Sager NP9377 / Clevo P377SM-A Review by HTWingNut

Nvidia sold a product which you bought, you have not paid them anything for any bios, so comparing the two makes no sense. You are not entitled to their work and they are under no obligation, legally or morally to release their work to the public.

 

Well yes the reason for not releasing it now is politics. And for that you can thank the imbeciles who are taking credit for their hard work.

 

You're absolutely right, they have no obligation whatsoever but I'm not going to shut my mouth when they're teasing it publicly - john has made mention of it in the thread what, 4 times?

Either release it or stop talking about it.

You have your opinion, I have my own. If they are truly withholding the release because they don't feel they are getting the credit they deserve, and they are unwilling to explore options that could help make sure they are getting that credit, then they are in the wrong as well and get thrown in the pile with nVidia for gimping their product in the first place. That's my opinion on the matter.

The fact at the end of the day is that I don't know what is actually going on with the whole process and I was only responding to the limited information that has appeared in this thread and any opinion formed is entirely on the basis of the limited information that I have. I know *nothing* about these individuals personally and I have no actual bias towards them, my posts are purely based on the information that I have been given. In other words, I could be 100% wrong about the entire situation and I admit that freely. I'm very good at seeing both sides of a situation and in this situation, I don't have much of a picture to go on at all.

 

I'm still following this thread for the slim hope of a vbios release for my sager NP9377, I'm playing metro last light and i'm throttling so bad with my 880m's in sli.

I have no issues donating to people who work on vbios's, I spent $2800 on a laptop what's another $30 to someone who helps unlock the performance, especially when they took their time out to make it. Sigh now I have to read people argue over politics.

 

They have every right to not release their work and benchmark their results and show them off.

It's a bit like car racing, where different companies compete to get the best times, they race against each other but are not forced to share their tech.

They have shown it's possible and that's a large step on the way to creating your own mod, which you are perfectly entitled to create and release as you see fit.

By your own admission you do not seem to know the facts, so making statements on it at this point is simply a bad plan.

Sorry if that seems a bit blunt but I have seen attitudes like yours spread and consume tech communities (see the futuremark forums) at which point they collapse and die, so I am pretty up on nipping these sentiments in the bud before it spreads.

 

I think we should all just calm down and relax a bit.
Whoever makes vbios for GPUs are of course thanked
And am sure lots of people feel grateful and appreciate their efforts.
Some see things other way,let everyone just be intitled to his opinion ,
So without making scenes about it just keep discrete a bit for sake of both sides.
Is anyone aware if the GeForce 870m having any sort of throttling or other issues ?
Any links for 870m sli gaming benchmarks yet ?
This incoming week would be my final week for placing the order as I got
Someone getting it from US for me ( living way far )
Or else I'll have to pay 1k$ between shipping and duties.which I Wnt do.
Racing againt time I guess.

 

Sorry but this isn't my first forum rodeo... Its people that do what you're doing with this very statement that lead to forums exploding, collapsing, and imploding. If this was my first time at the forum rodeo, this would have been a much angrier response than it is. Seeing that I'm a senior moderator on another forum and was a forum administrator of my own forum for 4 years, I'm going to take the high road here and just tell you that you're zeroing in on me exclusively without actually taking into account the posts that John has made in this very thread that just scream arrogance which drove my conclusions. Good day to you sir.

 

You might need to get over yourself a bit and take your argument up with nvidia. Every single one of your post screams. "I think I'm the one who is going to bring these guys to their needs to release something" I got news for you. Not going to happen.

 

You really think that I'm trying to push you to release it while I'm calling you arrogant? Not hardly. If I really find myself that interested in it, I'll make my own mod. I'm not incapable of modding a vbios (it doesn't take a brain surgeon), I'm not interested in the time investment for the minimal gain that I more than likely won't need for my purposes anyway. I've got an HD 3000 in the laptop I mainly use now and the only time I have to pull out the Alienware and deal with the obnoxious GPU fan is when I want to play certain titles in PCSX2 that have an abnormal superVU overhead which causes a stupid strong performance drop on GPU performance. Outside of that and PPSSPP, my Inspiron does most things I need it too. This machine is going to be overkill but since I want it to still be useful in 5 years, that's exactly what I was going for.

Keep your fancy mod to yourself, I would never suck up for it.

 

@HTwingnut
Time for a thread clean up buddy!

 

My interpretation of Johnksss posts are not arrogant at all. He is simply showing what is possible. If you look closely you will notice that many of his posts are in response to people asking about problems with the 880M. This is why we see multiple posts.

Sent with love from my Galaxy S4

 

Oh well, we have truly managed to derail this epic thread, that is one thing I can agree with john on.

So on topic - I still can't wait for mine to get here. It hit Phase 6 on Friday so hopefully they'll ship it by Tuesday or Wednesday. Starting to think I should have paid for expedited shipping though but a package I ordered that went UPS ground the other day actually arrived here in perfect condition which I can't say the same for all of my packages that have come FedEx 2 day from Amazon lately.

 

Still in phase 1 myself

 

It moves fast. I don't think they update it every day. My machine went from Phase 3 to Phase 6 on Friday and that was 3 emails in a row (within 2 minutes of each other) to show the updates lol.

How come you don't have it in your signature? I forgot if you shared your spec options or not lol

 

It's entirely base model 880m sli, I will upgrade everything later (SSD's, RAM, and eventually 4930MX from ebay)

I will add it to my sig once I get it though

It will definitely be a worthwhile purchase especially considering I will get married soon and I'm sure she will not want a big desktop around.

 

LOL! Yeah they also don't tend to like you spending money on what they call "toys" so get your big expenses out of the way while you can

 

good to know that 9377 owners are now standing by, in time we can help and share our experiences in our laptops

EDIT : please share your thoughts and benches when you receive it, like issues etc, anything will be helpful, so far owning a 9377-S by more than a month is nice and solid as ever, temps are low when gaming, fans dont suddenly rev up like crazy, gaming on battery boost is an east, whenever you receive your units, remember to update you .net framework first, i have an issue where i can use the hotkey and CCC coz i dunno i have like 3.5 or something

 

UPS is pretty good at handling high value items (>$1000). When I used next day air for my P370SM, the driver actually made me sign a release form which basically stated that I've checked to make sure the item arrived in one piece, is in working order, and that I absolve UPS of any delivery related damage.

Also according to the driver, packages tagged with a "high value" label are segregated from all the other packages, that they get their very own truck (instead of being hoarded into a container), and is checked at each stop along the way. The caveat is that I'm not sure if what I said applies to UPS Ground.

On topic: Make sure you de_dust the fans and heatsinks regularly. I recommend at least once every 3 months. Maybe my room is dusty or the U3 cooler is sucking in all the dust or something, but when I opened up to clean out the fans just now, I noticed an incredible amount of dust accumulation in both GPU heatsinks, despite me not having gamed at all for the past 2 months. Temps instantly went down by 5C after blowing out the dust, so it makes a difference.

 

right on that, good hygiene around the laptop eliminates the dirt, cleaning the laptop table, frequently checking underneath the laptop chassis if there is any dust build up and same check to the laptop cooler itself, a clean laptop is a happy gamer

mine was delivered by UPS also, and sent here all the way to Asia with a solid delivery, parts are intact.

normal after using my laptop after several hours of gaming, i let it run on idle before i shut it off, then after turning off, de dust the bottom chassis and make sure that some food or dirt smudges around the chassis and keyboard are clean

 

I've had packages arrive 36 hours after ordering from the states to the uk by UPS, they are my favourite international courier.

 

I bought port covers for everything to help keep the dust out from as many places as possible. You can get port covers on ebay, $20 to get them all covered.

You need to ensure you install Nvidia's physix driver manually. There Gforce experience doesn't install it when you update. Metro last light was running at 12Fps and I spent like 2 hours tinkering with it just to realize that physix was the cause *facepalm*

I'm running metro last light everything maxed (no SSAA) with vsync on and have a solid 60fps, with out Vsync I got 70-130fps but the screen tearing was horrifying.

 

LOL .NET is the biggest POS ever. Thanks for the heads up.

I'll definitely have a review up shortly after getting it. Hopefully the 4940MX doesn't cause too much power drain and cause everything to throttle. Its only a 10W TDP difference but 10W can be system breaking.

Can't be any worse than my Alienware... I had to take that machine apart once a month to clean the fans to keep the cooling performance up and getting access to those fans? You have to pull the battery, remove some screws, flip the laptop over and gently pop the button panel off, then remove the keyboard and you can finally get access to the fans.

Yeah, UPS generally does good by me but I don't like our driver... he's too nosey.

Man... PhysX issues are a nightmare. Glad you got that sorted (nice frame rate too)

 

ouch, never tinkered with physx, i just had a geforce update and that's it, i did experienced screen tearing on Dead Space 3 when i tried SLI on it, a restart solved the problem, i had it once and never had it again. i normally use SLI on a bigger screen, on 1080p SLI is activated on BF 4, metro LL and crysis 3, no tearing and lagging, but i only go as far as 2x aa since i don't need (or bother) to crank up more than 4xaa in crysis 3, both metro and BF 4 are maxed and no lags, haven't tried the new beta driver so far and i heard that its a meh so didn't bothered to download.

 

UGh, I noticed since I installed my second 2.5" HDD that the palm rest has been getting uncomfortable hot. :/

I need to measure the temps and get back here, Has anyone else have a really warm palm rest on the left side?

 

It can get warmer there thanks to a HDD.

 

So finally pulled the trigger ... Order done today by Donald of powernotebooks,.
4810-880msli-16gb-256gb m550 and 1tb wind8 etc...
Already ordered a 512gb m550 as 2nd msata and 1tb hdd as 2nd hdd.will fix myself.
Will receive hopefully 3rd June as I used rush service and 3 day air shipping since it has to go to Virginia.
Now waiting phase I guess...

 

Congrats on the new machine!

If they're anything like XOTIC, you'll have it before that. I ordered my machine without rush and ground shipping on the 7th and it will be here tomorrow and that included the copper cooling upgrade and white glove packaging.

Curious why you didn't buy a second 256GB M550 for RAID0 though?

 

There are some issues on my machine with RAID0 -- hoping for a BIOS update from reseller or Sager that includes a firmware update for intel's IRST. Just opened up a ticket today after testing with known good drives, RAID0, & UEFI.

More details in the review I just posted in the Clevo/Sager reseller forum.

 

RAID0 works fine with Windows, it sounds like you're having a Linux issue. Unfortunately, Linux and laptops don't tend to get along so well which is why I only ever run Linux in a VM on my Alienware M17x (although my Inspiron 17R handles it fine). I hope you get your issue resolved, most companies won't give you support for something that works in Windows. That said, Sager supports things other companies won't touch so maybe you'll find satisfaction but I wouldn't fault them if they choose not to badger Clevo for a fix.

 

Thanks mate , will be waiting your thoughts of the machine tomorrow then
SSDs are already blazing fast and after using them for 3 years now I don't think a raid 0 will show me much boost as it don't tend to move files a lot or so plus i dnt trust raid 0 much especially on SSDs they tend to fail.
So 256gb should cover Windows and all softwares etc then the other 512Gb will be just for my games .. Then the extra 2tb for movies,music etc.
Now hoping we wnt notice much throttle from the 880ms . Guess Ull know sooner than me.

 

I thought that SSDs were more reliable than regular hard disks - they have a set and predictable lifespan?

I guess we will see what I think of RAID. If I don't like it, I'll take em out of RAID, install OSX or Linux on the second one, use the first one for Windows, and if I can, set up the 2 1TB as RAID0

 

Don't get me wrong SSDs are far more reliable than normal HDDs ,but every storage device is subject to failures.when set to raid 0 their chances of failure doubles and if you google a bit you will notice lots of people suffering from it.
For that I see that the benefit of it for me ain't that much , you will notice no difference in performance or speed while doing normal stuff with the PC ( gaming ,browsing,boot ups etc etc ...as these SSDs are so fast already, it's only when u copy files between them that the speed doubles.
And with me having 2x1tb of HDDs , all the big files I have will be moved their.
It all depends on how you wana use them.
Have you received the system of yours yet ?

 

Raid 0 definitely decreases boot time. 10-15 second single SSD to about 4-6 seconds with my Raid 0 setup. Not a huge difference because at a certain point it's not limited by the SSD speed, but still pretty nice to push the button and have it on seconds later.

 

I see your point but mechanical drives have something like a 5% failure rate compared to 1.5% for SSDs. SSDs also generally don't succumb to heat like a hard drive would (this depends entirely on the environment that the drives are in and the type of NAND though) - the Crucial drives that I got are not the fastest around but they're some of the most reliable. I wish I knew if XOTIC uses M500 or M550 drives, it just says "M5" when you order them. I'm expecting M500s but I'll be thrilled if they're M550s.

Mission critical data will go on the storage disks.

Knock on wood but in my 19 years of computing, I have never experienced a catastrophic hard drive failure.

Machine is out for delivery today.

 

Same issue with just windows unfortunately.

 

Seriously? Was it RAID out of the box? Mine is set up with RAID too, what is the specific issue you're having so I can look for it on my machine?

EDIT: Nevermind, I did a Google search. I won't be bothering with UEFI unless I decide to put OS X on the machine so I'm not going to worry about it. Doesn't look like fun though. -_-

 

2 decent SSDs have less chance of failing than a single HDD.

 

This machine is off the chains. I have a few minor complaints but I'm nitpicking. This is one stellar machine!

I'm compiling data for the next few days before I do a full review.

I need to figure out how to use XTU real quick so I can see what kind of performance this thing is really capable of.

 

Congrats mate , am sure your super excited...
Howz the 120hz screen ? Bright ? Howz the colors ?

 

Its easily the best LCD I've ever seen. And that 120hz came in handy running the FFXIV:ARR benchmark just now... Average of 144 FPS with absolute maximum settings @ 1080p lol

But seriously, its extremely bright, it doesn't suffer from glare issues, the colors pop right off the screen, NO tearing that I can discern, whites are white. It might be a touch on the warm side but I prefer warm to cool when it comes to my laptop screen.

There was one thing that I did that I don't know how to undo... somehow I shut the lights off on the keyboard... The initial set up asked me what kind of keyboard I had, I selected it and it shut the lights off and they haven't come back.

EDIT: Figured it out with the keyboard lol.

 

Glad to hear man, I will definitely be getting a Sager in my future.

 

I've owned my 9377-S for a few weeks now, and I'm loving it. 4810, 880M sli, 16g ram etc.

I bought it mainly for gaming, and that it does. Only been playing BF3 and The Witcher 2 on it, and the frame rates are really great.

HOWEVER, I have a bad temperature problem. With the fans set to max all the time, BF3 gets the GPUs into the mid 80s, and The Witcher gets them to 90 within an hour of playing. At that point with the witcher, I see throttling (reduced core clock) on MSI Afterburner. I'm running a U3 cooler (3 fans placed at the intake of the three laptop fans), and I also reapplied some Turniq thermal paste. I'm not running the games at max settings, but pretty close. These temperatures are unacceptable on these slightly older games.

BTW, the laptop was purchased through XOTICPC.

Any advice?

Thanks,
Kevin

 

You can try re-doing your thermal compound. Too little, too much, or improper application can all affect temps.

 

Yeah your temps are crazy high. I just played BioShock Infinite on Ultra for the last half an hour and maxed at 87 on each GPU. What's your ambient temp? I'm in Denver so low humidity and we keep the A/C on 72F (around 22C). The system sounded like a jet engine but it stayed cool.

 

it should come with a proper thermal paste from sager themself, unless ofc they did a bad one ...happened to me on np9380 , but I really blamed my reseller at that time because it should have been checked by them before shipping.
I'll wait ethrem opinion on his temps as well ,I hope the cooling of this system isn't as bad as the np9380 .. The slave gpu of that machine suffered with that and for my surprise when my reseller contacted sager they told him it's normal for it to reach 85-90c which made me assume that even the best thermal paste
Wouldn't have solved the cooling issue of that system . Had 7970m xfire on it.
Let's hope it's just a bad thermal paste as I noticed they changed the way the heat pipes are in regards to the older models. Take xotic advice and redo the thermal paste and let us know what happens.

 

I wouldn't say 87c is a healthy temp for the gpu ethrem but again I kinda expected to have this kind of temp...... It's the way the system is built ....
Now am assure my Gpu won't run cool

 

I haven't been able to take them past 87C with a 99% GPU load on both cards.

Ambient temp 22C/72F, laptop sitting on a table tray meant for eating dinner, nothing fancy just oak.

Forcing max cooling with FN+1 drops GPU 1 to 33 and GPU 2 to 34 after a few minutes. Idle seems to be around 40C

I'm not disappointed by temps at all

EDIT: 87C is acceptable for high performance mobile parts. Its not ideal but its not 90C+ like I've seen with my M17x either.

 

Can you do more tests on other games and see the max it gets ?
I assume from the earlier post that it throttles at 90 right ? Or beyond that ?

 

Like I said, I haven't gotten it to 90C no matter what I've thrown at it. The CPU throttled when I was messing with XTU but the GPU has not throttled. What work load will typically push the cards to their max thermal wise?

I did look up reviews of the MSI and Alienware and the cards run stupid cool in them (76C in the GT70 and 74C in the AW18) which makes me wonder what the issue is in this case. I've never repasted before... maybe I'll have to learn... -_-

 

I did already re-do the stock paste, which was quite heavy. And, the overheating issue was there with the stock paste, which is why I re-did it. I could take a go at it again with the paste and see if I can affect a change in the temperature.

I saw throttling once the GPUs approached 90C. The framerates are rather high (120fps +), so I don't believe the GPUs are being over-stressed. And I actually had to cap the framerate in BF3 to 120, because I was seeing 150-200fps consistently. It is a BEAST of a computer.