Sager NP8170 (Clevo P170HM) Review by HTWingNut (resident goldfish - blub)

Do anyone have experience running Adobe CS5 with the NP8170, most features on?

 

I will when I get my NP8170 wooo whoooo

 

nice laptop
looking at Your windows score 7.5 my acer is not that bad 6.5

 

WEI is a misleading score though. For comparison purposes:

GTX 485m versus GTS 250m = 12198.8 Vantage 3DMarks versus 3128.4 marks, respectively.

i7 2720qm vs 720qm (direct step up to sandy bridge) = 5507 3D Mark 06 CPU marks and 3067 marks, respectively.

This is just the GPU and CPU, but notice that the GPU is almost 4x faster with the new 485m over the 250m, and the CPU is around 75% faster with the sandy bridge performance.

The WEI tends to increase non-linearly. It's harder to make gains in the upper end, especially considering it's limited at 7.9 currently. Specs wise, the new sandy bridge + 485m/6970 machines are leaps and bounds above older hardware

 

Just thought I'd post an update on thoughts after owning this since beginning of February. I know lots of other users finally got their machines too, but thought I'd share from a user's perspective after owning it for four or so months.

So far I am very happy with the machine as far as performance. It rips through every game without a problem, it crunches video encoding like no tomorrow, and runs with reasonable temperatures all the way.

But like any marriage, that little tick that your spouse had that only slightly annoyed you can become a major deal breaker over the course of time.

First of all I'd like to say though, the GTX 485m is a beast of a mobile GPU. I thought I might be a little discouraged when the AMD 6970m came through. But I'm not in least discouraged even though the 6970m is cheaper, this 485m doesn't disappoint in any way, shape or form. Worth every penny. Sure it would be nice and sensible for nVidia to price more reasonably, but that's water under the bridge.

But there are a few things that really bother me.

For one, the stock screen. I'm not normally that fickle with my screens, but the viewing angles are horrendous. You can't even get a decent matte replacement screen for any reasonable price either. But since the machine is pretty much stationary 80-85% of the time, I thought I'd mitigate that by using an external monitor. Using my four year old Dell 24" IPS, you can't compare at all, and am glad I did the switch. I can manage with the stock screen for the occasional mobile uses it gets.

This leads to another issue, however. Since the place where I use my laptop has limited space, I can't quite tuck the machine away, primarily because of the need to turn on max fans when gaming, which can ONLY be done using the laptop keyboard (Fn + 1) and there is no way through software or external USB connection that will allow this, so laptop has to be within reach at any given time. Real annoyance. Speedfan won't work. It doesn't generate a scan code so I can't use something like autohotkey.

This also leads to another issue / inconvenience. The BIOS is so sparse, my $300 ULV notebook has over twice as many BIOS tuning options. For such a solid, well built, and power packed machine, lack of user tuning options is a real turn off. No fan speed control. No overclocking features, no nothing.

Finally, the keyboard. The keyboard itself is nice. I like how it types and the feel of it personally. But the limited allowed simultaneous key presses can be a problem for gaming time and again. Additionally, the 15" keyboard in a 17" chassis still really bothers me. The only benefit the 17" offers over the 15" variant is a second hard drive bay, and well, the larger screen, nothing more. Not to mention lack of a backlit keyboard. The Asus G73 and G53 SW series offer a backlit keyboard and are comparably equipped, and consider them direct competitors to these machines. Personally I wouldn't say it's an end all deal breaker but it's definitely a nice feature to offer, even if an option.

I may add more later if I think about it, but for now that's it.

That being said, figured I'd put my unit up for sale to see if can fetch what I want for it. If not, I'm happy with the machine, just my needs have changed a bit now, and would prefer a less expensive 15" unit with a better screen, most likely an NP8130. The warranty on this NP8170 unit has been reset to start this month (June 201) for two years since it got the replacement motherboard from the Intel SATA recall and I bought the two year warranty.

 

This statement made me chuckle. I have owned/built many desktops and a few laptops over the years and when I do a BIOS update I systematically go through all the options and write down the settings so when the update is complete, I can put all the settings back. I went through this process with my desktop and I literally had 4-5 pages of settings. When I went to update my NP8170 BIOS, I was dumbfounded at the lack of virtually any settings at all. I went through the BIOS over and over thinking I missed something. Half-a-page of settings and I was done.

 

Right. I usually just set my camera on my mini tripod and take a picture of each page. I always wondered why they didn't make it an option to dump the BIOS data to a text file.

 

One more thing to note, whether the new motherboard, repaste, or what, but my temps are reasonably lower than they were before. I was running in mid 70's for both CPU and GPU when playing Bad Company 2. Now it's upper 60's. I'll take it either way, but wonder if there was something to do with the motherboard or just a really good thermal paste job.

 

Is it running with max fan on or just the stock fan speed ?

 

Max fan speed.

 

Now I'm confused . After a round of BFBC2 both CPU & GPU were in the low 80's...

 

Great review!

Just to confirm - is the chassis (body) actually metal/aluminum or is it plastic? My spouse has a Macbook Pro 2010 and I have to say, the case material is a big factor for me.

 

what kind of thermal compound did you get with your system?? Did you get the factory compound??

 

A very clear and professional review, thanks for taking the time

 

Nice and long review Nice done

 

Adobe CS5 works great on CUDA cards.
My system is 7282 dual gtx580M.

 

This review makes me even more excited about my new rig coming in from XoticPC. Very well written and reasoned out

 

Thanks... I'm anxiously anticipating what the Ivy Bridge refresh brings. If it includes switchable graphics (with 4+ hours battery life) and a backlit keyboard I'm sold. I love Sager/Clevo notebooks.