HTWingNut's Sager NP7330 / Clevo W230ST REVIEW

When the first notebook (clevo W230ST) arrived at notebookcheck.net, they said, that the LCD broke on the way to them. They had to send it back.
So it seems it is more fragile (the lcd). I hope everything will be ok.

 

The LCD is rather fragile. The chassis on the other hand, might not be that fragile.
I had a ~4-5kg aluminium finished suitcase drop onto the opened screen + palmrest area. (laptop on floor, suitcase fell off a table)
Gave a rather unnoticeable scratch on the palmrest and broke the screen completely.
(But I did replace the screen, for free )

 

Well 2 small drops (30/40cm) for me and my chassis broke twice, will post pictures when I get it back, if they didn't change the chassis.

 

Fan noise: Yup, point taken. But it'll only be a PoC if the fan diameters are the same.
Screen: I'm a little OCD, and I do photography, or am usually arrowed/asked by friends/teachers to cover events. And by my family to cover holidays. So... yeah. The sRGB coverage is pretty important for me.
300g, really, I don't really feel much of a difference.
It's not anything to do with strength, yes, it's just well when you're used to holding a D700 with a TC-20E III and a 70-200mm F/2.8 VR II for years one-handed and snapping quick shots, a few hundred grams doesn't feel too much different. You do feel it but it's not significant, at least for me.
7260-AC: Heheh I got mine free in a promotion I'd rather let the builder do it for me since if it breaks it's under the warranty.
Battery life: 30% drain in 1 hour, but with wifi on, brightness ~50%, some light photo-editing / web browsing concurrent. Furthermore, the power consumption of the quadcore i7s in web browsing/low load is pretty high. Especially if you are a fast reader (e.g. 900-1000 WPM speed reading), or if there's flash ads. I would say around 12W average (HWMonitor) is probable. Another thing to note is the difference between the TDPs of the 765m and the 760m, which is about 10W. Under load, I'd rather a 30% increase in battery capacity with a <10% increase in max power consumption (obviously it won't be dissipating at it's max TDP on battery, though, which would decrease the power consumption of the 765m, assuming identical workloads and frame limiting)

 

I haven't dropped the chassis yet, I'm not willing to risk the $$$.
In the meantime here's a photo of the pixels on a not-yet-broken Chi Mei screen (obviously not displaying a white background)
It's different from most screens (laptops and desktop screens and TVs) I've seen though.
https://db.tt/ImAYVimE
The pixel arrangement reminds me of the display on a Blackberry Playbook, though.

 

Reminded me of that article from a french website:
Les dalles décryptées par leurs sous-pixels

It looks like samsung's PLS technology.

 

Not to mention the 765m vs 760m. It's like 10-15% difference in real life and the 765m should be able to achieve higher overclock clocks.

I dunno. The screen on the W230ST is matte, and very bright. Useable outdoors at full brightness at least in direct sun. Used it quite a bit like that this summer.

The Clevo is no less fragile than the MSI or Gigabyte...

 

As I already told you, maybe with bright scenes, but you can't use it with darker scenes.
I'll take a few pics when I get it back, show you what I mean... It's not even really sunny anymore over here, but it doesn't need much sun to make it useless unfortunately...
And it may be marketed as matte, but with those reflections it shouldn't. Just look at the p34g in the video above, now THAT is a matte screen.

I don't know about MSI or Gigabyte sturdiness, but w230st's chassis is WAY more fragile than w110er !

 

I dunno. I find the chassis just as solid as the W110ER. I've shoved mine in my work bag numerous times and the bag gets dropped, shoved, and crap thrown on it. Either it's a great bag (it's not, it's a cheap freebee), or the chassis isn't all that fragile. It's already taken a beating and still no problems even a drop (ashamedly) to the floor (with my foot interrupting the fall a bit I admit) and still intact. And screen is fine so far outdoors for movies/videos and web browsing. Had no issues so far. I think you just got a bum screen because it is very bright at brightest setting. Any brighter and everything would be washed out. I use it at ~ 40% brightness most of the time.

Matte is a personal preference. I don't get any more reflection than any other matte screen I've owned. If it's too matte then it typically results in a grainy looking screen which would defeat the purpose of IPS.

 

The gigabyte above doesn't look grainy, and has much less reflections.
But ok, let's say I got a cheap chassis and low-brightness screen.
My brother who bought it too also got a low-brightness screen.
I assume when I'll get it back, the new screen will be a bum one as well.
As is the one Prema got... Let's assume your high-brightness screen and usage are reference, sure =)

 

The backlight bleed on the one I just received seems a bit ridiculous.
Backlight turned down: imgur: the simple image sharer
Backlight turned up: imgur: the simple image sharer

 

I notice my notebook shows a lot more bleeding just during boot up. Once the computer has booted into Windows it goes away even with a black background. Does yours go away or stay like that?

 

All I'm saying is that I you make it sound like it's a dark panel that's impossible to read. I don't doubt that there could be some things that are better. As far as matte, I haven't seen the Gigabyte but in general a heavy matte surface can cause the look of a grainy image, just my point.

For brightness check out this image of them at full brightness:

Left: P150EM, Middle: W230ST, Right: W110ER


And the other images from my review: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...uts-sager-np7330-clevo-w230st-review.html#lcd

It's not the best indicator of actual brightness but it's clear it's as bright as if not brighter than the one in the P150EM 72% gamut. I have had three of the W230ST Chi Mei screens that I've evaluated and all have had equivalent brightness in sun (also shown in image) and as shown in dark.

In direct sunlight (sun overhead, slightly behind me):

 

I noticed the same, but can't understand how it would be possible :-/

Was your cam flash on ?

Try again with something actually dark, then you'll see what I meant =)
I already told that it's ok with bright scenes !

 

No flash.

Like what? Movie?

 

movie, game, dark websites, anything dark will (not) work !

 

I mean, give me a URL, image, movie scene, whatever, so I can compare so it won't be challenged that it's not appropriate.

 

=D
Ok sure, good idea, let's take this one to compare :
http://totalplaystation.com/full/ps...ferno/alone-in-the-dark-inferno_56923_916.jpg

I assume you can't see the monster well in direct sunlight, even less his legs.
If you can, you most definitely have a brighter screen than I did (or much more clouds ^^)

 

Hello, guys!
Im about to buy this laptop, but have a very specific question!
I'd like to hook up the little beast to 2560/1440 external monitor through onboard HDMI port. The monitor I use has only Dual DVI interface. Anyone got similar experience? Do I need some tricky cables or something?
Thanks in advance!

 

You need to make sure you go from HDMI to dual link dvi in the cable.

 

So I talked to the company I bought it from, RJTech. They said that it is "normal" for AAS screens and advised me to just not turn the backlight up. Sounds like BS to me.

My panel is a Chi Mei panel.

 

Unfortunately, that seems par for the course. I went through three panels to find one that's just ok.

Beamed from my G2 Tricorder

 

My apologies if this has already been discussed heavily, but I don't feel like scrolling through 600+ pages of discussion to find my answer

What are the final battery life numbers on this machine? I know HT's review says 3.5 hrs light use, but has Sager updated the BIOS at all, and have any other modifications been made to improve the battery life? Is there any way to, (without having to jump through hoops every time I unplug the machine), get 5+ hours?

 

No

Sent from my SGH-I317M using Tapatalk 2

 

Right.

Set to Power Saver, turn off backlit keyboard, keep brightness below 50% and you'll get 3.5-4 hrs browsing.

 

Over 4 hours is achievable but 5 hours+? I don't really think that's possible atm.
4 hours: Undervolting, underclocking, power saver, lowest brightness, light use.

 

Ohwell, reading the topic. Back to the roots Hows temperature doing? Occasionally i'm getting around 91-97 on GPU... while playing LoL. And i already replaced the termal grease, and the polishing on the platforms is not the best but still fine also disabled turbo boost, so CPU is actually fine, but GPU just hits it. Any ideas how to drop temperature again? oh, forgot, tried to add small thing between heat pipes to avoid heat transfer between them works ok i guess.

 

that's strange, GPU is by far the coolest, never goes over 80/85° for me.

 

Yeah. I thought so. But, CPU reaches 64C max, while graphic cards reaches 77 last game. And thats low shadows Going to try with all max to see max temp on both.

 

Yeah. CPU reaches 76 while GPU reaches 92. Any ideas how to avoid it? Did anyone try to use cooling pads of some sort? or maybe replacing the cooler with something more powerful

 

My GPU rarely goes over 65C any more.

 

Hmmm have you checked if the surface you placed your computer on is a factor? Flat surfaces aren't always the best, propping it up slightly at the back or using a perforated surface helps.
Anyway, your GPU temps are really excessively high compared to the CPU.

 

flat surface are no problem.
either your heatpipe is "bended" (ie not flat) or there is way too much paste in between.

 

its standing on solid flat surface, and enough space between bottom and the surface itself... while browsing - without any rich 3d graphics and stuff cpu is 45 and gpu is 42.
About heatpipe - what do you mean by "bended"? Should it be same thickness through whole pipe? both of them? I will take few photos of it and post it here...

 

Double post -_-

 

Ohkay.... Burn-in Test with FurMark did not heat up my graphics card, it reached 70 barely in 5 minutes. But when i do stress test with intel xtreme tuning utility - cpu goes all way up to 99... This really makes me furious. And got no idea how to drop temperature down. Did replace thermal grease just incase, but layer is thin enough...
Here are pics of my heatpipes.

 

I meant that the surface facing the gpu should be (well, almost) perfectly flat. If not, the contact is not good and heat is not spread correctly to the heat-pipe, which results in higher temps than usual.
But now you're saying furmark doesn't heat the gpu, that's even more strange.
There might be a problem with gpu drivers if a game is heating it beyond 90° and furmark doesn't.

 

Yeah well. The surface touching CPU and GPU crystals look fine, not bents or scratches, its not perfect polishing, but I saw worse in my life that worked fine. So far went to reinstall win8.1 after update broke rebooting Going for clean install, will see what happens.
Did stress tests on cpu and gpu - cooling system handles them separately fine, 2 hours of cpu burn-in, 1 hour of gpu burn-in are fine, but problem starts when I go for something that puts load on both of them at once, then cooling cannot handle it and both overheat. And I can feel proper hot air coming out of vents... In discussion with Schenker to find solution also, as sending it back to Germany from Russia will be troublesome

 

That's not too abnormal for the intel burn test, that is designed to load a CPU to its maximum possible point that will never happen in normal usage.

 

Someone doesn't know how to apply thermal paste, that's what I just found out. After running a torture test the other day, where my laptop started throttling to 2,6GHz - despite being undervolted (-100mV) and underclocked (3,0GHz on 3rd & 4th core), I found it necessary to get new paste. I ordered mine with Arctic Cooling MX4, but decided to switch things up and go with Arctic Silver 5 for the new. After cleaning, re-applying new paste, my load temps dropped 18C (Yes, EIGHTTEEN!!!). Seems like I should've and just upgraded the paste myself from the beginning.

 

You can afford to get much closer to the perfect application yourself, always worth doing that if you know how.

 

I would just imagine that when you select it on the order as an upgrade, and you pay for it - a large reseller like this, should have plenty experience to do it correctly in the first place. They've been building laptops and desktops for years after all, and plenty more than I'm going to build in my lifetime.

 

They just don't care, sad but true.

 

They are building hundreds if not thousands of laptops a day. They just switch type of thermal paste and squirt it on. Reapplying thermal paste isn't that difficult, and the extra couple minutes you give it compared with the operator who gives it ten seconds will make a world of difference. I have never had a laptop from the factory (Sager or otherwise) that a personal repaste hasn't improved the thermals significantly. Even the hard to reach CPU's I've repasted because it's worth it in the end.

 

Yeah, found that out - lesson learned. I was just amazed how much of a difference it made.

 

They are more concerned with having enough paste to have proper contact rather than getting it as 100% thin as possible.

 

they put really too much, almost every time.
this is NOT proper contact =)
there is little difference between enough paste and as thin as possible.
but there is a big difference when they put 2x or 3x what's necessary !

 

It's more a better safe than sorry as well as operating efficiency in the build process. When you're on the line for for warranty on the CPUs and GPUs from a money perspective it's not worth the risk of the builder accidentally not applying enough and being on the line for that repair due to damage. Rather apply too much, have it done in one shot, and as long as the running temps are within target ranges good to go. You won't find anybody saying that it can't be done better yourself.

 

The problem is not that you can do it better yourself, the problem is that it is done wrong even when customers pay an extra for it !!
.
What you're basically saying is that quality control is virtually non-existent, because during those tests (if they were run correctly) :
1- any laptop who didn't get enough paste initially could be spotted right away and fixed in 5 minutes top (and they shouldn't be too much).
2- running temps would be way off for many of those powerful laptops since they reach a point (+95°C) where the cpu throttles, which I assume is not the "target range"

Beside that, not putting enough paste is really hard.
But putting way too much is so much easier =D
I agree on the operating efficiency part hehe

 

It isn't done wrong. It's still *usually* within temp limits. You're paying extra for the paste not for a personal application of the paste. That's why I don't bother with it. Sager notebooks are so easy to clean and repaste, it takes literally 10 minutes if you take your time, and 5 if you've done it a lot. They get probably ten seconds on the line to squirt the paste. Sager is not alone in this. Every OEM does this. They must figure it's not worth the added labor for the limited machines they get back. I'm not saying it's right, but it's the way it is.