're fun and light!!! They're small, have high capacity or twin batteries, you can even write on them directly - they make the perfect "field" laptop. Sure, you cannot game with them - try playing Crysis on an integrated video card (the Intel graphics "accelerator"s don't go very far). You used to be able to play Flight Simulator X on the integrated cards, but as of the latest service pack, they've broken that also, so for any kind of decent gaming, you're flat out of luck.

I guess whereas previously I used to have a desktop and a laptop, now I have a heavy-duty laptop and an ultra-portable tablet. The combination works pretty well

 

I notice that some of the graphics I provided for the review didn't make it on the review page, so I'll upload them here instead.

I love the configurable jacks. This is what happens when you plug-in a jack:



Flight Simulator X is still a very buggy program even after its second service pack, but at least it does stress all 4 cores on the system, as evidenced by this Task Manager screenshot:



The HDTune screenshot with the Intel driver cache didn't make it either. Just look at this phenomenal HDTune chart. Has anybody seen anything like this before?



I also provided Task Manager screenshots for the system, running in XP mode versus Server 2003 mode. Its wonderful to have access to all 4GB of memory in Server 2003 mode! I just wish SLi worked in Server 2003 natively without having to trick the nVIDIA driver with TweakXP.



And here's another side-by-side screenshot for enabling the Intel Matrix driver RAID cache. Note: A lot of laptops currently ship with the Intel Matrix driver, even if there is no RAID. Check to see if your own laptop also offers this setting, and enable it for increased I/O performance:



And here's the overclock settings for the GPU - remarkable how it so measurably impacts performance:



A note for the SLi settings - this is something I found out about after writing the review. For the best gameplay experience in Crysis (the final released version) you will want to set SLi to Alternate Frame Rendering Mode 1. Without SLi, or even with SLi without this mode, the game performance was rather poor. With this setting, I am able to turn on all the details and play at very high resolutions! In fact, I am playing the game at the hacked XP quality settings of Ultra High (which Crysis artificially seems to disable on systems without DirectX 10, but the capability is still there under the hood, and the graphics look a lot better with god-rays and the like).

Finally, I'll close this "appendix" by attaching a CPU-Z screenshot of the quad core processor in all its glory



I'm glad everybody enjoyed the review, it was lots of fun to write and thanks for reading it Till next time guys and gals...

 

Thanks mate for the review.!! cant wait for my beast to arrive so i can mess around with it.. prollly have to wait another month for the 8800 GTX

 

That system must have cost a fortune, I don’t understand why you didn’t wait for the 8800M . According to this review Even a single 8800M GTS can beat 8700M SLI in 3Dmark06.

 

Thats a lot of process @_@. Could you check with core temp how hot is it in idle and load?

 

I am not on the move to much, but I live in Ireland and goes home a couple of times a year, so its nice to be able to take your system with you. Its mainly replacing this old desktop, but yeah. with the power in this system, i do believe it can compete with desktops.

 

It's still a Clevo....

= Poor Quality
= Problem Prone
= Expensive Parts(especially if you need to replace them yourself)


Hope you got a 3 year warranty!

Many of my collegues including myself fell for the very good specs that Clevo offer in their notebooks. ALL and I mean ALL of our notebooks had motherboards replaced etc...

Nice Lappy! BUT I would NEVER buy another Clevo...

 

I'm speechless. That second HD Tune result (with the Intel driver cache) is amazing.

 

Hey, what nVidia Control Panel is that? Mine doesn't have that many features...also could you post some pictures from Crysis? I`d like to see how your system handles it and how it looks on ultra high...
Nice beast you got there

 

Thank you for the excellent review.

Can this thing run multiple monitors? I see only one DVI output in the back. With a DVI splitter, you should be able to get 2 external LCD's yes? If you buy 2 video cards in SLI, will it have 2 DVI outputs in the back, allowing you to run 4 LCD's.

Will Sager come out with a 20" model of the quad? I'm guessing it's a matter of time and when Clevo puts out a 20" chassis.

 

-Bandit77- There is only one DVI port even if you have two cards. If you buy a Matrox DualHead2Go or a Matrox TripleHead2Go you can have 2 or 3 external monitors connected to that port..

(I haven't tried it myself but I've heard that it works out just fine)

 

Thanks Deodot.

Yes, I heard matrox works well also. Ideally I would like an all in one laptop where I wouldn't have to bring anything else. But I suppose the only time I would really use multiple monitors would be at home where I can leave the matrox already hooked up.

 

Also, if I only buy 1 harddrive, can I add more HD's later? basically do I just pop the drive in and it's ready to go? TIA.

Also, why is the laptop cheaper through 3rd party sites like

http://www.pctorque.com/sager-9260-gaming-computers.php

and

http://www.discountlaptops.com/index.php?section=configurator&regular_model_id=1436&model_id=1441

seems to be almost $1000 cheaper if you price out the Quad w/ 3 hd's.

 

For best pricing (in the US), check out:
- www.xoticpc.com
- www.pcmicroworks.com
- www.rjtech.com

 

I've owned this unit for about little less than 2 months now and I keep having problems with it.

My OS shuts down all of sudden while touching absolutely nothing, and gives me a error message while bootup "can't load winload.exe" (something close to this (^^ ) I would try to reboot and the laptop would something like

bootup>bios>blackout>bootup>bios>error message saying OS is corrupt>reboot>bios>windows screen

I've already reinstalled the OS twice, and it's the same thing all over again. I'm running Vista Ultimate 64, is there some known issue pertaining to this version of OS or driver issues? I've already performed Hitachi HDD Fitness test and that came back green. Did a Vista memory test and it came back fine as well. I've had problem like this right out of the box so I don't know what's the problem now.

 

Hi Mimarsinan,
Very nice in depth review.
Could you give some input if you were to compare between this Sager and:
Dell M6300, HP 8710W, Lenovo T61p.
If you had to choose one for Mechanical Engineering work (with heavy duty 3D CAD program), which would it be? Take into account reliability and support...

Thanks,
Ofer.

 

Also, can anyone comment on the message from XRod, and other problems posted? Am thinking about ordering "the beast" but am a little worried...
(by the way, can anyone explain why its sometimes referred to as Clevo and other times Sager?)

 

i need help on overclocking i have the np9261 sager 2.4 quad core with dual sli 8700m, raid 0 with 3 160 sata hard drives and 2gb of memory running on windows vista 32 bit home premium can you help i have riva tuner 2.06 but is there an easier user friendly way to over clock and get a 3d benchmark score like yours at 10000 plus i am at 8339 as a benchmark score but i am at 5300 on one card when i turned the sli off can you help with the overclock a walk thru with screen shots and an easier program to use to overclock everything to get the same score? i am in iraq so e-mail is the only way to contact me my e-mail is my user name @ us.army.mil