Sager NP7338 / Clevo W230SS Review by HTWingNut

Introduction

System Specifications

Laptop Styling and Components
- Comparison with NP7330
- Styling and Construction
- Keyboard
- Ports
- Internal
- LCD
- Speakers and Audio
- Storage

Performance
- CPU Intel i7-4810MQ
- GPU nVidia GeForce GTX 860m

BENCHMARKS

Power and Cooling
- Power Consumption
- System Temperatures
- Surface Temperatures
- Fan Noise
- Battery Life

Conclusion



intro INTRODUCTION

Clevo hit a home run last year with their popular 13" gaming laptop the W230ST. They packed a full 47W Haswell quad core CPU and an upper mid range GPU, the GTX 765m, into a compact package that performed on par with much larger machines wiht similar components. Since then, Intel has refreshed their Haswell CPU lineup by bumping their quad core CPU's by 100MHz and nVidia has released mid range GPU's with their supposedly cool running and low power consumption Maxwell architecture. The 860m is supposed to trump the 765m in power, heat, and overall performance along with longer battery life. This review will evaluate the W230ST with the 765m vs the new W230SS with the 860m.

LPC-Digital has supplied a review sample of the NP7338 which is the Sager version of the Clevo W230SS, to evaluate for this comparison and hopefully it will help users make an informed buying decision. With the NP7338 package, you get the laptop, 120W 19.5V power supply, user manual, driver disks for Windows 7 and 8, Blu-ray video software (even though the laptop does not come with any optical drive), and warranty information.

specs SPECIFICATIONS
The specifications of the review laptop came configured as follows:

Sager NP7338 / Clevo W230SS
13.3" 1920x1080 IPS LCD
Intel i7-4810MQ Quad Core CPU
nVidia GeForce GTX 860m with 2GB GDDR5 5000MHz vRAM
2x8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM
Intel 730 240GB 2.5" SSD
Intel 7260 802.11AC Wi-Fi Adapter
Windows 8.1 64-bit

NP7338:
Measured Dimensions: 13" x 9" x 1.25"
Measured Weight: 4lbs 8oz with two stick of DDR3 RAM, one mSATA, on SSD

Power Supply:
Measured Dimensions: 5-7/8" x 3" x 1"
Measured Weight: 1lbs 3oz with both cables

Laptop Overview:
<iframe width='640' height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/8EQqnjA-G5k" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>


LAPTOP STYLING AND COMPONENTS

Brief Comparison NP7338 vs NP7330
If you were to put last year's NP7330 and the new NP7338 next to each other you physically would not be able to tell the difference except for one minor difference; there is a matte type coating on the touch pad. Otherwise ports, ventilation, chassis, and LCD bezel and lid are all the same. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just to note that it is basically the same machine on the outside. The guts, of course are a bit different with the latest Intel CPU and nVidia GPU. Granted it would have been nice to see a few changes to address some consumer concerns, namely USB port location, moving them rearward and preferably on the left side, improved speakers and speaker placement, and use a bit different material or construction on the palm rest to avoid wear over time. But to be honest, that is just nit picking an already great compact and powerful gaming laptop.



Styling and Construction
The construction of the laptop exterior is all plastic with a black lid and bottom shell, with a medium gray color (looks painted) around the keyboard, palm rest, and LCD bezel. A webcam is in the traditional location centered on the bezel above the LCD. Three status lights rest at the upper left corner above they keyboard for num lock, caps lock, and scroll lock. The chrome trimmed power button rests over on the right. The touchpad is centered below the keyboard spacebar, with a matte coating added to it, and has two independent buttons with definite physical feedback when clicked, but a light audible sound. One note on the touchpad is that the stock drivers seemed to cause a jumpy cursor. Downloading and installing the latest drivers from Clevo's website seemed to fix the issue.



Keyboard
The keyboard sports a white backlight running at two separate brightness levels and can easily be toggled with a Fn key + F12 or through the included Clevo Control Center "Hotkey" software. Typing is comfortable and since I have been using the W230ST extensively for the last year almost, I can personally say that it is quite comfortable and has long time comfort. Key travel is medium, and the chiclet keys make very little noise and have few missed keystrokes.

Ports
Starting from the left side back of the laptop, there is the single fan vent, a USB 2.0 port, headphone and mic jack. Along the front are status lights for power, battery, airplane mode, and hard drive. Unfortunately the molded-in symbols are difficult to discern what is what, but easy enough to get used to. Over to the right side at the front are three USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI, a VGA, then Ethernet and power ports. A Kensington lock slot is nestled at the back end of the right side. There are no ports on the back, just the battery underneath.



Internal
Flipping the laptop over reveals the just mentioned battery, which runs along the back edge, removable with two slide latches. A single removable panel offers vents for the single fan and breather holes, and offers easy access all the swappable interior components including the CPU, GPU, two RAM slots, a single 2.5" SSD/HDD slot, two mSATA slots, and the Wi-Fi card. The CPU and GPU carry their own heatpipe but are joined at the fan with a single heatsink.





LCD
The LCD is the same as last year's model, CMN1343 Cheimei Innolux N133HSE-EA1. Brightness, contrast, viewing angles and overall image quality are excellent. Backlight bleed is still noticeable, however, with a dark screen. This seems to be the normal for an IPS screen for some reason, but a minor tradeoff considering all the other advantages/improvements over a TN panel. Response times are also good for an IPS panel, at 11ms, although not quite as good as many TN panels running at 2-6ms, but considering the 60Hz refresh and performance of the machine, it is not an issue for gaming. There is no ghosting or burn-in or other anomalies present.

A 3K screen is apparently eventually going to be made available for the NP7338, however was not available at the time of this review.







Speakers and Audio
The speakers remain Onkyo brand from last year, although the overall volume and richness of the speakers seemed improved compared with my NP7330.

Storage
Like last year's model, the NP7338 supports two mSATA slots and a single 2.5" SATA drive bay. 9.5mm fits and included stick on 2.5mm spacers help accommodate a 7mm drive. All SATA ports are SATA III. This specific model came with the Intel 730. A full detailed comparison of this drive can be found in the review of the NP9377.


performance PERFORMANCE

Intel i7-4810MQ
Typical with Intel releases, their CPU's receive a minor bump in clock speed, and the i7-4810MQ is just a minor refresh of the i7-4800MQ which bumps up the clock speed 100MHz for base and turbo clocks, running at 2.8GHz with turbo up to 3.8GHz with single threaded apps. Running a 47W TDP CPU in the small frame of the NP7338, and especially considering it shares a heatsink with the GPU, can contribute to higher than desirable temperatures during gaming. However, Intel XTU works with this laptop, and it is easy to tune the CPU by dropping voltage and/or CPU clock speed to achieve reasonable temperatures. Otherwise stressing only the CPU and not the GPU, the cooling is sufficient for taskes like compiling, encoding, or rendering.


nVidia GeForce GTX 860m
Maxwell, Maxwell, Maxwell... this is what lots of users have been waiting for. Many initially thought Maxwell would be based on the 20nm fabrication process instead of the same 28nm of the current generation Kepler. However, even while based on the same process, there are many prominant changes to the design which results in a significant performance, thermal, and power improvement. The 860m has 640 CUDA cores which are more efficient than the Kepler cores, which is why it the Kepler equivalent 860m has nearly double the CUDA cores.

I have pitted the 860m against the 765m to compare performance, thermals, and power draw. The end result is pretty impressive. Gaming FPS was up about 35% over the 765m while consuming only slightly more power (about 5%) and generating 10-15% more heat. A die shrink to this process, which is only pure speculation at this point, should improve the performance by hopefully another 50% while improving considerably on power consumption and heat generated.

Both GPU's were also overclocked. The 765m overclocked to a level to hopefully meet the 860m performance to give a fair comparison of power and thermals. The 880m was also shown in the results as a comparison to the top end card which is 256-bit and 1536 CUDA cores (based on Kepler). The strange thing is that the results were all over the place when compared with the 880m. I can only imagine it was an issue with drivers or poor optimization of the game engine.

Even the latest version of GPU-Z 0.7.8 does not properly identify the clock speed of the 860m, it should be 1029 even though it shows 540, and also shows low texture fill rate, but the other details look correct.





Overclocking the 860m was done with nVidia Inspector. Like other nVidia cards, there is a hard limit of +135MHz over stock for overclocking. Reaching this level required bumping the voltage up about 150mV, otherwise at stock voltage it was only able to run at about +100MHz over stock. The 765m could reach the +135MHz overclock with stock voltage, but Prema's modded bios (biosmods.wordpress.com) was used to achieve +200Mhz on the core but required a bump in voltage of about 250mV to reach it. Voltage is not adjustable for the vRAM, but was able to run at about +500MHz (effecitve 5500MHz) on the 860m. The 765m stock vRAM speed is only 4000MHz but was able to clock up to 5000MHz without issue.

With the "overclock" setups, using Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (aka XTU) the CPU speed was reduced to 3.2GHz for 3 and 4 core activity and voltage reduced by 60mV to help keep temperatures under control.

In any case here is a comparison of the GPU's:

860m Stock: GPU 1029MHz (Boost 1097) / vRAM 2GB GDDR5 5000MHz
860m Overclock: GPU 1164MHz (Boost 1232) / vRAM 2GB GDDR5 5500MHz
765m Stock: GPU 797MHz (Boost 863MHz) / vRAM 2GB GDDR5 4000MHz
765m Overclock: 997MHz (Boost 1062MHz) / vRAM 2GB GDDR5 5000MHz
880m Stock: GPU 954MHz (Boost 993MHz) / vRAM 8GB GDDR5 5000MHz

The 860m seemed to maintain boost speeds during all gaming and benchmarking sessions.

The end result if you look at comparison of 860m vs 765m results in:

Synthetic Benchmarks = 35.8% average improvement with a range of 20% to 70%
Game Benchmarks = 35.9% average improvement with range of 11% to 56% if you remove the odd flyers with Saint's Row IV and Metro LL


benchmarks BENCHMARKS

Synthetic Game Benchmarks
3DMark 11




3DMark FireStrike


Catzilla


Unigine Heaven


Unigine Valley



Game Benchmarks

Battlefield 4


Bioshock Infinite


Company of Heroes 2


Crysis 3


Grid 2


Hitman Absolution


Metro Last Light


Resident Evil 6




Sleeping Dogs


Saints Row IV
This was just some random action through similar parts of
the city which would explain the irregualar results.


Titanfall
Note that the FPS is capped at 60FPS, which will bias
the results below 60FPS.


Tomb Raider




powercool POWER AND COOLING

Power Consumption
Power measurements were taken of the PSU as it drew from the wall. It is clear from the results that stock and even an overclocked system that the provide 120W power supply is more than adequate to support this machine. It can also be seen that in order for 765m to even approach stock performance of the 860m, the power draw required can be as much as 20% more.






System Temperatures
Temperature measurements wer taken using HWMonitor of both the CPU and GPU during the benchmarking. Since the cooling systems between the NP7330 and NP7338 look to be identical, it is a good and fair comparison to show the improvements in cooling potential with the new Maxwell technology. If you look strictly at the GPU temperatures, it looks like the 860m just runs hotter, but considering it performs 30% faster, the added 5-10% in thermals is not that significant.

CPU Temperatures during benchmarking




GPU Temperatures during benchmarking




Surface Temperatures
Temperatures were taken of the keyboard and palm rest surface and underneath the laptop while idle and also under load. In general the system felt perfectly comfortable to use during regular tasks. At load, the central keyboard area can feel a bit toasty, but nothing that is uncomfortable. Underneath the laptop also was comfortable resting on my legs, but with hot air blasting out the vent on the left, requires it to be manipulated so it's not blasting on you.





Fan Noise
Fan noise was about the same as the NP7330, however the bursting was not as noticeable, at least the fan did not jump to near 100% instantaneously. It would bump up once temps exceeded 60C or so, but not anything like it did with the original release of the NP7330. At idle though for the most part the fan was not even audible, and using the Clevo Control Center to set it to quite helps quite a bit. Granted this limits CPU and GPU performance a bit, but you can't have quiet and performance too. Of course during gaming the fan will ramp up, but to be expected and nothing out of the ordinary. You can even set the fan to full speed with the Fn+1 key combo if you want to reduce temps, at the sacrifice of more noise of course.

Battery Life
One of the significant improvements made this year to the NP7338, I am happy to say, is battery life. My typical light web browsing load, running in power save mode, 20% LCD brightness, keyboard backlight off, resulted in almost six hours of battery life. 5hrs and 58minutes to be exact, running from 100% down to 5%. While this is likely a little bit lighter load than your daily tasks, it is most certain to easily exceed five hours with a slightly stressed system runnind down to about 10% battery charge remaining. Compared with the NP7330 which achieved only about 3.5 hours, that is a significant improvement. Power draw according to BatteryBar indicated about 9-10W at any given time and considering the 62WHr battery five hours or so seems about right.




CONCLUSION

While the chassis, component layout, and cooling system has not changed much from last years NP7330, the NP7338 does have some noted significant improvements. Of primary note is the battery life nearing six hours on power saver mode. Then of course there's the improved performance of the 860m over the 765m sure to offer solid gameplay FPS running at 1080p. My thought from last year on the 765m was that it was a borderline 1080p GPU if you wanted to run the latest games at a reasonable detail level. Well the 860m seems to push that to a much more comfortable limit, running the latest games like Battlefield 4 on High settings averaging about 60fps with dips only in the 40's.

The average and minimum FPS of the 860m performs about 35% better than the 765m. Overclock potential right now seems a bit limited due to vRAM, but even running 5500MHz (+10%) and 135MHz increase (+13%) resulted in an almost linear improvement in FPS, about 10-11%. If Intel ever cares to unlock the max clock speed, there is potential to improve performance even more, and there is plenty of thermal and power available to push it further. There's likely also the option of a third party BIOS to help improve on this as well.

Other minor improvements like the refreshed Intel Haswell i7-4810MQ and the latest Intel 730 240GB SSD round off an otherwise solid package. It will be nice to see if Clevo redesigns their chassis for next year because simple changes like moving USB ports primarily to the left side AND to the back, as well as adding a DisplayPort, and moving the sleep fn button away from the volume controls will be a much added bonus. The stock 1080p IPS LCD is excellent all around for desktop work with good response for gaming as well, but looking forward to what the 3k screen options will bring.

With all the new 13" to 14" thin and light laptops being released, the NP7338 continues to hold its own. It may be a little bit thicker, but it the package overall is well balanced and solid for general computing and gaming.

 

You the man HT!!!! Now on to reading this awesome review! :thumbsup:

 

Any idea on why the battery life is so much better? Did both machines have the same version of bios installed?

 

Optimus has been improved and general system power control.

 

Lower power consumption was for the most part achieved through motherboard changes. We tested a W230SS BIOS Mod on W230ST and saw little to no difference in power consumption even without the use of the NVIDIA GPU...

 

Yes, I should have mentioned that in the review, that Prema's W230SS BIOS modded for W230ST resulted in no change in battery life. No matter what on the W230ST the battery drain would be 15-18W drain at idle, where the W230SS is only about 9-10W.

 

Another job very well done HT!
You do us all a great service with all the hard work and effort you put in these reviews and I just want to say thank you
You say the fan noise/level is the same but with no bursting fans (which is great) but comparing it to the W110ER are they louder under full load?

 

Excellent review HTWingNut. You set the bar high. I would put your review process and overall quality up against anyone else out on the internet.

If I was in the market for this format I would be looking at this machine pretty hard.

 

I wonder how far you could push it with part changes, like that intel 730 is relatively fast but it's also rated for something like 1.5W idling instead of the 0.5W or less for other SSDs (source: AnandTech | Intel SSD 730 (480GB) Review: Bringing Enterprise to the Consumers ). I'm sure you could do other things like switch to DDR3L but swap out that SSD to save 1W seems like a worthwhile move, I mean that's nearly an extra hour of battery life I think.

 

Awesome review! Still waiting for that video tho

1 W over the 6 hours is 6 Wh, which is a bit under 10% of the battery capacity. You might get an extra 20-30 minutes with a more efficient SSD.

Can't believe they would ship the notebook with such a high power SSD. I'd be pretty annoyed if I bought it to discover that.

 

I don't think that maths works because it's not 1 watt over 6 hours it's 1 watt over 6 and then some more time because of the saving. 62Wh in 6 hours is roughly 10W/hr, make that 9W/hr and that gives you 6.88 hours which is... 6 hours 53 minutes, I'm gonna call that 7 hours because there's been so much rounding

Totally agreed though, if it's not gonna affect performance much (and a slightly slower SSD probably wouldn't) I'd take a lower power part. Looking longingly at those intel 530s, currently using an intel 335 in my W110ER

 

I should have noted that I added crucial m4 256gb msata as well to install all the benchmarks and games which was in there at that time as well. Plus published idle power doesn't always relate to system battery life. On power saver the drive shuts down when not used too. You might get 10-20 mins more at best with a power sipping ssd.

I'll do another test with just my plextor m5m 256gb or maybe 256gb samsung 830 and report back.

Beamed from my G2 Tricorder

 

Not to derail but is the finish on the touchpad the same and has anyone covered it with a protector? I saw some pictures of the previous model with the black showing through the paint and it looked pretty bad.

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk 2

 

The finish is different. It has like a matte coating over it. Who knows how long it will last.

Beamed from my G2 Tricorder

 

Just re-read the anandtech review (link at the bottom), apparently the 730 doesn't support *any* power saving tech, none whatsoever, nada. You're right about ratings though, that's why they actually test power draw. Long story short Intel 730 480GB @ 1.34W idle vs Intel 530 240GB @ 0.34W idle. Unless Clevo decided to totally ignore the supported techs reported by the device and kills power to that port anyway, that is actually gonna make 1W difference.

link: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7803/intel-ssd-730-480gb-review/7

 

To buy or not to buy hmmm.... This is tough lol, the xtra performance on the maxwell gpu is great and the one thing that turn me off about my clevo w230st from last year is battery life and it's improved on the 230ss but I'm still worried about the bursting fan when not doing anything.

HT, is the display the same chi mei model that was on the w230st last year? Any changes on it like the quality of the anti glare since it wasn't grainy when I had the w230st last year. How's the backlight bleeding glow? Any stuck/bright/dead pixels?

 

From his review bench he said it was the same chi mei screen. I dont think any of us have complained of bursting fans on this model. I had it happen to me on the first day, but i was doing alot of thing on the machine with downloading latest drivers etc....once i was done i never had a problem. The fan does ratchet up when you use the cpu hard but its the nature of the beast. The i7 generates heat fast. Before i killed some time playing silent hunter Iii on the igpu and the fan was just audible but steady. Cpu useage was 40%ish.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

 

Same screen, although not guaranteed on all. Backlight bleed same as others, a little bit in a couple spots but I guess I've just come to accept that's the best they can do. I've gone through three different LCD's and now this one all with some level of backlight bleed. Otherwise everything else is great, no dead or stuck or bright pixels.

 

How do games look when you lower the res on this ?
I know it's not ideal and can handle most games at 1080P but with some demanding games I'd rather leave most of the settings on high/ultra and lower res for better FPS.

 

The quality of the screen makes ultra almost a non issue. Running bf4 on my laptop looks better on medium on my laptop then it does on on my gtx 780 and 27" fhd monitor on ultra.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

 

Needless to say now im looking at new a new lcd monitor for my desktop!

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

 

After this review I'm actually thinking buying one!
My W110ER ( still running strong! ) is still a great little powerhouse but my eyes need a slightly bigger screen.
Great to hear they fixed the fan profile.

 

I use a £140 external IPS 24" monitor with DP input at 75Hz. Image quality is great.

 

Forgot to ask:
HT where you using stock thermal paste when running your tests or some other paste like ICD?

 

It was IC Diamond.

 

bought my current w230st after reading your detailed review, probably going to upgrade this newer model soon since the improvements seem to be very decent. thanks for another great review.

still no dvi or displayport though, sigh...

 

I just started looking at some IPS panels to upgrade to for my home machine. This little laptop is starting to cost me!

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

Hah, nothing compared to some machines

 

62/(62/6-1) = 6.64285714

0.64 * 60 = 38 minutes. I'm always conservative in battery estimates, so I round down to 30 minutes. Either way, still closer to 30 than to 60 :3

 

This is very good to hear

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk 2

 

Thanks HTWingnut for the detailed review and the picture of your palm rest in the w230st thread, I went ahead and ordered the w230ss from Reflex Notebooks and looking forward to it arriving.

I'm moving from a Sony Vaio Z (2012) to this laptop, so I'm going from a pretty sexy machine to something a little more clunky but I think the w230ss will suit me better in the long term. The Sony is a fantastic machine but the lack of being able to do any upgrades was starting to be an issue with the 8GB of memory in particular becoming stifling. I'm also hoping the keyboard layout on the w230ss will be better, didn't realize how much I'd miss having discrete Home, End, PageUp and PageDown keys until I got the Sony. Finally while Linux works well on the Sony I could never get the external graphics card it has to perform well under Linux which really limited my gaming, looking forward to the better supported Nvidia cards.

 

Yeah external cards so far have been nothing but a pain, I hope that situation improves as I would love a solid 13" which I could plug into an external solution.

 

Here's a couple quick gameplay videos of BF4 and Titanfall. It wasn't until afterwards that I realized I was on quiet mode (which uses balanced mode in Windows).

<iframe width='640' height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/yyrW1nVVU2k" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width='640' height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/iNzp8L8PK2w" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Thanks for all the info here guys, and especially HT. I have decided to buy the w230ss because of all the info here.

 

it really is a great laptop for the price

 

Yeah, even if you add a 120GB SSD + Windows 8.1, it's less than $1200 out the door. For a quad core i7, 1080p IPS LCD, 860m, 8GB DDR3, 120GB SSD + 750GB or 1TB HDD, Intel Wi-Fi, plus a portable form factor, you can't beat it for the price at all. Sager has 15" and 17" notebooks with same specs for same price, so I guess you get your pick. 13, 15, or 17 inch.

 

Considering the premium sony and the like charges for the small form factors it is quite impressive.

 

This is why I am purchasing it. It is not a beauty queen, but the form factor and performance at this price is hard to pass up.

Originally i was skeptical about quality because of the price tag, but this forum convinced me that it is a solid buy.

 

Added video of laptop overview. Sorry long overdue, just never had the time to do it.

<iframe width='640' height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/8EQqnjA-G5k" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>


Also using NP7330 (W230ST) as an example for repaste, same as for NP7338 (W230SS)

<iframe width='640' height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/CFztLNvjchA" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

I like your little ramsink on the chipset lol.

 

Hey all, I've got a couple of questions. I'm more or less looking between this and the lenovo y40 (and slightly possible a MBP). This obviously blows the y40 out of the water in terms of raw power in a portable package, but here are my two questions- 1) is the battery really that good? A fairly long life is crucial because I'm in class most of the day and 5 or so hours for word processing and web browsing seems fantastic. And 2) does the plastic used seem to feel like its sturdy?

Thanks in advance!

 

Yes the battery life is much improved over the last model. It's a pretty sturdy model and should cope with normal wear and tear decently.

 

It looks like Wingnut has that thing armed to the teeth- the specs I'm considering are just a 4710MQ and maybe an mSATA drive for the OS

 

The core is very strong, there wont be a huge difference between a 4710MQ + msata for OS and one armed to the teeth as you put it.

 

Well thanks for the info! This machine is looking like the ultimate in power and portability

 

Pretty much yes.

 

First of all let me thank you for the amazing review!

I have been trying to choose between this laptop and the P34G V2 for a while, I almost was 100% I am getting this laptop until I saw a video of the sound the fan made in the NP7330 is it really that loud or did that guy have a lemon?
Can you kindly put up a video with the fans under stress of a modern game? I would be ever so thankful, I really want to be done with this and order but its so hard to part with so much money when u cant see what you are buying in person.

And again thank you for this professional review :thumbsup:

 

It's hard to make a judgement using audio from a camera microphone. It can get loud, but it's not horrible. Cooling 100W of components takes CFM which equates to noise in such a small chassis.

 

Thats true but comparing last years 7330 fan sound (only video with fan review) to current years p34g v2, I find the P34G V2 is surprisingly quiet compared to the NP7330... and that bothered me, because I much prefer the sager for many reasons and was very close to purchasing it until I saw the fan review, The fan sounded like a loud hairdryer in the video I saw ... and so i had hoped someone will do a review of current NP7338 fan noise levels.

 

It's true it's quite loud. My 3820TG was way quieter. But it was half the performance as well....