So I just got my new 9880 through xtremenotebooks.com, 4,400 bux w/ the 3 year warranty + LCD accident protection. Had to choose between a new desktop or laptop. (yeah, wish I knew about pctorque before hand). Thinking about getting refund. This thing is a BEAST, but I need it for doing 3d animation when I travel.

Here are a couple issues...

1) WUXGA Screen looks pretty good at top resolution (1920 x 1200), very crisp...but anything below that (1600) looks pretty crappy. Kind of blurry and dim, with poor contrast. I have the nview settings at default, and I thought maybe it just looked bad in comparison to the HD type display, so I put it next to a dell inspiron 9200 running at the same res (+/- 100 pixels for different aspect) and the Dell was markedly brighter, clearer and crisper. Both units on AC power w/ screen luminance all the way up. I checked the settings on how the 6800ultra is sending out the picture and its set to adapter scale. Is anyone else out there running their 900T at a lower than 1900 resolution and having weird results? I'm using the 7.7.7 drivers...

2) Card Reader light always solid green. Is this normal?

3) Fixed the infamous on board mic problem by enabling "stereo mixer", but still kind of poor.

4) Max volume is lower than I anticipated. And is it me, or is the "Subwoofer" nothing more than a regular speaker, just on the bottom of the laptop?

5) Included BisonCap utility refuses to capture audio simultaneously w/ video no matter how much it's settings are fiddled with.

6) Windows built - in sound recorder crashes, citing "Not enough memory to complete the process" um. 3 gigs of RAM. Is this an issue with windows XP SP2 and having over 2.7gb RAM?

Other than that, this things terrific... but I'm concerned about the display because I paid quite a bit extra hoping it would be the best available. Hopefully I'm doing something wrong w/ drivers or settings. Also, has anyone had any experience overclocking their screen refresh rate past the default limited 60Hz?

Any advice and comments / critique of the notebook would be appreciated, including links to other threads.

Best,

Matt

Common among LCD displays. Most usually have a "native" resolution they want to run at, and anything else can sometimes appear distorted. Since you've got an 8x5 display, you'll only want to use resolutions that are 8x5 to get the best possible picture (otherwise, they'll appear even more distorted). Some true 8x5 resolutions are: 1920x1200, 1680x1050, 1440x900, and 1280x800 (1600x1000 is also a true 8x5, but I've never seen a machine running it).

Normal. You can turn it off by disabling the card reader when you aren't using it.

My 9860 has very weak sound as well. A common complaint on the 9860/9880 model.

I can't answer your other questions.