*** Official Clevo P65xSA/SE/SG / Sager NP8650/51/52 Owner´s Lounge ***

That's not an apples-to-apples comparison - the GS620 was running the i7-4710HQ and the P650SE was running the i7-4870HQ. Not even close.

 

True, I didnt notice that. My bad. Thanks for pointing it out as that does make a difference since the 4870HQ does run hotter.

 

Increased the list.

- 1080p Matte TN AUO B156HTN03.6, Not the best but not bad
- 1080p glossy display with AVHA technology (AUO B156HAN01.2) think this is IPS or similar
- 1080p IPS Matte Display (AUO B156han01.2) (Offered by Mythologic)
- 3K display with matte finish and IPS-Pro technology (Panasonic panel)
- 4K display with wide color gamut and IPS technology (Sharp LQ156D1JX01B)
- fake 4k display using RGBW panel same as Lenovo y50 (Samsung LTN156FL02-L01)

 

To be fair, the GS60 is available with the 6GB GTX970m, and the P650SE is not... but that GS60 will cost you at about $400 more than the P650SE (configuring as close as possible on xoticpc.com).

 

Still waiting on the 4K screens, their ETA is the 14th. Only the 1080 screens are in stock right now.

 

Right, but the 1080 screens, has Sager found out yet whether they're TN or IPS? They said they wouldn't be able to know until they got them in stock...

 

What about 3k screens?

 

What screen are the 1080s that u will be offering?

 

So is xotic pc going to have the wide color gamut 4k screens or the fake ones? Also when is Maxwell expected to reach all laptops by?

 

Maxwell is across most laptops at this point with 830m to 980m.

 

At this time there are no 3K offerings by Sager.

Looks like the stock 1080 screen is AUO B156HTN03.6 which is a TN.

We will offer the one by Sager, we wont have our own to put in there. Sager will not provide the model number until they are in stock.

Maxwell is available on most right now. The GTX 980M/970M/860M (2GB) are Maxwell. For the models still using Kepler we probably wont see Maxwell until the 960M and lower models come out. At this time there hasnt been any announcements by Nvidia.

 

it's on gs60, ge60, g550jk, Q501LA, etc.

 

honestly the only difference I think, but don't quote on it, is one is glossy and the other is matte. I found a used one extracted from a Q501LA on ebay for my y50 and and it's only IPS type panel that I didn't feel motion blur

 

Every Q501LA I'm seeing is touch screen, but the LTN156HL01 is listed as being not a touch screen. Or is there a separate digitizer in the Q501LA?

Also, is the -102 the glossy version or the matte?

 

nah the digitizer is separate, I know for sure 102 is matte but 101 is only known to be glossy because it was in touchscreens, so the exact details are still unknown

 

Oh whoops I meant to say broadwell. Would broadwell be coming soon enough?

 

Cool. I found it on eBay from China for about $115, but I kinda want to see the TN screen in person before spending a bunch more money that I don't really have I know Samsung screens are generally really nice, though, so if I do spend it I'm sure I'll be happy with it...

 

Or you could just order from a company using one of the IPS screen options. These are actually more commonly found on this laptop than the TN option.

 

The only vendor I've seen rebranding the Clevo rather than reselling a Sager is Mythlogic, and although I'm sure they are a fantastic company, most of their cost goes for the services they provide in setting up the machine, rather than towards hardware. As I'm on a super-tight budget and am more of a do-it-myself kind of guy, I'd rather my money go to hardware than to services. Even with paying an extra $115 for the Samsung screen, I'm still getting more hardware for less money with my Sager than I would get if I went with Mythlogic and got all the parts separately (RAM, SSD, and HDD).

Of course, if you can recommend another US vendor, I'm all ears...

Edit: Sorry, there is RJTech.com, but even they appear to offer only the TN screen, given that it doesn't explicitly say IPS.

 

Same boat as dabeer

 

Haven't heard anything about new CPU's.

 

Not going to look them up specifically but copied from that list I made:
Sager np8651 and np8652 | Mythlogic Dia 1614 | Schenker XMG P505 and p504 | EUROCOM M5 Pro | XTREEM EV P651Sx

 

Yep, I have a similar list that even includes a few other options... Sager is what I'm getting, but that comes with TN. Mythlogic I've already discussed... the others are all UK or EU, not US.

I want to stress here - I am NOT slamming Mythlogic. They seem to sell a high-quality consumer-ready product. If you're looking for a gaming laptop that's ready to go out of the box, go to Mythlogic. If, on the other hand, you're more of a hobbyist or on a tighter budget, there are less expensive options available.

 

Ningyo I just ordered the same setup as you from Mythlogic and there customer service is worth the little extra cash, just not getting the 4k monitor.

 

Yeah their prices on the 4k went up after I ordered anyway, not sure I would go for it now I went back and forth a lot before deciding on it. (was +$150 now +$235)

And I did want at least a couple of the services they provide, like the color calibration. If I could get a 220w power supply I would probably try an extreme OC mod but since there is not enough power anyway I am fine with the IC Diamond, so again no real loss in that. After you include those the price differential is nearly gone anyway.

(Was originally planning to remove the Heatsinks, mill out the area between the CPU/GPU and the heat-pipes, then clamp them flat and solder them together so you still got the Heat-sink area, but the heat-pipes made direct contact with the CPU/GPU. Then lap them to a mirror surface and use some Liquid Ultra or Pro. Then rebuild the radiators so the heat-pipes went through the center with fins to top and bottom instead of having them run across the top of the radiator fins.)

 

I'm running with 28" 4K panels at home. They are fine, although having a platform/presentation that caters to high PPI counts and scales fonts is best.

Windows 7 sucks, although at 28", it's tolerable. Windows 8 is somewhat better, thanx to Microsoft at least getting all of their software over to their new Graphics Foundations.

But there are a lot of legacy Windows apps out there that are built with legacy WinForms. And they suck. This is because Microsoft has done an extremely good job on maintaining legacy compatbility by letting everyone statically link or include their own libaries, even when they break from existing APIs altogether. They broke from a whole slew of APIs with Vista (NT6), quite a bit of that had to do with "brain drain" in the early '00s. The problem with that approach is two-fold.

1) New APIs, Tools and Dialogs don't help old programs built with old libraries, like old widget sets
2) Security is a nightmare, and there are endless attack vectors in everything statically linked or those that have old, dynamic libraries in the program directory**

In the case of #1, this is why changing the font scaling does not fix a lot of legacy Windows software, running those legacy WinForms libraries. Legacy software is using old functions that Windows Vista/7 (and later, even 8 in most cases) don't have tools or routines to address or scale. The old programs still work, because they have their old libraries. But Microsoft is not shipping tools, dialogs, etc... that fix those font-presentation routines, if they even have the support (not that font presentation was that good back then, especially in XP). Even Microsoft itself is guilty of shipping a lot of legacy dialogs and libraries in Vista and even 7, although Windows 8 does a better job of being "more native." Still doesn't address old software, but it at least Windows 8's own dialogs look good now.

I address #2 in a P.S. below, but it is related. It's hard to have centralized libraries without breakage.**

BSD/Darwin (MacOS X) and GNU/Linux take different approaches, but they both benefit from having a vector-based drawing/scaling API that has been around over a dozen and a good decade, respectively, for each.

BSD/Darwin is a bit like Microsoft, in that they can have old libraries hanging around. However, Apple has been really good about maintaining API's long-term, including for Cocoa, Quartz, etc... So MacOS X is really good, and the best right now at 4K. They've been doing their "Retina" prior to everyone, and it shows in polish. Virtually all Mac software looks really good as a result, as the dialogs address drawing for all old and new libraries doing fonts and presentation.

GNU/Linux platforms have varied desktop environments, but any GTK+ 2 (used by GNOME 2, XFCE, LXDE and other environments) that are a decade old have been shipping, and are vector-scaled with an optional drawing/presentation system known as Cairo. GTK+ 3 mandates Cairo, although virtually all environments had adopted Cairo by the mid-'00s any way. That's when most Linux desktops really started to looked better and were easier on the eyes than Windows XP. So as long as Cairo is in use, if you scale fonts in GTK+ 2 (or later) applications, they look really good.

I.e., Windows 8 is still inferior, Windows Vista/7 suck in comparison, while XP is a total joke (especially those old XP-era WinForms even on 7/8). With the newer GTK+ 3 environments always using Cairo built into the compositor, such as in GNOME Shell, scaling for high PPI is cake. There are still other widget and font-drawing systems on Linux systems, and Qt isn't bad either, but some are. But the overwhelming majority of apps on Linux today are GTK+ 2 or later, unless they are of the rare, old Xt, Motif or Athena, and Cairo is in use. In fact, virtually all porting kits or "native" (i.e., write once for any OS, and it adopts the native widget) target GTK+ 2.

Given that I run Linux for work, I'm not worried about 4K. I do, however, hate booting into Windows 7 on my 28" 4K panels, hence why I ordered Windows 8 for my 15.6" 4K Clevo.

-- bjs

**P.S. Microsoft, and Windows ISVs, use a lot of open source libraries in their programs (and always have, typically those of BSD-like licenses), even some core Windows components, often statically linked or not part of the system libraries. These old libraries have attack vectors, and it gets pretty nasty. One of the worst examples was a libz (main compression library) issue about a dozen years ago which affected far more core Windows libraries than on any UNIX/Linux platform, because the latter only had one dynamic library, maybe one or two statically linked programs (e.g., kernel and LibC itself). OpenSSL is yet another, common attack vector, and one heavily used in a lot of ISV programs and services because they use HTTP-SSL.

Microsoft even started a project called Co-App to try to get ISVs, as well as their own teams, to start using one, centrally managed, dynamic library for open source libraries. Of course, there are still issues with lack of backports, so there are still going to be issues with older, unmaintained open source libraries. But at least there will only be 1 on the system to address, possibly via a backport if enough developers do it. E.g., this is what Enterprise Linux distros do, they backport security fixes (customers pay them for 3, 5, 7, 10 and even up to 1 years) so they don't break the old version APIs, so old software still works.

 

For me, being colorblind, color calibration is kind of a waste And in a house with 2 cats, the ICD is only good until the first radiator cleaning. And with a budget where a $10 difference can decide whether I can afford it or not, lowering the price by $30 while simultaneously gaining 2x4GB RAM and a 1TB HDD, plus better warranty terms, is huge.

 

If there is thermal room it would be interesting to see how the machine reacts to an over sized brick.

 

Off-topic question: What are your impressions about the compatibility of the hardware/drivers that you're using and Linux? Any horror/success stories you can share?

 

Eurocom is a Canadian Company, so shipping to US shouldn't be an issue, and all the screen options for the M5 Pro (Clevo 650se/sg) say IPS screen

Already ordered mine and waiting for it to get shipped

 

Okay I need some help from someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm ordering from Scan ( 15" gaming laptop with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M or 980M - 3XS).

I'm configuring it with the 8GB of RAM, the 970M, Windows 7 (I can't be bothered to adjust to Win 8). The bit where I'm getting stuck at is the storage drives. I want an SSD as I want the fast boot up and load times on my laptop however don't really want to fork out the £311 for the 1TB Samsung SSD. I was looking at the just getting the 500GB Samsung SSD as the first storage drive and no secondary storage drive but an external 1TB HDD. However reconsidering is it better for me to get the 1TB Hitachi 7200 rpm drive as the primary storage drive and then a 250GB Samsung SSD. Would this still give me plenty of storage but still give me the fast load and boot up times? Or does the SSD have to be the primary storage drive in order to achieve this.

Many thanks in advance for any advice with this.

 

Seems like Mythlogic has removed the IPS panel label on their 1080p matte offering as it no longer says IPS now..

Wonder if that was a typo to begin with..

 

I went with the 240GB SSD (m.2) and 1TB 7200k platter. 240GB is more than enough for OS and games, and the 1TB can store movies/documents/music, which don't really benefit from SSD that much. in my opinion, this is the best option: a perfect medium where you still have SSD speeds without paying the price of an all SSD configuration.

edit: even if your 1st drive option is the 1TB, and your SSD is your second option, you can still install your OS to the SSD. most laptop boutiques (xoticpc, Eurocom from personal experience) will actually install the OS on the SSD by default if available.

 

Still more expensive than what I'm getting from LPC-Digital, but thanks.

 

Added to the list. Thanks for the link!

 

Okay this makes a bit more sense to me. If you look at the configuration, if I went for the 1TB 7200rpm drive as the primary drive, do i get the 256 Samsung 840 EVO as the 'secondary drive' or do I go for the option above it with the M.2. Plexor as a SSD? What's the difference between the two? And I take it on the next order screen under notes I just ask for the OS to be installed on my SSD?

 

Yeah, I noticed that, too. It also says that they have a 150W AC adapter - another reason I switched to a different vendor.

 

I think you have to go with the M.2 Plextor, because you can't have a 9.5mm and a 7mm 2.5" drive at the same time. But the M.2 Plextor should be a better choice anyway, if you can afford it, because it's PCIe x2, and so is a little bit faster than the SATA 840 EVO.

 

speaking of Eurocom, they posted an official first look video

 

FINALLY!! Someone explained what that Hole under the fan intakes where! lol

 

This laptop has finally got me looking at m2 drives, they are just so convenient it seems.

 

After watching the Eurocom vid and seeing some really good lighting and angles on it, this is really a nice looking laptop. Very professional and sleek.

 

I like the sandblasted version, no chrome accents on the back, and stealthy

 

Indeed, I'm starting to not mind the look so much.

Definitely wish we could get the sandblasted version here in the US, but I haven't found a vendor for it. Oh well.

 

Did anyone get to the bottom of the CPU fan which looks like it's mounted the wrong way up?

It was mentioned before but I didn't see anyone chime in with their thoughts.

The fan definitely looks the wrong way up to me, but I guess that's highly unlikely.

Also looked like quite a bit of keyboard flex under the WASD keys and jaybee haven't you got the first post metal finishes the wrong way around:

Shouldn't it be:

 

Thank you. It seems like getting a 3K with Windows 7 will not work out. I don't have any external displays to connect to, so I'll be fine with 1080P on a 15", I'm thinking.

 

Not seeing the connection here, as I Run 1440p w/ WIndows 7 w/ no issues as well as 1600p, so why would 1620/1660p be any different?

Granted 1080p is a good choice, something is just pushing me towards 3k..

 

From what I gathered so far, the scaling with other programs seems to be the issue like Chrome and Adobe. Have you had no issues with running them?

Also, apparently Windows 8.1 is better suited for HiDPI.

Please do correct me if I've got this backwards.

 

I have run Windows 7 and 8 at 2.5K/1440p. It okay on Windows 8, it sucks on Windows 7, but one can survive. And I've now also run Windows 7 and 8 at 4K/2160p. It's tolerable on Windows 8, but is horrendous on Windows 7.

My point ...

Don't do 4K unless you have Windows 8.
When it comes to 2.5K or 3K, it might be more debatable on Windows 7.

And in my view, Windows 8 still doesn't look as good as other desktop options.

 

For me I see 0 diff in Adobe, though it might depend on the app and driver as well I guess, but I've never encountered this, I"ve also tested 4k just fine, and I use adobe/clip studio paint a lot. Chrome just gets smaller from what I've seen but then again maybe there's something I'm missing. I usually set DPI to 110-120% on either depending, then later down to 100% once i"m used to it.

Could you please elaborate on what sucks here for this. my desktop environment has all the monitor types you're talking about so maybe its different on a laptop? Either way I'd be curious to hear, as mine are scaling perfectly, regardless of which monitor I drag the window over to (expanding it further)