I won't go into details that others have already talked about in these forums, I just want to mention a few things I never saw while I was researching to buy it and that might be useful to others evaluating this laptop.
First of all, I bought from PCtorque, who again gave me great, fast service even through the holiday season and delivered my notebook exactly as requested and on time at a great price. I really recommend them.
Sager 5720-V Notebook: 5720-V
17" WUXGA LCD (Glossy 1920 X 1200)
Pentium M ( 780 ) 2.26 GHz
nVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX
1024MB 533DDR2 (1024MB)
100GB 7200RPM HD
Media Bay: 8x DVD+-R DL
Intel PRO/Wireless A+B+G & Bluetooth
The good:
- The screen: I have resisted going to widescreen for a while but it's just difficult to find good 4:3 machines anymore, so I had to give in and go for my first Windows Widescreen notebook. This is the first screen I have owned on a laptop that can easily look much better than my desktop Dell LCD. Incredibly sharp and saturated. Glosiness has not been a problem at all. Everything just looks beatiful in it. It does have sparkles but I don't find them that annoying. Very slight leak at the bottom but only if you look for it hard, doesn't bother me at all. I did expect the screen to be brighter though, based on some of the higher end Sony's I've seen, but it's excellent all the same. I showed some pictures to my wife on it today and she kept commenting on how amazingly sharp and beatiful they looked on this screen.
- The keyboard: Love, LOVE the keyboard on this thing. Great feel, nearly perfect layout. I would have placed dedicated PgUP and pgDown keys over the arrow keys instead of 2 dead panels, but the presence of a dedicated num pad makes up for this in spades. it's a very comfortable notebook for heavy writing.
- Performance: The P-M 2.26Ghz feels just as fast or even faster than my desktop P4 3.8 Ghz. I knew to expect this since my old P-M 1.6Ghz was also a very fast machine. Photoshop CS2, 3ds max, Maya and many others run excellently, and makes for a true mobile workstation. Everything feels very snappy and limited multitasking has been flawless. Heavy internet browsing is a pleasure on this machine.
On the GPU side of things, the 7800GTX seems to be every bit as fast as my desktop 7800GTX. There's some situations where the notebook will stutter where the desktop doesn't, but I attribute it to memory differences (my desktop has 2GB vs 1GB on my laptop). It's hard for the card to power the massive 1920x1200 resolution natively on some games, but generally graphics performance is really jaw-dropping and is as good as my fast desktop system. Amazing.
- Sound: Sound coming from the notebook speakers is not the best I've ever heard, but it's very, very competent. Games sound loud and clear, so does music. Lacks a little bass but not completely, so they are actually listenable. I'm very happy with them. No hiss, just a very faint chirping when the hard drive is being used, and only if there's absolute silence in the signal. Other than that, no complaints about sound at all.
- The notebook is a lot lighter than I expected, it's not heavy at all, and it's pretty too. The fan rarely comes on and when it does, it's very, very quiet.
The bad:
- Wireless performance: I had read about this problem from other people and I am sad to confirm that wireless performance on this notebook is abysmal. It's sitting less than 6 feet from the transmitter (Linksys Wtr54G) and the signal meter on the notebook is constantly dropping to 24, 11 or even 5 Mpbs. My other two notebooks are sitting on either side of it at a rock solid 54Mb connection. The wireless performance is so bad that I can't even stream MP3s from my server without every other track stuttering. The notebook could be right next to the wifi router and still have a crappy connection to it. Copying a simple 500MB file takes 4 or 5 times longer on this notebook than on my other, slower notebooks because of the connection being constantly weak. I have no idea what causes this, maybe it lacks an internal antenna?
UPDATE: Krassh pointed out an updated Wireless card driver available here: http://support.intel.com/support/wir.../cs-010623.htm
This driver seems to fix the wireless problem altogether, at least for me, and effectively eliminates this problem. A must have for 5720 owners.
- The trackpad: The trackpad is one of the few negative aspects of this laptop. When I noticed the trackpad was not made by Synaptics I knew it wasn't going to be great. After using the laptop for a few days I can tell you the trackpad just sucks. It's horrendous. The drivers are crappy, a lot of features don't work correctly, the sensitivity is not adjustable, and on and on. The trackpad constantly fails to recognize taps and I find myself hitting the trackpad 3 or 4 times in order to do what my Synaptics-equipped Acer does perfectly without fail. The WORST part is that the trackpad seems to lack the necessary precision to use at this screen resolution. Sometimes it's simply impossible to hit a particular button on the screen becase the pointer just jumps from one side of it to the other regardless of how minuscule your finger movement is, it's very frustrating, whereas a Synaptics pad is incredibly precise. Hitting every button becomes an annoying chore. Finally, the drivers offers options for customization that I could only qualify as stupid. Please Sager, dump these trackpad guys, they suck hard. Go with Synaptics in the future. This is the only part I hate about the laptop so far.
- The extra buttons / DJ buttons: The 3 quick launch buttons on top do their job fine albeit in a very limited way: you can only really customize one of them to launch a different application. The other two will launch the default mail and web applicaiton respectively. I guess that's acceptable.
The DJ buttons however are another very weak area. There are 8 buttons total, of which only 6 work in windows, but not always. The next/previous/play-pause/stop keys mostly work - I saw some odd behavior wirth Winamp but they worked most of the time. The volume buttons seem to work ok within windows, but they seem to do nothing when inside a game for example - no matter how much you hit them, the volume will not change. So sometimes there's no way to lower the volume on a booming sound sequence except muting the system altogether. I really think analog volume controls are very underrated.
The customization options for these buttons are so minimalistic that there's really nothing to talk about. There's almost nothing you can change about this, so you're stuck. Forget about using the first DJbutton as a mute button or as a volume preset. Nope, they'd tather you never use them before providing a basic level fo customizability.
The clock display is an ingenious use of the space, but I wish you could change it to 12-hour format. Again, zero customization level.
And finally, a small detail: I have found no way to turn off the screen on command. My acer has a key combination to kill the display instantaneously and save power that way. This notebook as a similarly labeled FN key, and the accompanying paper sheet says "fn+f7: display toggle". It's really not explained anywhere what "disaply toggle" means, but it's not "turn off the screen", and it's not "toggle aspect ration compensation", two functionalities it sorely lacks.
So, in general I am happy with the notebook, especially because it offers such amazing power and such a beatiful screen for this price, but the little details are a thorn on my side. Overall I would still recommend this notebook to those who need such a machine, but I would warn them about the quality and interface issues mentioned above.
First of all, I bought from PCtorque, who again gave me great, fast service even through the holiday season and delivered my notebook exactly as requested and on time at a great price. I really recommend them.
Sager 5720-V Notebook: 5720-V
17" WUXGA LCD (Glossy 1920 X 1200)
Pentium M ( 780 ) 2.26 GHz
nVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX
1024MB 533DDR2 (1024MB)
100GB 7200RPM HD
Media Bay: 8x DVD+-R DL
Intel PRO/Wireless A+B+G & Bluetooth
The good:
- The screen: I have resisted going to widescreen for a while but it's just difficult to find good 4:3 machines anymore, so I had to give in and go for my first Windows Widescreen notebook. This is the first screen I have owned on a laptop that can easily look much better than my desktop Dell LCD. Incredibly sharp and saturated. Glosiness has not been a problem at all. Everything just looks beatiful in it. It does have sparkles but I don't find them that annoying. Very slight leak at the bottom but only if you look for it hard, doesn't bother me at all. I did expect the screen to be brighter though, based on some of the higher end Sony's I've seen, but it's excellent all the same. I showed some pictures to my wife on it today and she kept commenting on how amazingly sharp and beatiful they looked on this screen.
- The keyboard: Love, LOVE the keyboard on this thing. Great feel, nearly perfect layout. I would have placed dedicated PgUP and pgDown keys over the arrow keys instead of 2 dead panels, but the presence of a dedicated num pad makes up for this in spades. it's a very comfortable notebook for heavy writing.
- Performance: The P-M 2.26Ghz feels just as fast or even faster than my desktop P4 3.8 Ghz. I knew to expect this since my old P-M 1.6Ghz was also a very fast machine. Photoshop CS2, 3ds max, Maya and many others run excellently, and makes for a true mobile workstation. Everything feels very snappy and limited multitasking has been flawless. Heavy internet browsing is a pleasure on this machine.
On the GPU side of things, the 7800GTX seems to be every bit as fast as my desktop 7800GTX. There's some situations where the notebook will stutter where the desktop doesn't, but I attribute it to memory differences (my desktop has 2GB vs 1GB on my laptop). It's hard for the card to power the massive 1920x1200 resolution natively on some games, but generally graphics performance is really jaw-dropping and is as good as my fast desktop system. Amazing.
- Sound: Sound coming from the notebook speakers is not the best I've ever heard, but it's very, very competent. Games sound loud and clear, so does music. Lacks a little bass but not completely, so they are actually listenable. I'm very happy with them. No hiss, just a very faint chirping when the hard drive is being used, and only if there's absolute silence in the signal. Other than that, no complaints about sound at all.
- The notebook is a lot lighter than I expected, it's not heavy at all, and it's pretty too. The fan rarely comes on and when it does, it's very, very quiet.
The bad:
- Wireless performance: I had read about this problem from other people and I am sad to confirm that wireless performance on this notebook is abysmal. It's sitting less than 6 feet from the transmitter (Linksys Wtr54G) and the signal meter on the notebook is constantly dropping to 24, 11 or even 5 Mpbs. My other two notebooks are sitting on either side of it at a rock solid 54Mb connection. The wireless performance is so bad that I can't even stream MP3s from my server without every other track stuttering. The notebook could be right next to the wifi router and still have a crappy connection to it. Copying a simple 500MB file takes 4 or 5 times longer on this notebook than on my other, slower notebooks because of the connection being constantly weak. I have no idea what causes this, maybe it lacks an internal antenna?
UPDATE: Krassh pointed out an updated Wireless card driver available here: http://support.intel.com/support/wir.../cs-010623.htm
This driver seems to fix the wireless problem altogether, at least for me, and effectively eliminates this problem. A must have for 5720 owners.
- The trackpad: The trackpad is one of the few negative aspects of this laptop. When I noticed the trackpad was not made by Synaptics I knew it wasn't going to be great. After using the laptop for a few days I can tell you the trackpad just sucks. It's horrendous. The drivers are crappy, a lot of features don't work correctly, the sensitivity is not adjustable, and on and on. The trackpad constantly fails to recognize taps and I find myself hitting the trackpad 3 or 4 times in order to do what my Synaptics-equipped Acer does perfectly without fail. The WORST part is that the trackpad seems to lack the necessary precision to use at this screen resolution. Sometimes it's simply impossible to hit a particular button on the screen becase the pointer just jumps from one side of it to the other regardless of how minuscule your finger movement is, it's very frustrating, whereas a Synaptics pad is incredibly precise. Hitting every button becomes an annoying chore. Finally, the drivers offers options for customization that I could only qualify as stupid. Please Sager, dump these trackpad guys, they suck hard. Go with Synaptics in the future. This is the only part I hate about the laptop so far.
- The extra buttons / DJ buttons: The 3 quick launch buttons on top do their job fine albeit in a very limited way: you can only really customize one of them to launch a different application. The other two will launch the default mail and web applicaiton respectively. I guess that's acceptable.
The DJ buttons however are another very weak area. There are 8 buttons total, of which only 6 work in windows, but not always. The next/previous/play-pause/stop keys mostly work - I saw some odd behavior wirth Winamp but they worked most of the time. The volume buttons seem to work ok within windows, but they seem to do nothing when inside a game for example - no matter how much you hit them, the volume will not change. So sometimes there's no way to lower the volume on a booming sound sequence except muting the system altogether. I really think analog volume controls are very underrated.
The customization options for these buttons are so minimalistic that there's really nothing to talk about. There's almost nothing you can change about this, so you're stuck. Forget about using the first DJbutton as a mute button or as a volume preset. Nope, they'd tather you never use them before providing a basic level fo customizability.
The clock display is an ingenious use of the space, but I wish you could change it to 12-hour format. Again, zero customization level.
And finally, a small detail: I have found no way to turn off the screen on command. My acer has a key combination to kill the display instantaneously and save power that way. This notebook as a similarly labeled FN key, and the accompanying paper sheet says "fn+f7: display toggle". It's really not explained anywhere what "disaply toggle" means, but it's not "turn off the screen", and it's not "toggle aspect ration compensation", two functionalities it sorely lacks.
So, in general I am happy with the notebook, especially because it offers such amazing power and such a beatiful screen for this price, but the little details are a thorn on my side. Overall I would still recommend this notebook to those who need such a machine, but I would warn them about the quality and interface issues mentioned above.
