My bad experience and lil review with my Mayhem G3

Yeah, that's what can happen with top components in a laptop. I don't personally understand why people don't more often pay attention to heating issues. Even my old Acer Travelmate 800 LCi (with 1.3 GHz Pentium-M and 4200/5400 rpm HD) heats up uncomfortably, and I need to use an external keyboard with it at work.

The truth seems to be that you need to acquire a computer with an adequate (and hopefully silent) cooling system, if you want to use the most heating components. I, personally, try to pay much attention to power consumption and heating issues, and pick components that don't consume much power and thus heat less. This way, I get more battery life and less heating issues. Also, less heating means less need for cooling, and thus a more silent system. Note that thin notebooks may heat up more uncomfortably than thicker ones. That's one reason why Dell 9100/XPS computers are so thick!

The most heating components are the hard drive (usually the biggest problem), the processor, and the graphics card. If you pick a Pentium-M processor, you can get rid off most of the processor heating. There are still the two other components, and I don't know very many low-energy consuming alternatives for them. Usually the graphics card is clocked quite low in systems that try to conserve power (e.g. HP Compaq nc6000), which, of course, impedes gaming performance.

newdawnguitar did you make sure that you downloaded the latest cpu driver, and it was running at the proper speed? Also I had a problem with one of the programs for the touchpad was using 99% of the cpu. As soon as I stopped that program from running and downloaded those drivers my G3 sped up alot.

I don't know what to say about the heat...I know it can make my left palm sweaty. If I return my G3 I am looking at the 4750.

Hey newdawnguitar let us know how your return goes. Mine went smoothly so hopefully you won't have any problems.

Hey Flyby, i don't think a cpu driver will work. The heat under the left palmrest is being caused by the hard drive. I'm not sure what else you can do to cool the notebook better. Maybe an external notebook cooler.

Best of luck to you guys. As for me i'm still waiting for a notebook to come out that suits me.

Rustican the cpu driver was for the slow speed. As soon as I dowloaded the driver and turned off that touchpad program my G3 flew through loading and using programs...before it would take literally an hour or more to load/unload a program. P!ssed me off more than anything. But it got fixed and I loved it.

I thought the heat was the gpu on the left, guess not. I'll have to look again when the new one arrives the beginning of next week. The heat and the loud fan will hopefully be fixed with a $30 cooler.

I also had a problem with my Mayhem PC. Sent it back due to issues with the BIOS. When the pc went into standby, I was unable to get it back without letting the battery run out completely!! Very weird. Called ABS tech support and they had me download a new bios and flash my drive.... great. After that the pC wouldnt even start! Hunk of junk. I now have an emachines 6809. I love this bad boy, playing doom3 right now and it plays pretty smooth!!

I'm still waiting for my tracking number. ABS said it got my RMA'd G3 already and it says on the order status webpage that it has been shipped, but I have yet to recieve any tracking info.

The RMA was smooth enough, but now I'm just waiting to see when the new one arrives. I'll see how the next 30 days goes...maybe something else will come out.

I am very happy with the AMD64 and wished Sager would put one in a system like the 5690, but it doesn't. If within the time limit I decide I don't like the Uniwill I plan on going with the 4750.

The only thing is I really like the WXGA. I know everyone likes the higher res of WSXGA, but I like how the 9700 is able to play everything at native res on very high detail with no slow down on 1280x800. Honestly I think the WSXGA might be too small for my use....which is only gaming and surfing the web. I'll figure it all out and sorry to hear about your bad experience with ABS, good thing we all didn't buy it from GamePC that doesn't have the 30 day money back guarantee.