**OFFICIAL M860TU/ETU Owners Lounge**

How would P9500 perform compared to Q9000/Q9100 in games? I know there isnt many games that support 4 cores, but shouldnt that change very soon?

Any idea what the prices will be?

 

The P9500 would be faster in games today because of the higher clock, but the Q9000/9100 would be faster in multitasking.

 

Has anyone not played DMC 4 with the keyboard on the laptop? I'm getting issues with ghosting on this keyboard..

 

What is ghosting? I have played it through with the keyboard and I didnt have any problems.

 

As in the keyboard doesn't detect too many simultaneous presses of buttons, I'm having a hard time playing DMC 4 because of this

 

What's your BIOS and KBC firmware version?
Hint: You see it starting up the laptop or if you press f2 and go into the BIOS menu.

 

Hi Kevin_Jack. I'd like to know how to upgrade my bios for the NP8660. I don't know how to PM.

 

you wont be able to use the pm option until youve got a minimum of 15--20 posts.

 

I'll go ahead and copy the PM that I've been sending out here.

Things will only go wrong if you do something other than what I've instructed. I've given this to nearly ten M860TU owners, and no one has had any issues.

 

BIOS : 1.00.13s LS1
KBC/EC : 1.00.08

 

Strange. The missed key thing should have been rectified then. Contact your reseller and tell them about it.

 

Emailed sager support, but I'm getting no reply... of all the things, one more thing though, has anyone experience the disappearance of the LAN network in ncpa.cpl? Sometimes it's there, other times, it's missing from even the device manager, if I'm not mistaken, the ethernet lan device for the np8660 is Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit LAN

 

You bought the laptop through Sager? Hmm, the response will take a while. Might I suggest uninstalling and re installing the Ethernet drivers and see if it helps for that situation.

With the keyboard, await for the Sager response, or maybe one of the resellers here could give you some advice. Although it should not be skipping, even in intense game play.

 

Managed to solve the realtek driver problem. Anyway, playing FPSes with the keyboard is fine, or any other games in fact, except for DMC 4, which requires so many buttons to be simultaneously pressed for a particular combo....

 

@MrDJ
Oh okay.

@Kevin_Jack
Thanks. I'll try it out.

I've seen it before here. How do I check what version my Bios and Keyboard are at?

 

Either it'll say on the post screen during boot, or on the first page of the bios. Otherwise go into bios and disable gui boot or whatever the option is.

 

How do I increase my GPU voltage? I've been trying to overclock with nvidia system tools but I can't even get past 530/825/1300, those are my stable clocks right now. If I go any higher, the screen goes black and I get a message saying "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered".

 

Anyone get higher than this thus far?

Thought I should post my highest score yet.
I don't think I'm gonna keep this clock though, she's a wee bit high. Think I'll stick back to 600/960/1500.

 

I think you're at the top

 

Right on
Has anyone considered an externl battery for this monster?
I've seen a few with around 21000mAh, but have yet to see one with 20v and 6a.
Anyone else see one that would work or tried one before.
There are some that are quite slim and would be easy to pack, I think I'd like to have one considering the existing battery life on this beast.
Or are people really getting double the battery life with Win 7?

 

2 1/2 to 3 hours isn't enough for you?

Send me a link for that external battery thing, if it can get a substantial amount of battery life more than I'm currently getting, that might be a considerable purchase.

 

I only get around 1.75-2.25 hrs, extra battery life always helps. As long as it can fit into my Matias Armor case then it's compact enough for me.

heres one:
http://www.laptopshop.co.uk/external-laptop-battery.html

http://www.sales-battery.com/External_laptop_battery.html




Has anyone had luck with ClockGen or Crysal Cpuid for a software OC on the M860TU?
Anyone want to modify the BIOS for me to change the multiplier.....there's a reward!
I could build you one of these.....

 

Somehow np8660 doesn't allow me to overclock it during battery mode, any work around this? I'd made sure that it's in high performance mode, but ntune won't allow any custom changes...

 

That's just how it is; there's no frequency tweaking while on battery, period.

 

now that's depressing. Somehow, I managed to solve the ghosting issue with flashing my ec firmware to .10, I guess that takes care of that.

 

Well you can run at overclocks, but you just can't raise clocks while on battery.

 

Yea.. Get what you mean, the clock actually remains even after plugging off the ac. So that's alright i guess, but the processor seems to be stucked at 6x if it's running on battery.

anyway, thanks for the replies and stuff, really appreciate it.

 

Oh yea, just a little update from my side. I did some 3dmark runs on stock voltage now, 550/900/1375 on the 9800m gt and got right above the 10k border, 10.075. Max temp at 85 degrees and stable.

Think i'll stay on stock voltage until I decide to break records again

 

May I ask on what resolution did you run on? and what drivers were you using?

 

Default resolution (1280x1024) and i'm using the official notebook drivers from nvidia (179.28).

 

Does anybody know if the eSata problem on the m860tu is fixed yet? Mine came yesterday and I seem to have that problem

Information is scarce

Future reference for those with the same problem: upgrading to the newest BIOS .13 did not solve the eSata freezing problem.

It also did not solve my CPU whine problem.

 

GPU temp maxed out at 80 Celcius after a few hours of COD4. Is that too high or is that fine? All my other temps seem to be low enough.

 

80C is just fine. You don't have to worry about GPU temperature unless it exceeds 95C

 

excellent, thanks for the quick reply!

 

Palin, whats the word on the cpu whining and Esata support?

 

A month ago, Sager's position on the issue was:

 

Kevin, why do you suggest using .12 for a while before using .13?

 

95C without issues? Holy crap. Are you sure those kinds of temps won't be causing long term damage? I heard 85C as a safe temp in most cases.


Edit: Since I don't want to double post, I just wanted to report something on battery life. I'm getting roughly 3.3 hours now on Windows 7, with a few things disabled in device manager. I've disabled my webcam, bluetooth, fingerprint reader, and CD drive. Wifi is still on, and I'm on power saver with 2 ticks on brightness. 3 hours and 20 minutes is pretty awesome, almost enough for two lectures.

 

Did a quick 3dmark06 test with the 185.20 driver now, and i was a little surprised I have to say.

179.28 driver
Stock clock = 9238
550/900/1375 (Just for testing) = 10.071

185.20 driver
Stock clock = 8852
550/900/1375 = 9556

So if I have not missed something in this forum, I would conclude that the 179.28 is the best driver for 3dmark and 185.20 is a good driver for smooth gaming/fps in-game. Somebody agree?

Edit:

Clyzm; that's a very good result you got there, 3 hours and 20 minutes ain't bad..!

 

Yes, I am sure...please keep in mind that you would very rarely see sustained temperatures above 90C, but up to 95C is within engineered specifications.

 

Well, desperate times need desperate actions. So I modded my M860TU to get some better cooling, did the HDD "mod" i found on this forum, which was to make a hole in the case to get some airlflow into the harddrive I also got some small VGA ram heatsinks to get some more cooling on the large gpu and cpu heatsinks. The Artic Silver 5 is also on place ofc. To make it all a bit more "extreme" I turned around my Zalman NC-1000 to get the vents on the back of my M860 so the vents would line up with the fan on the lappy.

Some pictures:






I also did some testing on 3DMark06 to check the temps, ended up with a new personal highscore



The temps are really good now actually, and the heatsinks works a little bit afterall!

Edit: lol, checked my idle temps now and the cpu idle'd on 19 - 20C and the gpu on 32 - 34C. Not bad!

 

What exactly are those blue spiky things and what do they do?

 

What were your temps and 3dmark score before this mod?
What was your total temerature drop for idle and under load?

 

those are passive cooling mods that are supposed to help add more passive cooling.

 

Before this mod I had 10544 in 3DMark06 with a max temp of 86c. (Stock score is 9354 with 76c as max temp.)

So I would assume that the VGA ram heatsinks helped a bit (maybe).

Idle temp is the same now as before the mod.

 

@Erling!

How are you running your P9500 at 10x multiplier in those screencaps?

 

lol, didn't notice before now actually! Has to be a bug though, but everest also report 10x also on full throttle ? I haven't changed any settings, soo....

Edit: I'm guessing a Windows 7 bug maybe, or then both cpuz and everest have some problems to read the correct value.

 

I'm on Windows 7 as well, but I'm not getting such an issue. Same CPU/ram/video card specs too.

Are you running anything like RMClock or SetFSB?


edit: Also, happy to report that after the latest bios (EC10/BIOS13) my whining sound is now 100% gone! Woot!

 

Amazing erling, well done.

I doubt those little blue things are doing anything to help GPU cooling but the HDD mod definitely is! 41 degrees celsius is so good. I wish they had cut some holes in that spot initially, im too afraid to do it myself.

 

I think I might end up purchasing the T9800 or X9100 as a CPU upgrade for this.

Any thoughts between the two CPUs? They seem to be around the same price ($500-$600 CAD), and the x9100 is clocked slightly higher, and is 44w.

Also, going off Ebay, it seems that all of these are ES (Engineering Samples). How would one know, going off any quoted number, which is the latest revision? To my understanding ES chips are of different qualities depending on the date of production.