Tronbot's 4080 review

I've had a Sager 4080 for about a month now. It's a 2.6Ghz with 512 megs of ram and a 60 gig, 5400rpm hard drive. Here are my thoughts:

The screen looks beautiful when it's off. Once you turn it on, it's less impressive. The 4080 has much worse viewing angles compared to my friend's Sager 5670 and my dad's Toshiba A15. Even staring at it dead on, the top and bottom look different. If you center it so the top looks good, the bottom is a little washed out. If you center it so the bottom looks good, the top is too dark. In neither case is it unreadable, it's just a minor aggravation. I've been told that most LCDs are like that, but neither the 5670 (with wide-angle LCD) nor the Toshiba do the same thing. Also, dark colors tend to invert if you lean more than 45 degrees to the side. The good news is that it has a great response time. We played a lot of Counter-strike with my 4080 and my friend's 5670. There was a very slight but almost unnoticable blur on the 4080, whereas the 5670 has very bad blurring. More good news is that I find 1400x1024 to be a great resolution for a 15" screen. Text is nearly unreadable on the 5670's 1600x1200 screen. I can't tell if it's just the way the screen is made or if it's the "glossy finish", but something makes text look smoother on the 4080 than the 5670. Text on the 5670 has very sharp edges. Text on my 4080 has softer edges, like a CRT.

The 5670's and 4080's keyboards feel the same. Both are comfortable, but bend a little bit when pressed. The Toshiba's keyboard much firmer, and actually feels a lot better. It certainly isn't a big enough difference to affect a purchase. The worst part isn't the keyboard itself, but the wrist rest. The 5670 has a very comfortable, sloped wrist rest. The 4080's is not sloped at all so your wrist rests on the sharp corner of the laptop. It would probably be fine if it were at a keyboard-tray level, but since I have mine up on a desk it's pretty uncomfortable.

The 6-in-1 card reader is actually pretty handy since it can read my digital camera's memory cards, but it caused a problem when Windows was installing. Windows decided to make the card readers into drives C, D, E, and F, and then made the CDROM drive drive G. That left drive H for the hard drive. That probably could have been fixed somehow, but it didn't bother me enough to try.

The built-in camera is decent. It requires a good light source and has a lot of latency, but the quality is quite good.

The speakers sound pretty cruddy, but you shouldn't be expecting anything more from a laptop. They're better than the Toshiba speakers. There's some serious interference on the headphone jack, too. Sound isn't this computer's forte. There's a constant hiss when listening through headphones, and certain actions like moving the mouse, typing, or using the hard drive cause quiet clicking.

One more complaint: the fan. The fan is way too loud and whiny. I can't take this thing to class with me because it'll disturb everyone, and there doesn't seem to be a way to turn the fan off. I really wish there were a way to run it at a lower speed. This is a good place to note that it is HOT. HOT HOT HOT. It idles between 50 and 60C.

I bought a 140 watt power inverter to use the laptop in the car. I used it for a few hours without any problems. Luckily, it isn't too hot to keep in your lap.

For those of you who care, Linux also works well with it. I'm going to make another post in the Linux forum detailing what I had to do to get it working.

I don't have much to say about the performance since I don't do benchmarks. Basically, it feels fast. It runs Prince of Persia and Need for Speed Underground without any problem, and it compiles programs faster than my 1.4GHz desktop. Hard drive intensive tasks are very slow. The CPU gave the same imaginary numbers that Sisoft Sandra says it should, if that makes you feel any better. I haven't timed it, but battery life seems to be about 1.5 hours.

I emphasized all the little problems in this review, but overall the computer is really amazing. Beyond those few little quirks, it's perfect. It definitely blows away my desktop. Really, the thing I hate the most about the laptop is the cooling fan, and that's a really minor problem. If you're looking for a really powerful laptop and don't need all the fancy extras of the other models, the 4080 is a great deal.

Edit:
Forgot to mention: The viewing angles get better as you get farther away. People standing behind me never have a problem seeing it.

Linux detects it as a Samsung if that means anything to you.

Yep, that's what it looks like. It's not as bad as it is in that picture though. Like I said, it's just a minor annoyance. This is my first LCD screen, so I'm especially aware of all the little differences between it and CRTs. It is mostly noticable on solid, dark colors. Black text on a white background doesn't invert no matter where I go.

It's very quiet. Music drowns it out. If you just plug in head phones and turn it up you don't hear any static? It happens on my friend's 5670 also, so I figure it's just an effect of everything being crammed together.

By the way, my dad just used my laptop for the first time, and the first thing he said was, "wow, nice screen!"

That's not the exact problem I have, just a similar look. You can see in that picture that the screen is tilted, but also it looks like the image is a gradient from black to blue. The effect here is more of an uneven distribution of backlight. Colors don't warp or invert like they do when you move far to the side, they just look a little pale and washed out in the bottom inch or two of the screen.

I'll try to post a picture of it later this week.