I’ve had my 8790 for a few days now, I’ve only had one other laptop and a crappy one at that circa 98 Toshiba pos, so I don’t have much to compare it to besides my desktop. As a lot of people here, I spent quite a while deciding which laptop to go with, deciding between alien ware and sager was a hard choice, as a fairly hardcore gamer I wanted a machine that could dish out anything I want to through at it now, and down the road, thus far I’m fairly happy.
8790 specs 3.2 northwood, 1gig DDR, 60gig hd.
Desktop specs 2.6 northwood, 1gig ram, 9700 pro.
Shipping-Took for damn ever, but it had to go from Cali to Florida then back to Cali so I could doge tax b/c I’m a cheap bastard.
Packaging-not bad here, I don’t think it would survive a 2 story fall, but it could have been worse.
Looks-its fair looking, not great, but I didn’t buy it based on looks.
Size-It’s about what I expected, a large notebook. It’s a few inches larger than your standard notebook, fairly thing and it’s certainly not light.
Screen-The screen is great, no dead pixels, it’s a very different experience, so far I can say that 1440x900 is a very comfortable resolution for just about everything, I wouldn’t want to go much higher, text would be to damn small.
Sound-I’ll have to be honest here, I’m disappointed with the sound, for a machine having 4 speakers+sub, its fairly poor, and even worse, you do in fact pickup hard-disk feed back through the audio out jack. It’s not horrible, but its not ideal, that’s for sure, should be a lot better for 2200
Gaming-I’ve ran several games on this thing, and I can say this is where it truly shines. First off, I’ve over-clocked the video card to 475/290+omega drivers which put me at 3800 in 3dmark 03. Playing games widescreen is an entirely different experience, I like this display equally to my 21 Trinitron. Far cry looks great and from what I can see, my 8790 runs it better than my desktop with high settings I’m getting from 65-120fps, looks great. All Steam games look swell, BF1942 looks just fine, even with some stretching-I know there’s an ini fix for it-didn’t do it.. Rise of nations looks superb, but needs a ini file tweak-did do it. Star wars galaxies looks GREAT at 1440x900 as I’m sure all of the sonny online games would Diciples2 looks good running at 1024x768 with some stretching.
While on the topic of stretching I did some playing around with dif video settings from 800x600 to 1440x900. Here’s what I can say, even games running at 800x600 look decent, not great, but playable, 1024x768 looks very good, stretching is fairly hard to pick up, it’s really not a big issue, so if this was a concern of yours, as it was with me-its not a deal breaker. I’m fairly sure any game can be ran with little to no fuss.
8790 specs 3.2 northwood, 1gig DDR, 60gig hd.
Desktop specs 2.6 northwood, 1gig ram, 9700 pro.
Shipping-Took for damn ever, but it had to go from Cali to Florida then back to Cali so I could doge tax b/c I’m a cheap bastard.
Packaging-not bad here, I don’t think it would survive a 2 story fall, but it could have been worse.
Looks-its fair looking, not great, but I didn’t buy it based on looks.
Size-It’s about what I expected, a large notebook. It’s a few inches larger than your standard notebook, fairly thing and it’s certainly not light.
Screen-The screen is great, no dead pixels, it’s a very different experience, so far I can say that 1440x900 is a very comfortable resolution for just about everything, I wouldn’t want to go much higher, text would be to damn small.
Sound-I’ll have to be honest here, I’m disappointed with the sound, for a machine having 4 speakers+sub, its fairly poor, and even worse, you do in fact pickup hard-disk feed back through the audio out jack. It’s not horrible, but its not ideal, that’s for sure, should be a lot better for 2200
Gaming-I’ve ran several games on this thing, and I can say this is where it truly shines. First off, I’ve over-clocked the video card to 475/290+omega drivers which put me at 3800 in 3dmark 03. Playing games widescreen is an entirely different experience, I like this display equally to my 21 Trinitron. Far cry looks great and from what I can see, my 8790 runs it better than my desktop with high settings I’m getting from 65-120fps, looks great. All Steam games look swell, BF1942 looks just fine, even with some stretching-I know there’s an ini fix for it-didn’t do it.. Rise of nations looks superb, but needs a ini file tweak-did do it. Star wars galaxies looks GREAT at 1440x900 as I’m sure all of the sonny online games would Diciples2 looks good running at 1024x768 with some stretching.
While on the topic of stretching I did some playing around with dif video settings from 800x600 to 1440x900. Here’s what I can say, even games running at 800x600 look decent, not great, but playable, 1024x768 looks very good, stretching is fairly hard to pick up, it’s really not a big issue, so if this was a concern of yours, as it was with me-its not a deal breaker. I’m fairly sure any game can be ran with little to no fuss.
