I have a Sager 5670 with 1gb of RAM, 3.06Ghz P4 (HT-enabled), the 40gb 5400rpm drive, and the built in wireless and spare battery. My deciding factor was the ability to have HT on the road with me. I have some software applications that benefit significantly from this. If I hadn’t needed it, I could have gone with a slightly slower CPU for much less money.
I’m replacing a Thinkpad 600E (Pentium II 366Mhz, 416MB RAM, 6gb disk). Really, I’m also replacing a 1.2Ghz Athlon desktop.
I’m running Windows 2003 Server, which is very much like XP as far as drivers go. They installed off the CD without a hitch, with one exception. I have an “Unknown device” that can’t find a driver anywhere, and I can’t figure out what it is. Everything seems to work.
This thing runs hot, and no mistake. The fans do a nice job of adapting to the situation. It’s pretty quiet right now, but if I fire up a game, the fans will kick it up a notch. (“Bam!”) There is definite warmth under the wrists. They ought to ditch the plastic wrist wrests and get some of that fancy heat-spreading rubber. Or maybe not; Sager is making a pretty conscious cost/utility trade-off when it comes to build materials. Even the power supply (250W in, 120W out!) has a fan. It’s a nice touch that it’s a variable speed fan, but if I were going to design a power supply with a fan, I’d make the cord long enough that it could reach the floor from an average height desk.
The keyboard is distinctly inferior to the Thinkpad. The keys are firm and responsive, but the keyboard has a bit of overall flex to it. I think it’s the sound of the keyboard that bothers me; a little bit of a rattle. The semi-translucent keys are a nice touch. IBM also offers a keyboard light, which is a super cool touch for computing in the dark. Key placement is generally pretty good, and it has a Windows key, but there’s a goofy arrangement of Ins/Del/PgUp/PgDn/End keys.
The UXGA display is very nice, though I wouldn’t call its visibility 170 degrees. More like 120 due in large part to the backlight projecting straight forward. Viewability from the side improves as the room gets darker. From dead on in front though, I’ve never seen its equal; it’s like the text is painted there. The high pixel density also makes digital camera photos really pop; I’ll be using this screen to show off photos from now on. There are six dead pixels, but they are all single elements (one red, two blue, and three green) and they are all “always off.” If they had said they were sending me a unit with six dead pixels, I would have told them to keep it. As it stands, it’s not nearly the problem I would have expected (“always off” for a single color element is the least significant type of “dead pixel” defect), particularly since the pixels are so gosh darned small. We’ll see how I feel about it in a week.
If anything, the LCD screen doesn’t dim enough. In the dark, with minimum brightness, you don’t need the IBM keyboard light because everyone for six blocks behind you will still think it’s daytime. But my girlfriend says the unearthly white glow makes me look sexy, so maybe Sager has achieved the ultimate: a laptop that helps you get chicks.
Right now I’m having trouble trying to drive an external monitor at anything other than 60Hz. It’s like it’s constrained by the LCD screen properties. Very hard on the eyes, but this is almost certainly a Catalyst driver problem and not a Sager problem.
Build quality is pretty mediocre. The LCD screen quivers a little when I’m typing, which is a bit unsettling. The wrist guard isn’t tightly attached; it flexes down when pressure is applied to where it seems like it ought to fit. It came with several blemishes on the surface _under_ the transparent wrist guard. The “Intel Inside” logo was applied crooked. Minor stuff, but it gives it a cheesy “refurb” feel that is inappropriate in new equipment. Positives: the LCD screen doesn’t distort when closed from the corner (a key indicator of a flimsy lid) nor does it react to pressure from the back.
Battery life is not that hot; about 2:30 with both batteries and a moderate workload on my first charge / full discharge cycle. The flip side of this is that when you pull the cord out, nothing happens. On the good old Thinkpad, pull the cord and the screen dims, the processor slows to a crawl and life generally gets a lot less pleasant in the name of squeezing out those extra minutes. With two batteries, it got about 3 hours in its heyday. So in terms of CPU cycles per battery charge, the Sager is really a huge improvement.
The killer with the batteries is the charge time. Although the batteries discharge simultaneously, they charge one at a time and with the machine in operation, it’s taken 3 ½ hours to get one battery back to 42%. Extrapolating, that’s a total charge time of about 16 hours for two and a half hours of runtime! I think I read somewhere that the batteries charge faster when it’s off / suspended, so I’ll follow up on this once I’ve had a chance to break the batteries in.
I’m still getting used to the touchpad; I’ve used and loved the trackpoint for about 6 years despite the fact that my fingertips were threatening to get calluses. “Tap to click” is a good idea poorly executed; I had to turn it off because I had to treat it like an eggshell to keep from clicking even on the least sensitive settings. I have no idea if other touchpads are better.
The hard drive seems slow even at 5400RPM with 16mb of cache, but not even handwriting notes on punch cards is slower than my old Thinkpad drive, so it’s still a big improvement. My desktop is a 15k Ultra160 SCSI, so all laptop drives suck by comparison. A 15k 9.5mm drive would doubtlessly melt through the bottom of the laptop.
The audio is pretty low end, Realtek AC’97. Electrical interference from the hard drive leaks into the audio out jack on the back; that’s pretty shameful. This isn’t major; with a bit of volume tuning I can’t even hear it, um, over the sound of the Sager’s fans. If I were a hardcore gamer, I’d probably be disappointed with the sound.
The Ethernet port is also low end, the Realtek RTL8139. To quote the open source *nix driver for this chip, “This is probably the worst PCI Ethernet controller ever made.” The performance blows (high CPU load vs. network throughput) but this is hardly an issue with laptops. It sends packets and it auto-negotiates acceptably.
The Wi-Fi adapter based on Intersil, just like everybody else. I haven’t peeked inside to see what brand it is, as if it matters. It works fine with my 64-bit WEP infrastructure. I’m having terrible trouble with my Sierra Wireless AirCard (a CDMA 1xRTT wireless PC card), but I think that problem (the dreaded “Code 10”) is related to drivers and handling of APIC interrupts related to Hyperthreading and is not a Sager issue. Other PCMCIA cards work just fine, though the recessed slot makes it a bit tricky to fully insert flat-backed cards like flash readers.
No Sager review would be complete without mentioning the size and weight. Both are massive. This thing barely fits in my existing backpack, which means I’m going to have to check around and see what I can get. The Targus deluxe backpacks on www.pctorque.com seem nice and are attractively priced, but I’d like to find something with carrying capacity for some books as well. Because, you know, if I’m going to end up at the chiropractor’s office anyway, I may as well give them something to gossip about.
All in all, I think the Sager is a really good example of carefully calculated tradeoffs. It’s the only option at this price range with its features. I could have gotten significantly higher quality at the same price by backing off on performance. We’ll have to see what the long-term impact of that is. I had my two previous Thinkpads for three years and four years. Right now, I’m not totally confident that the Sager will last that long, but I look forward to being pleasantly surprised. In the interim, I will definitely make the most of this mobile performance megalith.
Issues to follow up:
- LCD dead pixels
- battery life after charge-in
I’m replacing a Thinkpad 600E (Pentium II 366Mhz, 416MB RAM, 6gb disk). Really, I’m also replacing a 1.2Ghz Athlon desktop.
I’m running Windows 2003 Server, which is very much like XP as far as drivers go. They installed off the CD without a hitch, with one exception. I have an “Unknown device” that can’t find a driver anywhere, and I can’t figure out what it is. Everything seems to work.
This thing runs hot, and no mistake. The fans do a nice job of adapting to the situation. It’s pretty quiet right now, but if I fire up a game, the fans will kick it up a notch. (“Bam!”) There is definite warmth under the wrists. They ought to ditch the plastic wrist wrests and get some of that fancy heat-spreading rubber. Or maybe not; Sager is making a pretty conscious cost/utility trade-off when it comes to build materials. Even the power supply (250W in, 120W out!) has a fan. It’s a nice touch that it’s a variable speed fan, but if I were going to design a power supply with a fan, I’d make the cord long enough that it could reach the floor from an average height desk.
The keyboard is distinctly inferior to the Thinkpad. The keys are firm and responsive, but the keyboard has a bit of overall flex to it. I think it’s the sound of the keyboard that bothers me; a little bit of a rattle. The semi-translucent keys are a nice touch. IBM also offers a keyboard light, which is a super cool touch for computing in the dark. Key placement is generally pretty good, and it has a Windows key, but there’s a goofy arrangement of Ins/Del/PgUp/PgDn/End keys.
The UXGA display is very nice, though I wouldn’t call its visibility 170 degrees. More like 120 due in large part to the backlight projecting straight forward. Viewability from the side improves as the room gets darker. From dead on in front though, I’ve never seen its equal; it’s like the text is painted there. The high pixel density also makes digital camera photos really pop; I’ll be using this screen to show off photos from now on. There are six dead pixels, but they are all single elements (one red, two blue, and three green) and they are all “always off.” If they had said they were sending me a unit with six dead pixels, I would have told them to keep it. As it stands, it’s not nearly the problem I would have expected (“always off” for a single color element is the least significant type of “dead pixel” defect), particularly since the pixels are so gosh darned small. We’ll see how I feel about it in a week.
If anything, the LCD screen doesn’t dim enough. In the dark, with minimum brightness, you don’t need the IBM keyboard light because everyone for six blocks behind you will still think it’s daytime. But my girlfriend says the unearthly white glow makes me look sexy, so maybe Sager has achieved the ultimate: a laptop that helps you get chicks.
Right now I’m having trouble trying to drive an external monitor at anything other than 60Hz. It’s like it’s constrained by the LCD screen properties. Very hard on the eyes, but this is almost certainly a Catalyst driver problem and not a Sager problem.
Build quality is pretty mediocre. The LCD screen quivers a little when I’m typing, which is a bit unsettling. The wrist guard isn’t tightly attached; it flexes down when pressure is applied to where it seems like it ought to fit. It came with several blemishes on the surface _under_ the transparent wrist guard. The “Intel Inside” logo was applied crooked. Minor stuff, but it gives it a cheesy “refurb” feel that is inappropriate in new equipment. Positives: the LCD screen doesn’t distort when closed from the corner (a key indicator of a flimsy lid) nor does it react to pressure from the back.
Battery life is not that hot; about 2:30 with both batteries and a moderate workload on my first charge / full discharge cycle. The flip side of this is that when you pull the cord out, nothing happens. On the good old Thinkpad, pull the cord and the screen dims, the processor slows to a crawl and life generally gets a lot less pleasant in the name of squeezing out those extra minutes. With two batteries, it got about 3 hours in its heyday. So in terms of CPU cycles per battery charge, the Sager is really a huge improvement.
The killer with the batteries is the charge time. Although the batteries discharge simultaneously, they charge one at a time and with the machine in operation, it’s taken 3 ½ hours to get one battery back to 42%. Extrapolating, that’s a total charge time of about 16 hours for two and a half hours of runtime! I think I read somewhere that the batteries charge faster when it’s off / suspended, so I’ll follow up on this once I’ve had a chance to break the batteries in.
I’m still getting used to the touchpad; I’ve used and loved the trackpoint for about 6 years despite the fact that my fingertips were threatening to get calluses. “Tap to click” is a good idea poorly executed; I had to turn it off because I had to treat it like an eggshell to keep from clicking even on the least sensitive settings. I have no idea if other touchpads are better.
The hard drive seems slow even at 5400RPM with 16mb of cache, but not even handwriting notes on punch cards is slower than my old Thinkpad drive, so it’s still a big improvement. My desktop is a 15k Ultra160 SCSI, so all laptop drives suck by comparison. A 15k 9.5mm drive would doubtlessly melt through the bottom of the laptop.
The audio is pretty low end, Realtek AC’97. Electrical interference from the hard drive leaks into the audio out jack on the back; that’s pretty shameful. This isn’t major; with a bit of volume tuning I can’t even hear it, um, over the sound of the Sager’s fans. If I were a hardcore gamer, I’d probably be disappointed with the sound.
The Ethernet port is also low end, the Realtek RTL8139. To quote the open source *nix driver for this chip, “This is probably the worst PCI Ethernet controller ever made.” The performance blows (high CPU load vs. network throughput) but this is hardly an issue with laptops. It sends packets and it auto-negotiates acceptably.
The Wi-Fi adapter based on Intersil, just like everybody else. I haven’t peeked inside to see what brand it is, as if it matters. It works fine with my 64-bit WEP infrastructure. I’m having terrible trouble with my Sierra Wireless AirCard (a CDMA 1xRTT wireless PC card), but I think that problem (the dreaded “Code 10”) is related to drivers and handling of APIC interrupts related to Hyperthreading and is not a Sager issue. Other PCMCIA cards work just fine, though the recessed slot makes it a bit tricky to fully insert flat-backed cards like flash readers.
No Sager review would be complete without mentioning the size and weight. Both are massive. This thing barely fits in my existing backpack, which means I’m going to have to check around and see what I can get. The Targus deluxe backpacks on www.pctorque.com seem nice and are attractively priced, but I’d like to find something with carrying capacity for some books as well. Because, you know, if I’m going to end up at the chiropractor’s office anyway, I may as well give them something to gossip about.
All in all, I think the Sager is a really good example of carefully calculated tradeoffs. It’s the only option at this price range with its features. I could have gotten significantly higher quality at the same price by backing off on performance. We’ll have to see what the long-term impact of that is. I had my two previous Thinkpads for three years and four years. Right now, I’m not totally confident that the Sager will last that long, but I look forward to being pleasantly surprised. In the interim, I will definitely make the most of this mobile performance megalith.
Issues to follow up:
- LCD dead pixels
- battery life after charge-in
