Sager NP8153 / Clevo P650RS Review by HTWingNut

Sager NP8153 (Clevo P650RS) Review by HTWingNut

LPC-Digital has graciously provided a review sample of the new Sager NP8153 15" gaming notebook that sports some powerful specs for a gaming laptop at a reasonable cost. As is traditional with Sager notebooks the utilize Clevo chassis and update it with the latest technology. The new Sager NP8153 is based on the Clevo P650RS chassis, and offers the best balance between performance, size, and cooling. It harenesses the power of the latest Nivida Pascal GeForce 1070 mobile GPU with 8GB GDDR5 vRAM, but in order to maintain it's sleek and portable form factor both the GPU and i7-6820HK mobile Intel Skylake 45W TDP CPU are BGA, embedded components. Otherwise the system is feature packed with typical swappable components like dual M.2 SSD's, dual 2.5" 7mm (or single 9.5mm) drive support, four DDR4 RAM slots, and wireless card.



First, let's look at the system specs of the laptop provided for review:

Sager NP8153 / Clevo P650RS
Samsung 4k 60Hz G-sync 15.6" LCD
Intel i7-6820HK mobile CPU 2.7GHz base clock with up to 3.6GHz boost (HK means overclock capable)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile GPU with 1443MHz base clock with boost to 1645MHz (although it goes higher no problem) with 8GB of 8000MHz GDDR5 vRAM
Intel 600p 512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD with 16GB fast SLC cache
Intel Wireless AC 8260
2x16GB DDR4 2400MHz
Windows 10 64-bit

There is a lot to like about this laptop when you first look at it and handle it. Weighing in at a little over 6 lbs, it has enough heft and tight construction to make it feel substantial, but light enough that it won't burden you toting it along on a regular basis. The lid and keyboard surround are both a black brushed aluminum alloy, with some black matte plastic trim components along the forward edge of the lid, and the approximately 3/4 inch wide bezel around the LCD. The keyboard keys are square independent chiclet type keys but has a soft, very quiet, medium travel, with no flex of the keyboard unless you apply excessive pressure. There are three fully configurable backlight zones for the keyboard, adjusted through a Windows app provided by Sager. Speakers are located along the main laptop chassis underneath the center of the LCD lid under a plain styled black metal trim plate. The Synaptics multi-touch touchpad is about 4.25 x 2.5 inches in size, has separate mechanical mouse buttons below it that are very quiet to click, and a fingerprint reader is nestled in between them.



Ports around the laptop include on the left side, 1/8-inch / 3.5mm audio jacks for headphone, microphone and audio out, SIM card slot, SD/MMC card slot, USB 3.0, Gigabit ethernet jack, and Kensington lock port. Around the back is a chrome trimmed black plastic bezel with a vent for the GPU on the left side with power jack and an HDMI and mini DisplayPort out jack. Around to the right side includes a vent out the side near the rear for the CPU, another mini DisplayPort jack, dual USB 3.1 Type C ports, and dual USB 3.0 Type A ports. So in total there are two DisplayPorts, one HDMI, three USB 3.0, and two USB 3.1 ports.








Flipping the laptop over, there are a lot of vent slots on the plastic cover, with four wide thin bumpers to hold up the laptop, on on each corner. 14 philips head screws secure the bottom panel, although once they are removed, you have full access to the components of the laptop. While most of the guts are underneath this bottom panel, two of the four RAM slots are underneath the keyboard. If desired, you can remove the keyboard through removal of a few well marked screws on the bottom panel, and even a push-through hole to pop out the keyboard, without having to remove the bottom panel at all. Otherwise removing the bottom panel exposes most of the components that you'd be interested in servicing.



Dual fans are used to cool the GPU using a large heat plate and three flat heatpipes, with a fourth shared with the CPU single cooling fan. The CPU itself has a two heatpipes of its own. These heatpipes are thinner than what I'm used to with Sager laptops with desktop CPU's and faster GPU's like the 1080, but initial results seem to show it keeps the system cool without much issue or fan noise. Two of the RAM slots are easily accessible as well a two M.2 slots. Apparently the system can support two simultaneous M.2 SATA drives or a single PCIe 2x/4x M.2 SSD. There is also a drive cage that can hold a single 9.5mm thick 2.5" form factor drive or dual 7mm drives. Considering you can purchase 2TB drives in a 7mm form factor and most SSD's are also 7mm I think this offers good storage options while minimizing system thickness. The PCIe M.2 wireless card and system battery are also accessible. The battery is secured with four screws and is internal to the system, but the connector for it can be easily removed when servicing the machine.



The system itself weighs a bit over 6 lbs as configured (6 lbs 3 oz) with the 230W 19.5V power supply weighing in at nearly 2 lbs itself (1 lbs 15 oz). Measured laptop dimensions were about 15 x 10.5 x 1.4 inches (380 x 27 x 3.5 cm) and the power supply about 6.75 x 3.25 x 1.5 inches (17 x 8.5 x 3.8 cm). So it's about an 8lbs package to lug around, which is reasonably light for the components it houses.


LCD Samsung 4K 60Hz

The Sager NP8153 currently comes with the option of either a 1080p IPS or 4k PLS both matte and G-sync capable. This specific model houses the 4k 60Hz LCD. HWInfo64 identifies it as a Samsung FL156FL02-101 with hardware ID of SDC434B. While I couldn't find that exact model number at Panelook, there is an LTN156FL02-L01 ( http://www.panelook.com/LTN156FL02-L01_Samsung_15.6_LCM_overview_23360.html) which is likely the same or very similar. It's specs call out as a 4-lane eDP 40-pin, a-Si TFT-LCD, 3840x2160, PLS, 8-bit, 270 cd/m^2 brightness, 700:1 contrast, 16ms response, 85 degree viewing angle all around. It also supposedly has a PenTile RG(BW) pixel configuration. This specific LCD has some noticeable backlight bleed at top and bottom, but no worse than I've come to expect from IPS type displays and is only noticeable with a mostly dark/black image on screen in those areas.

From a desktop workflow standpoint, having 4k is a mixed bag because native 4k resolution results in text and icons being way too small to read, but if you scale even to 200%, to turn it basically into a 1920x1080 useable screen real estate, you're at the mercy of Windows scaling which is none too spectacular. While images and videos look crisp and clean, text can look a bit blurry due to Windows poor scaling, or apps that don't support it or support it well are only showed at the native pixel sizes which are miniscule at 4K on a 15" LCD.

Below images of viewing angles look a lot more washed out than they really are. It has very good viewing angles







This is a G-sync display and it seems to work without issue, with G-sync mode detected and activated through the Nvidia control panel. Gaming was fluid at both 4K and 1080p with no noticeable ghosting or streaking, and any noticeable frame tearing (Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was pretty apparent) was easily remedied with activating the G-sync option. I did attempt to overclock the 60Hz display as well, but was only successfully able to achieve 65Hz, so you're pretty much limited to 60FPS if you decide to activate G-sync.

The display was calibrated with a Spyder Pro 4 resulting in a color gamut of 97% of sRGB and 77% of AdobeRGB.



Brightness was at about 188 with a contrast of 610:1 at 50% brightness setting, and brightness of 356 with 620:1 contrast at 100%. Brightness seems to fall in line with the spec, but the contrast isn't quite as deep as the specs indicated.



Gray ramp and tone response details can be seen below.






STORAGE

As noted earlier, the system can accommodate two SATA M.2 drives and configured as RAID 0 or 1, or you can use a single NVMe PCIe 2x/4x M.2 SSD. There is room for dual 7mm height 2.5" SSD's or hard drives that can also be configured as RAID 0 or 1. Otherwise it can accommodate only a single 9.5mm height 2.5" drive. This particular model was fitted with a 1TB 2.5" 7mm hard drive and an Intel 600p 512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD. Techspot offers a great review of this SSD here: http://www.techspot.com/review/1254-intel-ssd-600p/

While the 1TB 7200RPM HGST hard drive isn't much to get excited about, the SSD is a new offering from Intel. The 512GB Intel 600p uses TLC 3D NAND storage chips of 192GB each for a total of 576GB allowing for extra room for overprovisioning. The drive's formatted capacity is the same as any other 512GB drive though at 476.81GB, so that extra capacity offers a permanant 20% overprovisioning. Additionally these drives feature an SLC cache, with the 512GB version containing 17.5GB of it, coupled with a 2GB DDR3L-1600 DRAM cache. So it's built for burst speeds, and frequent file transfers under 20GB should see significant speeds, while larger files will eventually crawl down to the speed of the TLC NAND as the buffer gets saturated.

Unfortunately I do not have a spare M.2 PCIe SSD to trial the transfer speed with, but there are plenty of reviews for that very thing. But what I can show is regular benchmarks and "real world" file transfer speeds, and there don't seem to be any noticeable bottlenecks. With ATTO disk bench, the drive temperature creeped up to 72C, but there was no throttling. Otherwise it idles at 28-30C, and regular use it can get in the mid to upper 30C range. Benchmarks results can be seen below.






RAM 2 X 16GB DDR4 2400MHz

RAM is a necessary commodity for any computer system, but these days there's not much to discuss unless you're aiming for super fast high end RAM. The NP8153 supports up to four sticks of 16GB DDR4 2400MHz and XMP of up to 2666MHz. The RAM in this system is of a brand I do not recognize, with "goldkey" stamped on all the chips, but it runs stable and no issues. It is 1.2V DDR4 2400MHz modules with stock timings of 17-17-17-39 2T. The Clevo Control Center CPU Overclock utility will allow a user to tune the timings and bump clock speeds up to 1450MHz (effective 2900MHz) should one so desire and is lucky enough to have RAM that can perform that well.

Here is the CPU-Z memory tab information.




WIRELESS CARD INTEL 8260 AC

There's not too many options for quality wireless cards these days, but Sager offers options of two of the best, either a Killer dual band AC 1535 DoubleShot Pro with BT 4.0 or Intel AC 8260 in the M.2 + Bluetooth 4.2. This particular model is equipped with the Intel 8260. Intel has a strong history with wireless cards, and despite issues with getting Wi-Fi AC issues sorted when Intel released their first cards a few years back, the signals, ping, and overall wireless connectivity is consistent and had no issues. My test bench is about 50 feet and one floor up from my Asus router and through carpet, floorboards, and three walls, transfer speeds were consistently 30-35 MB/sec with large files.


AUDIO and SPEAKERS

I feel that Sager has improved the audio quality over the years, offering speakers with a more full sound and windows tools to improve the audio quality. While most gamers like to use headphones, having a good set of built-in speakers is a welcome addition to any gaming laptop, even if just for music or videos. The NP8153 uses 2W Onkyo stereo speakers that are placed just below the bottom of the LCD panel, with Sound Blaster X-Fi MB5 audio application to help enhance the quality and loudness of the audio. It won't win the hearts of your audiophile friends, but it's at least decent enough to watch YouTube videos, listen to music, or just annoy your family and friends while gaming.

Headhone audio is supported by an ESSTM SABRE HiFi DAC through the 1/8" / 3.5mm jacks.


CPU INTEL i7-6820HK

A few years back Intel turned the mobile PC gaming enthusiast world upside down (negatively) when they changed all mobile CPU's to BGA soldered components. That being said, having a reasonably thin and light mobile platform, a mobile CPU is a good fit for a machine like this. The Intel i7-6820HK offers flexibility for user configuration of voltage and core clock adjustments, and this can be altered through Sager's CPU overclock utility. This 45W TDP quad core, eight thread CPU has a base clock speed of 2.7GHz with boost up to 3.6GHz with a single core, although under load with 2, 3, or 4 cores active it would maintain about 3.2GHz, with single thread it would only maintain 3.4GHz. It comes with Intel HD Graphics 530 running at 350MHz to 1050MHz, supports 4k @ 60Hz, as well as DirectX 12.

Regarding the integrated GPU, thankfully Sager now offers the option to run directly off the dedicated Intel GPU bypassing the Optimus/Microsoft switchable graphics that forces the frame buffer to pass through the Intel GPU. The user has the option, however, to switch between the Intel GPU, acting in traditonal Optimus fashion, or the dedicated Nvidia GPU, which requires a reboot.

Note the GPU Switch feature in the Sager Control Center


CPU performance is adequate to power the GTX 1070 as CPU performance remained under 60% on all cores during gaming sessions. It is a mobile 45W TDP CPU so you can't be expecting desktop CPU performance from this machine, but it's fine for general 3D rendering or video encoding. The Desktop i7-6700K at 4.0GHz has about a 15-20% advantage over this i7-6820HK at stock speeds of 3.2GHz.



However, the cooling system in the NP8153 offers ample thermal headroom, considering while loaded, the CPU averaged temps in the mid to upper 60C's while peaking at the low 70's. Additionally, Skylake CPU's are known to run at stock speeds at much lower voltage so there is an opportunity to increase CPU clock speeds while not affecting themals by much. Sager offers a Windows app to adjust core clock speeds, voltages, and other parameters like TDP. I was successfully able to clock the CPU at 3.6GHz on all cores, undervolt by 100mV, and maintain 3.6GHz indefinitely with CPU temps running at 80C or less when fully loaded, using the stock fan profile. The end result was performance within 5-10% of the desktop i7-6700K tested in the Sager NP9873 / Clevo P870DM3. Clearly there is further opportunity for improved performance should you like to push the undervoltage and overclocking threshold of your particular machine and CPU.

CPU BENCHMARKS

Cinebench R15


wPrime 2.10


x264 v5.0



GPU NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1070 8GB GDDR5

The new Nvidia Pascal technology improves on the previous generation Maxwell technology by improving on the architecture, shrinking the node manufacturing process from 28nm to 16nm finfet, and offering support for GDDR5X. Nvidia has claimed that mobile and desktop CPU's no longer will be independent technologies, but built with the same specifications. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 calls for:

1920 Cuda Cores
1506MHz Base clock with boost to 1683MHz
8GB of 8Gbps GDDR5 with a 256-bit memory interface which equates to 256GB/sec performance

It should also be VR and SLI ready, and support DirectX 12.1, OpenGL 4.5, as well as the Vulkan API, with PCIe 3.0 bus support.



On the Sager NP8153, looking at the GPU-z details, it seems the mobile 1070 comes with 2048 Cuda cores but at 1443MHz, with indicated boost of 1645MHz, although I've seen it easily boost to about 1750MHz frequently. Performance in general puts it at about a desktop GTX 980, maybe a little bit faster. I did do some benching against my desktop GTX 980 Ti and also compared with results from the Sager NP9873 with the MXM GTX 1080, for benchmarks that were run when I had that machine available. The 980 Ti seems to perform about 15-20% faster than the GTX 1070 and 1080 was about 30-40% faster than the GTX 1070.

The GTX 1070 components, like the CPU, is soldered directly to the mainboard, vRAM and all, so no removable components to swap out for repair or troubleshooting. But that's the price of having a laptop, and a relatively thin and light and powerful one at that.

4K performance was decent with most modern titles, although some struggled when using maximum details like Witcher 3, Crysis 3, and Deus Ex: Mankind divided, but the 980 Ti and 1080 were near the 30 FPS threshold at times as well. In some instances at 4k, there was some occasional stutter. A frame time analysis showed spikes up to 80ms or more at fairly regular intervals which would account for the visual hitching. This happened most noticeably with The Witcher 3, but went away when details were toned down or resolution was reduced to 1080p. Otherwise the gaming experience for everything else was fluid and enjoyable and pretty much all newer game titles worked great at 4K if you just reduce details somewhat, or opted to reduce resolution.

Even though Sager offers Windows tools to overclock the GPU, while I was successfully able to overclock the GPU, and despite the clock speeds running higher, gaming performance results did not seem to budge by much at all. At this point in time, there must be some limiting factor that I have not taken the time to root cause, but hopefully there will be an opportunity to overclock and utilize its full potential considering there is ample thermal and system power headroom to do so.

OVERCLOCK OPTION AVAILABLE


Game benchmarks were run at both 1080p and 4k resolutions and compared with the Sager NP9873 with single GTX 1080, which was no longer available to bench at time of this review, so some results will be missing. It was also compared wtih desktop GTX 980 Ti. A copule results also had some anomalies like Metro Last Light Redux where the 1070 outperformed the 980 Ti and 1080 and haven't been able to get that one figured out yet, but reported results nevertheless.

GAME BENCHMARKS

ARTIFICIAL

3DMark 11




3DMark Fire Strike




3DMark Time Spy


3DMark Ashes of the Singularity


3DMark Unigine Heaven



GAME BENCHES

4K


1080p




COOLING AND FAN NOISE

Cooling Performance

Cooling performance of this system is actually very good. As noted earlier, with a little tuning of voltage, and even with a slight overclock of the CPU, temps for the CPU were under 80C, and typically would run sustained temps in the upper 60's to low 70's when loaded.

The Nvidia GTX 1070 also ran surprisingly cool considering its performance in such a small package. GPU max temps ran at low 70C's at worse, but typically would roam throughout the 60C range during gaming all while using the stock fan profile.

Keep in mind that the CPU and GPU were repasted with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut. Some benchmarks were done prior to repasting, to check temperature improvements, and the Kryonaut did drop temps by a few degrees C on the GPU and about 1-2C on the CPU. Stock paste from Sager was IC Diamond.

Surface temperatures were cool to the touch all around when fully loaded during gameplay.

CPU i7-6820HK TEMPERATURES







GPU GTX 1070 TEMPERATURES





Fan Noise

Even with the great cooling, the fan noise with stock fan profiles are remarkably quiet. Fans can also be boosted to a more aggressive profile by selecting the preset "overclock" profile in the Clevo Control Center or through a manual customization menu, or setting full fans on altogether through this same Windows utility or pressing Fn+1 key combo. Of course it will generate more fan noise, but also can improve cooling efficiency.


POWER AND BATTERY LIFE

Power Consumption

The Sager NP8153 comes with a 19V 230W power supply with a 5.5mm OD barrel type plug. With stock machine settings, peak power draw from the wall rarely went over 190W, while in most cases during gaming sessions would run between 170 and 185W. The power supply is more than adequate to power this machine with ample headroom for overclocking, if that's something that you are able to achieve.

Shown below are the power draw levels during benchmarking and gaming.

CPU Benchmarks Power Draw


Artificial Benchmarks Power Draw


Game Benchmarks Power Draw



Battery Life and MSHybrid (Optimus)

Considering this is a lighter and thinner laptop, one would expect to be able to take this gaming machine on the road and make use of it while on battery. While gaming on battery isn't really recommended, it is possible to garner a solid 45-50 minutes out of it if you limit the FPS to 40FPS or so, of course depending on the game.

As far as general browsing and multimedia use, it is recommended to switch to MSHybrid mode (previously known as Optimus) which makes use of the Intel GPU for most tasks, while only utilizing the Nvidia GPU for intensive 3D applications, which it switches to on the fly. Apps that use the Nvidia card can be configured in the Nvidia control panel, and defaults typically to the Intel GPU for all apps except 3D games. In this mode the graphics control is handled strictly by the Intel GPU. On the other hand, while in discrete mode, only the Nvidia GPU is active, with full access to the Nvidia control panel and controls. Switching between the MSHybrid and discrete can be accomplished through the Clevo Control Center in Windows, but requires a system restart. With MSHybrid active, however, system boot times seemed to take longer than when just running in discrete mode.

Now on to battery life. I ran a multimedia battery test on the NP8153 both with Nvidia discrete mode and also using Intel GPU in MSHybrid mode. A 1080p video was looped using VLC media player in airplane mode with keyboard backlighting off in balanced mode at 40% LCD brightness running from 100% to 5% battery remaining. This resulted in 120 minutes in hybrid mode and 165 minutes in MSHybrid mode.




CONCLUSION

The Sager NP8153 offers excellent gaming performance in a thin and light package with an emphasis on cooling. It's optimized to play games at desktop level performance similar to a GTX 980, while remaining cool and quiet. Tools for overclocking and undervolting the CPU offer extra oomph in CPU bound applications putting it with reach of a much higher TDP desktop quad core CPU. At stock settings, the GTX 1070 GPU is a solid performer that smokes any game you throw at it at 1080p, and competes at 4k if you drop settings even in the most demanding games if you drop detail settings a bit. The only downside is that the GTX 1070 GPU was a challenge to overclock, but that may be due more to my lack of skills than the system's capability. The 4K LCD is good quality, and performs fine with gaming, although the 60Hz refresh can hinder performance a bit especially if you enable G-sync. Other features like a backlit keyboard, lots of storage space and I/O options, along with switchable hybrid or discrete graphics round out this package nicely. Unless you're looking for a highly stylish laptop, this machine has everything you need for a portable gaming machine.