First Impressions of Sager NP8662 - Page 3

Powerpack, I'm thoroughly confused. I don't bash people for working on saturday at all. The whole "I don't mod on shabbat" was an inside joke between myself and yoob, as at the time I was the only mod who was jewish on NBF. I have quite a bit of rep myself on that forum (NBR), and I'm not sure if you're trying to bash me, or if you're trying to help me. I like to take my responsibilities of moderating with some seriousness, and I don't want to degenerate my thread into some sort of war. If there is something you'd like me to clarify, PM me to keep this thread civil.

Let's also stay somewhat on topic too, we'ver really moved away from the point of the review, and while the diversions are nice, do we need 37 different topics in here? k? (This applies to all)

Jason

PS: big news, SSD on its way... new benches to be posted!

Who says I'm sitting on a hill? The Sager likes a flat, hard surface, and that's what it has. One thing though, is that removing the battery preserves the battery, and when I'm using the plug, I don't want either of my 2 batteries to receive undue stress / heat. The "tilt up" feature is mainly found in laptops that are mainstream yet do not have sufficient cooling on their own to keep such a profile, as well as for laptops that will find themselves isolated from an AC/DC supply for extending periods of time. The NP8662, if set up with a profile for economic usage, will last a little over 3 hours on battery, and its cooling setup is nothing short of amazing. Even with a P9700 @ 2.8GHz, a GTX 260m with 1GB GDDR3 (it's almost a desktop 9800 GT speedwise), and a 500GB 7200rpm HDD, the fan blows cool air when doing day-to-day tasks, and very little dust enters the system.

Status update: The x25-m is in the pipeline, and the addition of its first USB-based peripheral, a Microsoft Habu. It's a strange hybrid of an intellimouse and a mid-level Razer. It happens to work VERY nicely with the np8662. As for the x25-m... WHEN WILL IT GET TO NEWEGG?!

New Benchmark (win7) done with New SSD (INtel X25-m G2 160GB). Score: 6.4 overall.

See attachment for scores.

HDTune with x25-m G2 160GB SSD in as well. (NEW RECORD!)

I actually got a good deal on it. What happened was Newegg was selling for $670 + shipping, and I felt that was overpriced, considering that when they first came out they were $449 on Newegg's site (I actually ordered one at that price, but canceled it for personal reasons). About 3 days later the price SKYROCKETED to $999 and slowly came back down to the $600 to $650 level. Not happy with the pricing, and Newegg thinking they were the only gig in town, I went and called up intel to ask them if there were any places they recommended. The CSR I spoke to recommended a place called ShopBLT and that they have great service and are only $40 over the recommended price. Well $40 over sticker is certainly much better than $200 over sticker, so I went on their site and ordered myself the G2 x25-m for $490 with free shipping. ($488 + Free Shipping + $2 handling = $490). 3 Days later it's at my door, and it works like an absolute dream.

The beauty with the Sager np8662, and most sagers from what I've seen, is that access to the cpu / gpu / ram / hdd / fan is a matter of unscrewing 7 screws and flipping off the bottom panel. From there, everything that can be upgraded is accessible. The biggest problem I had with upgrading the drive was that a) the HDD was really well-secured to the SATA port, the "pull here" tab required a LOT of pulling to get the drive OUT, and b) It took me about 15 minutes to realize that there was a converter-connector on the end of the HDD that needed to be swapped to the SSD for it to fit.

I will quickly say that from when it leaves the BIOS screen to when I get to "welcome screen" with fingerprint reader prompt is only about 10 seconds. and another 3 to 4 from "successful login" to when all little icons on the lower right are there. Programs open in 1 to 2 seconds, windows open and close immediately, shut-down is in 3 seconds from when you hit "shut down". The SSD, on first impression, is a beautifully and shockingly fast instrument that really opens up what the computer can do. Whatever you do with it, DO NOT defrag it... turn that completely off, turn off superfetch if win7 or vista haven't already, and do not run any sort of "wipe free disk space" program like what's on the bottom checkbox of CCleaner, they just make your SSD's life harder. The intel SSDs, from what I've been told, do their own "garbage collection" when they sit idle, although I'm waiting for the new firmware (hopefully not going to brick the SSD with it).

Other than that, I'm enjoying it. If HDTune's 64kb sequential read score of 201.8MB / sec says anything, if you have a raid capable computer, it may be better to stick with a faster dual-core and make up the speed in the drive department if you do not need the power of quad. (Of course, if you can have quadcore and RAID SSDs you're in for a treat.)

Jason.

hee... yup, the sagers are 1-2 in HDTune.

raid up your SSDs in your M17x.... 128 or 256, and let them loose. I'd love to see it.

PS: Np8690 review is up, put some challenges there too!