5670 Review - Page 2

MrMsyvc:

I'll give it a shot. I doubt there will be much difference, though there are certainly fewer default services running on 2k3.

I have Sandra on here already and I seem to recall I've got a copy of 3dmark around here somewhere. PCPitstop I'm not familiar with.

SiSoft Sandra

CPU Arithmetic: 15532
CPU Multimedia: 35104
Memory Bandwidth: 3928
File System Benchmark: 16156
Network/LAN Bandwidth Benchmark: 9692
Combined Peformance Index: 2153

3DMark2003 @ 1600x1200: 532

PCPitstop

CPU: 5573
Memory: 6790 MB/s
Disk Cached Speed: 572.49 MB/s
Disk Uncached Speed: 2.59 MB/s
Video Performance: 140.62 MP/s
Combined Score: 1386

Everything is stock settings and not tweaked. I'm sure I could boost gaming performance by clocking the video card higher and reinstalling with HT off.

My warranty issues worked out happily. I've got a new unit already, and I'm completely happy with it. I swear the screen doesn't shake as much when I type, and even the stickers are lined up better.

Adam made a good point to me yesterday. If you want somebody to come out to your office and install your hard drive for you then dude, you're gettin' a Dell. But if the weight and battery charge time don't bother you, and you don't need on-site service, the Sager is looking pretty hard to beat for the money.

Though I'm still not 100% sure this thing will make it three years, I feel a lot better about it now than I did on Monday.

I'm also impressed with the hard drive sled, which I had to swap as part of the replacement. It's almost as nice as the IBM systems, and doesn't require you to buy special enclosures with the drive (major bonus). And really, the difficulty difference is between "for ages 4 and up" for the IBM and "for ages 6 and up" for the Sager.

While packing up the old unit to send back, I realized that I'd left a CD in the drive. I was able to use the AudioDJ controls to eject it without firing up the notebook or looking for a paperclip. Handy!

What does the Toshiba weigh?

The Toshiba has faster video, but if you stall around for the fabulous and oft-predicted M10 Sager (and it sounds like you might), it should erase some or all of that advantage.

Which one has better support depends on the type of support. Toshiba's warranty is superior, but for non-RMA support, these forums and PCTorque are highly effective. Although, I had a poor RMA experience, people at Sager and PCTorque seemed at least as upset as I was about it, and it got worked out in a big hurry.

I'm a little mystified as to which ATI driver is actually best, but other than that I have no unanswered questions about the Sager. That's thanks to these forums.

Well, if you're referring to the review in this thread, I wrote it.

On the support, it's a question of taste. I would be really hestitant to use Sagers in a corporate environment. If you want to call someone to fix all your problems, or walk you through them, then Toshiba probably has the edge. Sager, particularly in these forums, has more of the "fanboy" we-help-those-who-help-themselves support experience. I've been screwed by inept big company techs enough to prefer the latter approach.

One of the manufacturing "problems" I wrote about was in reference to the removable wrist guard, which I didn't realize was removable. Once I removed it and cleaned under it, it looked a lot better. I'm still mystified as to why there were greasy smudges under there, but my replacement didn't have that problem at all.

I do expect the Toshiba would survive a drop better because of higher quality materials and lower total weight. They don't make high end laptops out of magnesium just because it looks cool.

I'm not sure which Toshiba you're looking at, but if it's OEM'd from Taiwan then you may well run into many of the same quality issues the Sager has.

On the battery life, mine are now conditioned and are doing 2.5 - 3 hours.

I'm starting to see some reviews of Centrino notebooks that suggest that the Pentium M really shines on battery life when you're not using it. If you're actively using it (ie, gaming), it may burn down just as quick as the (dual battery) Sager. But if you need a laptop where you leave it on and periodically check email throughout the day, the Centrino is your boy.

The big battery problem with the Sager, as I've said before and will probably mumble about right along into my dotage, is not the battery life, it's the recharge time.

I got the Sager, but I'm still within my 30 days and I could return it if I wasn't happy. But now that I've got it up and running the way I want, I'm quite pleased with my productivity using it. That's what matters at the end of the day. It's a keeper.

Until the GeForce FX and Mobility 9600 make it into the greedy little paws of us lowly consumers, it's the GeForce4 4200 Go 64mb as found in the Dell Latitude D800 that is the mobile performance winner. I believe it smacks the Mobility 9000 in the 5670 around pretty vigorously.

I've certainly kept the CPU pegged for hours at a time doing my work, but the only extended gaming sessions I've done have been Starcraft (for nostalgia purposes), and that doesn't really heat up the 3D circuits on the video card. The cooling system in the 5670 is really, really effective (if a bit loud at high speed), so I really can't imagine this would be a problem.

Certainly there are a lot of hardcore gamers in these forums who can comment on that issue much more thoroughly.

Be careful, because there are something like four different Geforce 4 Go's and one of them (the GeForce4 4200 Go) is much faster than the other three. It is very rare to find a notebook with this chip in it. Scarily, I think one of the slow chips is called the GeForce4 420 Go or something like that.

The difference in name is very small. The difference in performance is very large.

vanfanel:

I think you left out that the GeForce 4 4600 Go is inexplicably slower than the 4200 Go even though the 460 is faster than the 420.