So it came to this.
I'm a big desktop gamer. Big screens, big CPU's, big hard drives, RAID0 stripes, SLI, the whole 9 yards. I'm also a Husband. And a parent of three children. My oldest son is 13 and lives with his mom (except on weekends of course). Sara (4) and Joey (7mos) live with me and my wife. My computer hobby started getting intrusive. In fact, my desk was as of late sitting in the middle of my living room. My wife was really getting sick of having to deal with my typing while watching her shows. My daughter would always yell at me to stop typing while trying to get her daily dose of Noggin. But we can't move out of our 2 bedroom apartment. Not yet. We are getting close to buying a house, but it'll be at least a year before we get enough of a down payment for the kind of house we want. What's worse is my wife wants to stop working to be a stay at home mom. I'll be living a true S.I.T.C.O.M. (Single Income, Three Children, Oppressive Mortgage). So I had to make some sacrifices. My wife said I have to downsize my PC habit and give her the living room back.
There simply isn't enough room anywhere else in the apartment for my desk, so I decided I was going to buy a very high end notebook for all my PC gaming needs. I was really worried about this move, so I figured I would give a Dell model a roll since I could always return it. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how well it performed with just a 2ghz Pentium M and the 7800GTX. Video performance was stellar, CPU performance was actually quite adequate for gaming (though I did miss my Dual Core 4800+ box when I did my heavy multitasking). Also, the single HD option was pretty pokey. While 7200rpm drives are decent in notebooks, for some reason they still seem very pokey to me - so I wanted to at least be able to do RAID0.
I took a peek at the Sager, the Alienware and finally the Hypersonic FX7. The FX7 looked like it had the most potential to get to me quickest since they had "pre-built" models that satisfied my needs. So, after visiting the website I was able to put together an FX60-powered model with 2GB RAM, dual 100GB 7200RPM drives in RAID0, a 7800GTX and all the trimmings (minus an OS) for $4200. While that seems like a lot of money, it still wound up being cheaper than the other models I looked at - AND I would have it in my grubby mitts faster.
I ordered it Thursday. I called friday and asked it it had shipped - but it had not. I was a little "weirded out" by the fact that I ordered a pre-built system but still had to wait a couple of days for it to ship. Now, i only had until that day to return the dell (last time UPS would come by with the call tag at least), so I told them I didn't want to sweat the weekend out without a PC. They were very accomodating and said they would slap the checkbox for "Saturday Delivery" for me. It showed up the next morning.
Impression #1: It's double boxed. The inner box has a very generic looking "Notebook Computer" graphic that's telltale it's very much an OEM model of SOMETHING. But I'm just fine with that. I snap open the box and pull the unit out.... wow. This thing is not what I would consider "Light", but with all that horsepower, could I really expect it to be? I plugged in the power supply and turned on the unit. Got the nifty Athlon FX logo, and instinctively hit F2 to hop into the bios.
The bios is quite bare-bones. You don't get any CPU options, memory timing options or the like (at least, not that I could find). That's a minor niggle a "hardcore" user might be looking for, but as for me, I don't care. Stock is just fine with me. I value stability above all else. I poked around the few BIOS options that WERE there, and the first thing I did was disable my onboard 10in1 Card Reader so my OS's %systemroot% wouldn't wind up on Drive H: or something silly like that.
Everything else appeared to be set up exactly the way I wanted it... RAID0 with a 64K stripe size, 1st boot item as CD Rom and the like. Now, I did a fair amount of preparation the night before. The first thing I did was create a floppy for the VIA RAID driver disk and had my external USB floppy drive at the ready. YOU NEED TO DO THIS BEFORE GETTING ONE OF THESE SYSTEMS! While the unit DOES come with a 2x speed USB floppy drive, interestingly enough it does NOT include a RAID driver floppy which is REQUIRED to install the OS (and no, it can't be installed during text setup in XP with anything but a floppy or memory key that emulates a floppy). If you don't have a PC around to make this floppy, you'll have to find one. (Hint for hypersonic: If you ship out a pre-made system with no OS and configure the HD's for RAID0, they're gonna need a raid floppy! How else are they going to see the RAID stripeset otherwise?
)
I started installing my OS - first thing I noticed is that the 8x DVD/RW drive is a bit on the slow side (24x CD). Of course, that's coming from someone used to a 16x/48x desktop drive. Regardless, the RAID drivers and OS installed without a hitch. I installed all the drivers required for all the components including the onboard webcam. After grabbing a modified INF file from www.laptopvideo2go.com, I installed the latest nvidia drivers. The screen on this screen is very very good. There's a slight amount of light leakage at the bottom of my unit, but there were no dead pixels whatsoever (I opted for the $99 insurance against dead pixels). Contrast-wise, I would have to give the Dell WUXGA screen the slightest benefit over the Hypersonic. They both have the "glossy" coating that enhances contrast, but the Dell screen seemed to have a slightly better black level.
Sound is decent. It's realtek onboard audio, nothing exciting. Basically the same AC97 onboard crap that plagues all notebooks. This has a 4 speaker "SRS" capable setup with a "subwoofer". I use the term "subwoofer" loosely in this context because it's really not what I would consider a subwoofer. Personally, I opted for the Soundblaster Audigy 2ZS notebook which is MUCH better than the onboard audio and uses far less CPU time in your games. Also, you can route the Audigy's audio through the onboard notebook speakers for those times where you can't use external speakers or headphones (there's a small system tray app that enables this). Another interesting item of note here: There's no bios option to disable onboard sound. Regardless, the Audigy essentially takes over when you install it. I didn't notice any conflicts within windows. In fact, with the option to reroute the Audigy's audio through the notebook's speakers, I have the feeling you would lose that functionality if you DID disable onboard audio. I haven't actually tested this theory which I assume you can test by uninstalling the AC97 driverset. I might do this in the future just to see what happens.
Now that I had all my stuff up and running, I decided to do some benchmarks just to see where this thing ranked with my desktop and the XPS M170.
I noticed my 3dmark scores were initially around 1000 points below most others in this system's range. It wasn't until I installed the AMD CPU driver that this was corrected. Another bios deficiency here: No Cool n Quiet options. Basically if you disable CnQ in the bios, you don't normally have to worry about installing the AMD CPU driver - at least I didn't have to on my desktop. Regardless, once I installed this driver on the Hypersonic, my scores were back up over 4000 where they belonged.
Another thing I noticed was what others in here noticed about the display. It is configured to report a refresh rate of 61hz. This wreaks havoc in Battlefield 2. In fact, right out of the box if you install BF2 and try loading it, it will simply crash after the splash screen (the notorious BF2 "Splash and Crash"). It wasn't until I edited my video.con file in my LOCAL PROFILE to modify the 800x600@60hz line to read 800x600@61hz that I was able to get BF2 working. Note: this file is located in c:\documents and settings\username\my documents\battlefield 2 directory, not the main BF2 directory. Once I made this edit, I was able to play at whatever resolution I wanted, so I just modified my shortcut to run BF2 at 1920x1200. It runs surprisingly smooth on this notebook - far better than I had anticipated. I figured there might be a few jerky spots at that res especially with everything cranked high with 4x AA. But nope, no jerkyness at all. Impressive to say the least.
Hard Disk performance with a 200GB stripeset (2x100GB 7200 rpm drives) is very very good at around 75MB/sec throughput (reported by Sisoft Sandra). Falls a bit short of a 2-drive raptor set by around 25MB/sec, but still - for a notebook that's still excellent. Video editing buffs will be ok here. The VIA driver for RAID seems quite stable. I'm still not used to using 'VIA' and 'Stable' in the same sentence yet, but i'm getting there! The RAID app that's on the driver CD is useful if you need to see the status of SMART or if you need to look up the drive's serial number for some reason. Aside from that, it's useless (unless you like reading poorly translated chinese).
A word on Connectivity. This unit has it all. While it doesn't have as many USB ports as the Dell (the Dell has SIX versus 4 on the FX7), it has enough to get by. You get 2 4pin firewire ports (boooooo, no power on 4 pin firewire), a Parallel port (useless nowadays), 1 serial port, 1 IR port TV Out, a 10 in 1 card reader, SVideo/Composite Ins/Outs, SPDIF, Ethernet, 56k, good god... EVERYTHING. I don't think you'll be limited here. Now, i'm the kind of guy who disables anything he won't be using in the BIOS. Buty don't disable your first COM port though. You'll get an error in the device manager if you do. Probably a small VIA chipset bug.
The touchpad is standard fare, but it's nice that they give you a scroll bar. What's nice about the scroll bar is that it doesn't require special drivers to use (unlike the Dell).
The front media buttons work. But you'll want to set your clock to display in 24 hour format. If you toggle it to 12 hours in the bios, you'll get wacky readings. It's currently 39:15 according to the front display on my notebook. Probably a little firmware bug there too.
I won't bother rating Battery Life. It's essentially useless on battery power. You might get an hour out of it (I doubt it), but again, you aren't buying this laptop for its functionality on the road. I didn't buy this notebook because I wanted something miserly on the juice, that's for sure.
The MiniPCI Wireless Adapter works at 108MB/sec with my D-Link DI-634M mimo router. This thing runs rings around the M170 which didn't do anywhere near as well when doing big LAN copies. No need to run out to get an Atheros-based MiniPCI card on Ebay.
The construction of this notebook seems VERY solid, by the way. It doesn't feel "cheap" at all. To be fair, neither does the M170 XPS rig, but geez, what's with that polished top screen that scratches badly by just LOOKING at it?
So, where's this notebook's downsides?
Well, It's heavy. But if you want a desktop replacement, this is what you have to get. The LED readouts for HD activity, etc could be brighter. You really need to look at them from directly overhead to see them. Also, the unit can get a little noisy when both cores are cranking and your heavily using the video card. But I didn't find the noise unbearingly loud. But when you compare it to the Dell XPS M170 which essentially runs silently, you DO notice it somewhat. But let's see Dell cram an FX60 into that thing, then we'll talk.
Lastly, If you get the "turbo" FX7 (meaning, it's prebuilt), you're pretty much stuck with the Grey/Graphite color scheme, which might be too bland for some of you gamers who are into the bling. Me, I don't care. Bling is nothing to me.
So in conclusion, if you have $4200 to plink down on the fastest overall mobile gaming rig you can find, AND you need to have it fast, this is it. Sure, you could get the turion-based SLI model, but I personally don't want to be stuck with a single core.
Anyway, there's my 2 cents on this notebook.
I'm a big desktop gamer. Big screens, big CPU's, big hard drives, RAID0 stripes, SLI, the whole 9 yards. I'm also a Husband. And a parent of three children. My oldest son is 13 and lives with his mom (except on weekends of course). Sara (4) and Joey (7mos) live with me and my wife. My computer hobby started getting intrusive. In fact, my desk was as of late sitting in the middle of my living room. My wife was really getting sick of having to deal with my typing while watching her shows. My daughter would always yell at me to stop typing while trying to get her daily dose of Noggin. But we can't move out of our 2 bedroom apartment. Not yet. We are getting close to buying a house, but it'll be at least a year before we get enough of a down payment for the kind of house we want. What's worse is my wife wants to stop working to be a stay at home mom. I'll be living a true S.I.T.C.O.M. (Single Income, Three Children, Oppressive Mortgage). So I had to make some sacrifices. My wife said I have to downsize my PC habit and give her the living room back.
There simply isn't enough room anywhere else in the apartment for my desk, so I decided I was going to buy a very high end notebook for all my PC gaming needs. I was really worried about this move, so I figured I would give a Dell model a roll since I could always return it. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how well it performed with just a 2ghz Pentium M and the 7800GTX. Video performance was stellar, CPU performance was actually quite adequate for gaming (though I did miss my Dual Core 4800+ box when I did my heavy multitasking). Also, the single HD option was pretty pokey. While 7200rpm drives are decent in notebooks, for some reason they still seem very pokey to me - so I wanted to at least be able to do RAID0.
I took a peek at the Sager, the Alienware and finally the Hypersonic FX7. The FX7 looked like it had the most potential to get to me quickest since they had "pre-built" models that satisfied my needs. So, after visiting the website I was able to put together an FX60-powered model with 2GB RAM, dual 100GB 7200RPM drives in RAID0, a 7800GTX and all the trimmings (minus an OS) for $4200. While that seems like a lot of money, it still wound up being cheaper than the other models I looked at - AND I would have it in my grubby mitts faster.
I ordered it Thursday. I called friday and asked it it had shipped - but it had not. I was a little "weirded out" by the fact that I ordered a pre-built system but still had to wait a couple of days for it to ship. Now, i only had until that day to return the dell (last time UPS would come by with the call tag at least), so I told them I didn't want to sweat the weekend out without a PC. They were very accomodating and said they would slap the checkbox for "Saturday Delivery" for me. It showed up the next morning.
Impression #1: It's double boxed. The inner box has a very generic looking "Notebook Computer" graphic that's telltale it's very much an OEM model of SOMETHING. But I'm just fine with that. I snap open the box and pull the unit out.... wow. This thing is not what I would consider "Light", but with all that horsepower, could I really expect it to be? I plugged in the power supply and turned on the unit. Got the nifty Athlon FX logo, and instinctively hit F2 to hop into the bios.
The bios is quite bare-bones. You don't get any CPU options, memory timing options or the like (at least, not that I could find). That's a minor niggle a "hardcore" user might be looking for, but as for me, I don't care. Stock is just fine with me. I value stability above all else. I poked around the few BIOS options that WERE there, and the first thing I did was disable my onboard 10in1 Card Reader so my OS's %systemroot% wouldn't wind up on Drive H: or something silly like that.
Everything else appeared to be set up exactly the way I wanted it... RAID0 with a 64K stripe size, 1st boot item as CD Rom and the like. Now, I did a fair amount of preparation the night before. The first thing I did was create a floppy for the VIA RAID driver disk and had my external USB floppy drive at the ready. YOU NEED TO DO THIS BEFORE GETTING ONE OF THESE SYSTEMS! While the unit DOES come with a 2x speed USB floppy drive, interestingly enough it does NOT include a RAID driver floppy which is REQUIRED to install the OS (and no, it can't be installed during text setup in XP with anything but a floppy or memory key that emulates a floppy). If you don't have a PC around to make this floppy, you'll have to find one. (Hint for hypersonic: If you ship out a pre-made system with no OS and configure the HD's for RAID0, they're gonna need a raid floppy! How else are they going to see the RAID stripeset otherwise?
)I started installing my OS - first thing I noticed is that the 8x DVD/RW drive is a bit on the slow side (24x CD). Of course, that's coming from someone used to a 16x/48x desktop drive. Regardless, the RAID drivers and OS installed without a hitch. I installed all the drivers required for all the components including the onboard webcam. After grabbing a modified INF file from www.laptopvideo2go.com, I installed the latest nvidia drivers. The screen on this screen is very very good. There's a slight amount of light leakage at the bottom of my unit, but there were no dead pixels whatsoever (I opted for the $99 insurance against dead pixels). Contrast-wise, I would have to give the Dell WUXGA screen the slightest benefit over the Hypersonic. They both have the "glossy" coating that enhances contrast, but the Dell screen seemed to have a slightly better black level.
Sound is decent. It's realtek onboard audio, nothing exciting. Basically the same AC97 onboard crap that plagues all notebooks. This has a 4 speaker "SRS" capable setup with a "subwoofer". I use the term "subwoofer" loosely in this context because it's really not what I would consider a subwoofer. Personally, I opted for the Soundblaster Audigy 2ZS notebook which is MUCH better than the onboard audio and uses far less CPU time in your games. Also, you can route the Audigy's audio through the onboard notebook speakers for those times where you can't use external speakers or headphones (there's a small system tray app that enables this). Another interesting item of note here: There's no bios option to disable onboard sound. Regardless, the Audigy essentially takes over when you install it. I didn't notice any conflicts within windows. In fact, with the option to reroute the Audigy's audio through the notebook's speakers, I have the feeling you would lose that functionality if you DID disable onboard audio. I haven't actually tested this theory which I assume you can test by uninstalling the AC97 driverset. I might do this in the future just to see what happens.
Now that I had all my stuff up and running, I decided to do some benchmarks just to see where this thing ranked with my desktop and the XPS M170.
I noticed my 3dmark scores were initially around 1000 points below most others in this system's range. It wasn't until I installed the AMD CPU driver that this was corrected. Another bios deficiency here: No Cool n Quiet options. Basically if you disable CnQ in the bios, you don't normally have to worry about installing the AMD CPU driver - at least I didn't have to on my desktop. Regardless, once I installed this driver on the Hypersonic, my scores were back up over 4000 where they belonged.
Another thing I noticed was what others in here noticed about the display. It is configured to report a refresh rate of 61hz. This wreaks havoc in Battlefield 2. In fact, right out of the box if you install BF2 and try loading it, it will simply crash after the splash screen (the notorious BF2 "Splash and Crash"). It wasn't until I edited my video.con file in my LOCAL PROFILE to modify the 800x600@60hz line to read 800x600@61hz that I was able to get BF2 working. Note: this file is located in c:\documents and settings\username\my documents\battlefield 2 directory, not the main BF2 directory. Once I made this edit, I was able to play at whatever resolution I wanted, so I just modified my shortcut to run BF2 at 1920x1200. It runs surprisingly smooth on this notebook - far better than I had anticipated. I figured there might be a few jerky spots at that res especially with everything cranked high with 4x AA. But nope, no jerkyness at all. Impressive to say the least.
Hard Disk performance with a 200GB stripeset (2x100GB 7200 rpm drives) is very very good at around 75MB/sec throughput (reported by Sisoft Sandra). Falls a bit short of a 2-drive raptor set by around 25MB/sec, but still - for a notebook that's still excellent. Video editing buffs will be ok here. The VIA driver for RAID seems quite stable. I'm still not used to using 'VIA' and 'Stable' in the same sentence yet, but i'm getting there! The RAID app that's on the driver CD is useful if you need to see the status of SMART or if you need to look up the drive's serial number for some reason. Aside from that, it's useless (unless you like reading poorly translated chinese).
A word on Connectivity. This unit has it all. While it doesn't have as many USB ports as the Dell (the Dell has SIX versus 4 on the FX7), it has enough to get by. You get 2 4pin firewire ports (boooooo, no power on 4 pin firewire), a Parallel port (useless nowadays), 1 serial port, 1 IR port TV Out, a 10 in 1 card reader, SVideo/Composite Ins/Outs, SPDIF, Ethernet, 56k, good god... EVERYTHING. I don't think you'll be limited here. Now, i'm the kind of guy who disables anything he won't be using in the BIOS. Buty don't disable your first COM port though. You'll get an error in the device manager if you do. Probably a small VIA chipset bug.
The touchpad is standard fare, but it's nice that they give you a scroll bar. What's nice about the scroll bar is that it doesn't require special drivers to use (unlike the Dell).
The front media buttons work. But you'll want to set your clock to display in 24 hour format. If you toggle it to 12 hours in the bios, you'll get wacky readings. It's currently 39:15 according to the front display on my notebook. Probably a little firmware bug there too.
I won't bother rating Battery Life. It's essentially useless on battery power. You might get an hour out of it (I doubt it), but again, you aren't buying this laptop for its functionality on the road. I didn't buy this notebook because I wanted something miserly on the juice, that's for sure.
The MiniPCI Wireless Adapter works at 108MB/sec with my D-Link DI-634M mimo router. This thing runs rings around the M170 which didn't do anywhere near as well when doing big LAN copies. No need to run out to get an Atheros-based MiniPCI card on Ebay.
The construction of this notebook seems VERY solid, by the way. It doesn't feel "cheap" at all. To be fair, neither does the M170 XPS rig, but geez, what's with that polished top screen that scratches badly by just LOOKING at it?
So, where's this notebook's downsides?
Well, It's heavy. But if you want a desktop replacement, this is what you have to get. The LED readouts for HD activity, etc could be brighter. You really need to look at them from directly overhead to see them. Also, the unit can get a little noisy when both cores are cranking and your heavily using the video card. But I didn't find the noise unbearingly loud. But when you compare it to the Dell XPS M170 which essentially runs silently, you DO notice it somewhat. But let's see Dell cram an FX60 into that thing, then we'll talk.
Lastly, If you get the "turbo" FX7 (meaning, it's prebuilt), you're pretty much stuck with the Grey/Graphite color scheme, which might be too bland for some of you gamers who are into the bling. Me, I don't care. Bling is nothing to me.
So in conclusion, if you have $4200 to plink down on the fastest overall mobile gaming rig you can find, AND you need to have it fast, this is it. Sure, you could get the turion-based SLI model, but I personally don't want to be stuck with a single core.
Anyway, there's my 2 cents on this notebook.
I opted for a Dell M170 but only because they basically gave them away last week. I am glad that your Hypersonic experience was a positive one,
