*** Official Clevo P650RG, P650RE3, P650RE6/Sager NP8658 and NP8657 Owner's Lounge ***

Yes I talked to them directly, so you should do that too.

Just make sure you haggle the USD price with them, since their listed USD prices are a bit out of whack. Either price out your machine in CAD, then convert to USD using the current FX rate of around 1.3 or have them price match somebody like XoticPC. Eurocom offers a 10% student discount too.

Call or email them.

 

I just got my NP8658 yesterday, and I'm loving it so far. How did you get your fingerprint reader going? The setup button is grayed out, and I can't seem to find drivers for it on Sager's website. Thanks!

 

Can you post a screenshot of when you are trying to set it up? Are there any unknown devices in device manager?

 

Thanks for chiming in Meaker. I actually just figured out that I needed to set a pin before I could set up "Windows Hello" and the fingerprint reader! Cheers.

 

Yes just incase you hurt your hand or there is a technical issue

 

I can't actually get the fingerprint reader working. Windows 10 installed the driver automatically and I have a PIN, but the option doesn't show up. Maybe it's because I'm signed in with a Microsoft account?
Is there another driver to use for the reader?


Also, for anyone doing a fresh install... the MS-provided driver for the killer NIC is super unstable on Win 10 x64. Don't connect your Wi-Fi before you update the driver or you'll bluescreen almost endlessly.
Annoyingly, the updated driver from Qualcomm breaks band1 (DFS) support on 5GHz.
The best option is to just stick with the Intel NIC...

 

Um, great, thanks. I'll just fire up the old time machine and retroactively change the NIC I ordered.

 

Well, now I feel better about ordering the Intel vs the Killer.

 

I am seriously considering pulling the trigger on the RG and I am in the UK.

If money was no object (business expense) what specs would you choose? I definitely want all SSDs and lots of storage, best cpu and gpu. Which screen?

The laptop has to last 4 years.

Thanks!

P.S. Does anyone know who makes the best bag/case for this laptop. I would like it to sit/slide on top of my carry on when I travel

 

2x 512GB PCI-E raid m.2 along with 2x 2TB 850 evo drives in the bays for maximum storage and speed, you can get similar speeds by tweaking that a bit though if you don't need all that capacity as you do pay for it

 

Going to get the P650RG from Metabox (Australian rebrand) soon! Taking advantage of their sale at the moment. I'll provide more information on it once I receive it!

 

Thanks for the info.

I actually did e-mail them after I read what you posted and they said that they had no information on what screen the laptop came with and they would let me know once they received the machines.

 

That's weird, they told me differently. They should have the machines this week anyway.

 

hey guys. just got a p650 rebrand from sager (6852) so I'm excited to join the ranks. Mostly been a desktop guy but after graduating, work means I'm travelling pretty often so I decided to pick this up in the fall sale. Looking to put it through its paces and see how the 980m compares to my xfire 280x setup!

 

Welcome to the forum and congrats on getting the new computer. Let us know how it stacks up to to your desktop and how you like it!

 

I am pulling trigger guys. I have some final questions on my build please:

1) Storage:
For the OS drive would you go for a single 512GB Samsung SM951 or m.2 drives in raid 0? If raid 0 is the way to go for lightning fast boot times, do these drives fail often? Is there a drive that is more reliable than the others?

I will also be adding either 2 x 1tb ssd drives or a single 2tb drive. Do any perform better than the rest or represent better bang for buck?

2) Regarding the screen, I am not sure what to go for (4K Matt sharp with no Gsync, 1080p with Gsync, or the Samsung 4K with Gsync). Will the 980m 8GB gpu be able to play games on high settings in 4K (BF4, Company of heroes 2, upcoming fps titles)?

Having really thought about it, my usage is as follows and I normally use this laptop when staying in hotels:
Movies and TV shows 50%
Gaming 25% (almost always online...FPS and RTS )
Work and Web 25% (I use my iPhone mostly for emails and web)

Which screen would you suggest given the above?

3) I currently have an old Alienware m17xr3 and I love the size of the screen but the heavy weight and portability are a killer. I also went to the larger iPhone 6s Plus and can never go back to the smaller iPhone. I am debating between the 15 inch and the 17 inch, the weight and lack of portability is a serious consideration. Do many of you travel with the 17inch? Is it too heavy and big?

4) Where is the best place to buy this laptop given that I am in the UK? Eurocom only offer the 980m 4GB from what I could see and their pricing seems much higher than others, maybe due to the exchange rate used. I don't know who else offer this laptop.

Thank you all for being so helpful!

 

Most likely not. Comfortable 4K gaming is still quite far away, even for desktop GPUs. And 980m is not enough to max some games even at 1080p@60fps.

 

I can not seem to find a US Retailer that uses the p651 chassis. Does anyone know of one that does?

 

If I remember correctly, the P651 chassis are for European resellers. I am not sure if any of them ships to the US.

 

Well technically speaking any Clevo vendor can use the P651 chassis if they so choose. However, Sager chose to go with the P650, while the European vendors went with the P651.

You can always ask Eurocom. They're like Sager, as in they get their chassis directly from Clevo, so maybe Eurocom chose to go with the P651.

But any Sager re-seller (which is what the majority of vendors are) will only carry the P650 chassis, as that's what Sager uses.

 

I personally stay with a matte 1080p screen with G-SYNC. There's not a lot of 4k content out there, and even the 980M has issues with current-gen games on high/ultra settings at 4k (though G-SYNC should help with that). Not to mention that scaling in Windows isn't always full-proof. But that's just me.

In the UK you can probably get this from either PCSpecialist or mysn, look those up.

 

Well there seems to be some more models added to Clevo's site P6***RA. From a brief overlook major difference is GTX-965m Variant

P670RA http://www.clevo.com.tw/clevo_prodetail.asp?id=877&lang=en
P671RA http://www.clevo.com.tw/clevo_prodetail.asp?id=878&lang=en
P650RA http://www.clevo.com.tw/clevo_prodetail.asp?id=856&lang=en
P651RA http://www.clevo.com.tw/clevo_prodetail.asp?id=857&lang=en

 

I recently placed an order myself.

I've been advised that the PCIe drive is probably not worth it unless you're moving around very large files on a regular basis. For day-to-day usage, you will not notice any performance difference between a SATA SSD and a PCIe SSD, but the SATA is much less expensive. I've also been advised to avoid RAID with SSDs. You will again gain little noticeable difference, and in fact there is one article out there that suggests that (in contrast to benchmark performance) in everyday usage, RAID SSDs might actually be a bit slower than non-RAID.

The 2TB drive is a little more $/GB, but would leave you an open drive bay to add another drive later. That's the configuration I chose, purely for future ease of ugrading. Larger capacity SSDs tend to perform better than smaller ones, I think due to their density. FWIW, I chose the 500 MB Samsung EVO 850 M.2 SATA drive for OS and the 2 TB Samsung EVO 850 2.5" for data.

I'll agree with others who already commented here that Windows still doesn't have the reputation of having it all sorted out when it comes to scaling to higher-pixel displays, plus for gaming you'll want the lower resolution to get good framerates anyway. I chose the FHD display.

You don't really get anything from the 8678 (17") over the 8658 (15") model. Same CPU, GPU, memory, and drive capacity. The 15" actually has a display option the 17" doesn't have (the QHD screen). Both have the same size keyboard and the same capacity of battery. The only things that the 17" has over the 15" are the larger screen (duh) and a subwoofer (who cares). This costs you 2 more pounds but no more $. Not worth it IMO.

 

Which reseller offers the QHD screen? Seems like it might be a nice compromise between the FHD and UHD. You could also probably game pretty comfortably at 3K with a 980m.

 

My mistake, it's a QFHD display. It doesn't look like there's such a thing as QHD, just WQHD and QFHD, at least according to Wikipedia. I wish there was a WQHD option (1440p), that would be just about perfect IMO. My current system has a 1920x1200 display and I'm not looking forward to losing the 120 vertical pixels in my programming environments, but I'd still rather go that way than up to 4K.

 

What's the difference between the P6X0RA and the P6X1RA?

 

Ahh, thanks for the clarification. Personally, I find that the sharpness of the text on an UHD screen makes it more readable at smaller font sizes, which in turn makes writing code easier on the eyes

 

Mostly minor differences in external finish,whether it be chrome exhaust ports or such

 

And who really needs 4K gaming? At the distance you should be from the screen, it's nearly retina. If you can clearly see pixels while gaming, you're too close to the screen. 1080p is enough, my opinion.

This whole 4K gaming parade is nonsense to me. No one has posted a good reason for it yet, anywhere. Just another reason to have dumb gamers to upgrade their displays, and get the most powerful $700 GPUs they can get.

If it's for professional applications, photo editing, graphics, then I can see a compelling reason for 4K graphics, but then professional GPUs can handle 4K, considering their $5000 price tag.

As for text and browsing? C'mon, who really does that on laptop any more? I use a tablet, everyone I know use a tablet or their phone.

 

Those are my thoughts, but I'm sure others disagree.

The one compelling argument would be when the 4K display is much better (viewing angles, colour reproduction, contrast, etc.) than the 1080p option. Even then, the usual $300-$400 price premium is not worth it in my opinion. But this is definitely a valid reason if your wallet can handle it, and you're ok with the reduced FPS/graphical settings.

I feel that 4K is where HD TVs were a decade ago. The panels came out (and were really expensive back then) before any content was readily available. 4K is here, but its expensive, there's not a lot of content, it requires scaling in Windows (especially on laptops) and the GPUs we have today can just barely handle modern games on high+ settings. Sure, you can scale 4K "perfectly" to 1080p, but then why did you bother buying a 4K panel in the first place, since you lost half the benefit?

In other words, we really need GPU technology to catch up before it can go mainstream.

 

There are still some things that baffle me about the world.

*rhetorical question:
Like, why there's a 4k display offering for anything less than 17" (eeks totally forgot that there are 4k phones)

*actual question:
Like, why this thread is still (un)official.
and like, is it okay if 17" models are mentioned here or will i have to play in the sectioned off pool for the elderly on another thread? structurally it seems identical and i'd like to hear about it from owners of the bigger model.

 

I noticed that my fans really spin up while playing Rocket League on my NP8658-S, and I downloaded HWMonitor to investigate. It's saying that my 980m is hitting 79C during gameplay on the highest graphic settings. On idle it sits at 43-44C.

I ran the Fire Strike demo just to see if it was Rocket League specifically causing this, and Fire Stike was 77C max. Better but not great though since HTWingNut got a much lower 61C on the P650SG's 980m in his review here (props to him for that review btw--super helpful). On top of that, none of the GPU temps of the laptops he tested with even broke 70 so I'm a bit worried with the 77C that I'm getting. I also tested it on multiple surfaces with the same result.

Not sure if it matters, but my my system cooling policy is set to Active and my power management mode in the Nvidia Control Panel is set to Adaptive Mode.

Is anyone else seeing high temps like this? Am I doing something wrong? Any thoughts would be great. Thanks!

 

Every chip is different, sensors are calibrated differently and all heatsinks are not the same. So long as you are not getting throttling over extended gameplay sessions you should be good.

 

My new 8658-S just got here about an hour ago so I'm in the process of setting it up and downloading/installing all my most needed programs. I'm already loving the display and the speed especially coming from a mechanical hard drive to having the OS on an SSD. I can't wait to play Fallout 4 on this beast.

 

Glad to hear man! I'm loving mine too, but am just slightly annoyed at the GPU temps I'm getting. I got my laptop for FO4 as well so we're on the same page; hope it lives up to the hype!

 

You might potentially want to try to do a re-paste.

 

there actually is (check my sig) its a panasonic panel, but unfortunately it doesnt seem like vendors offer it anymore. they did just this spring with the haswell-gen of these machines, but not anymore. i agree that u can game comfortably on 2880*1620 with a 980M. cant max out EVERY game to the tilt, but should do well with most of them

i can say that in very happy with this panel in every regard except overclocking ability, im just getting 65hz out of it haha

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

What's the difference between the offered "NVIDIA Video" driver from Metabox's (my rebrand's website) and just downloading the 980M driver off NVIDIA's site? Also, is the "Intel Video" driver required if we have the discrete GPU? Or are both NVIDIA Video and Intel Video drivers required together?

 

none. in most cases, the latest nvidia driver is more current than the one offered by your vendor

both intel and nvidia drivers are required, since youre on an optimus laptop best is to install intel first, reboot, then nvidia, reboot and youre good to go. removing drivers is the other way around (using DDU): remove nvidia first, reboot, then intel, reboot, then reinstall as mentioned before.

thats, of course, unless youre driving your laptop in dedicated mode only. then u wont need the intel drivers. but once u switch back to optimus / MSHybrid / switchable graphics, ull need both driver sets, so why not install them both and be ready for everything?

 

Thanks for the response. Is using DDU to prevent breaking the Optimus controller and creating all those issues I'm hearing about?

 

DDU is THE tool to go for when removing gpu drivers. it makes sure that theres no registry values / files / folders left that could potentially interfere with the new drivers youre installing.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Has anyone noticed ghosting issues with the 1080p IPS panel? It's the "LG Philips LP156WF6" apparently.

Leave a high contrast image on the screen for 5-10 minutes, then look at a solid grey image on screen and you will be able to faintly see the previous image for a little while.

It goes away after a while, but it's kinda worrying.

 

So long as it leaves no trace there should not be an issue, but if in doubt talk to your reseller.

 

It doesn't leave a permanent trace, but should it be ghosting at all? That isn't really ideal for such a high end notebook.

 

I have the same panel in mine and can give it a test to see if it's unique to your screen or not. Can you link me to a sample image that you can clearly reproduce this with?

 

Just go to any youtube video page (stop the video ofcourse), leaving the scrollbar at the top. Let it sit for about 7 minutes. Make sure the browser is maximised but don't full screen the video.

Then go here https://danpatto.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/grey.jpg
and full screen the browser (F11), you should be able to see the youtube page still faintly showing.

 

I hope that wouldn't be necessary since mine is the -S version from XoticPC, and should've come with IC Diamond paste on the CPU and GPU. I did send XoticPC an e-mail about it, and got the following reply from Eric F:

Good afternoon and thank you for your email. Ballpark at idle for CPU and GPU I would expect between 45C and 55C, with CPU slightly cooler than GPU. Under load, mid to high 80s for each, possibly reaching 90C, but not going much over, if at all. If the system is holding steady over 90, or spiking over 95, that should be looked at.

Played Metro 2033 Redux yesterday for about 30 minutes, and it definitely hovers at 79C. Based on Eric's reply, it sounds like the temp is normal, but based on benchmarks/forum posts from other people with 980Ms, I'm disappointed that it's not lower since the temps will only get worse over time with dust and other build-up. I might be overthinking the GPU temps here, but my last gaming laptop was a Sager several years ago and it would shutdown under heavy GPU load so it's something that I'm worried about. Thinking about that 30 day return window now...

 

just make sure ure not looking at the youtube video still the whole time, cuz then that faintly showing after image would be generated on your retina as a residual phantom image, rather than on the screen as a ghosting effect

@Allan23: do yourself a favor mate, and learn how to open up your machine and properly repaste. sending in your machine for a repaste or even returning it based on that is a no-go if u ask me. itll also help to do regular maintenance and properly clean out the innards from any dust buildup, that way ull be able to enjoy ur hardware for a long time to come.

i mean, one of THE reasons to get a clevo is the super easy serviceability! so go ahead and do it, i bet ull even start enjoying it like many of us pastes to go for would include IC diamond, gelid gc extreme, thermogrizzly kryonaut, or, if youre feeling adventurous and wanna get the most out of your system, coollaboratory liquid ultra

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Hmm... I loaded up a youtube video, maximized the browser, and left the video size at normal. Let it sit for 10 minutes, and worked on my work laptop in the meantime.

I hit control + tab to jump to the grey.jpg window, full-screened, and clicked on the image so that my whole screen was covered gray and all I honestly saw was the gray image. I looked at the screen from several angles, and tweaked the brightness down as well (it was sitting at 100% originally). Sorry dude--it sounds like yours might be particularly strange.

Just to check--in monitor properties, Windows says my monitor is a Generic PnP Monitor. I have 2 events on the Event tab, and one of them reads: Device DISPLAY\LGD046F\5&93d5ceb&2&UID4353 was configured. In another thread on notebookreview, someone said that LGD046F is the LG Philips LP156WF6. Does yours look like that as well?

 

Thanks for taking the time to try this out amid your other issues.

Mine says DISPLAY\LGD046F\4&23a8d123&2&UID265988

Pretty sure it's the same display. That's strange you don't have any ghosting. What's your brightness on? Mine's on 100%, so I wonder if that makes the ghosting happen quicker/more visibly. The problem isn't a dealbreaker for me, but knowing that it happens is just slightly annoying.