Gaau Si's Evolving 3790 Review

My 3790 arrived not less than 20 minutes ago to my doorstep. Sadly, I will never ship via UPS again. They dropped it and left, without asking for a signature. What if I hadn't been home? A spiffy looking Sager notebook box, which is basically what the BOLD text on the packaging suggests is in the box, is surely ripe for a passing pedestrian to snatch up. On top of that, I received the laptop 3 days after I should have, given the two day airshipping I ordered. It should have arrived Saturday but, apparently, UPS didn't want to ship it the last two hours from their air depot to my door. I don't blame this on Sager or PCTorque. It's UPS' fault.

First Impressions

Sexy design and big, beautiful screen. Sadly, my display has two stuck pixels. The laptop weighs roughly as much as my old Compaq 2800T so I'm happy about that. It's thinner than the Compaq if you don't factor in the 3790's peg legs. Build quality is not great but OK. Creaking sounds come out from the right palmrest area when you put any pressure there, like while typing. There's no spring in the left panel clamp but the right one works fine. I can still lock the lid closed by manually pushing the clamp in place. It's just annoying. When the fans come on you can hear them. A bit louder than my 2800T and my mother's Sony Vaio 505DX.

**Update**
I'm a dork. There's not supposed to be a spring in the left latch. It's used to lock the lid closed. Duh.



The machine is formatting the HDD right now. For a 7200 RPM drive it's super quiet. I can't even hear it. The Hitachi 7200 RPM is like a whisper compared to the roar of the 4500 RPM drive in my Compaq. I'll add more as soon as I get the OS and drivers in. Also post some benches. I can do some pics but they'll be low quality from an 8mm camcorder.

I'm debating whether or not to send this laptop back, seeing as I have a very low tolerance for stuck/dead pixels. I can live with the creaking chassis and springless left latch. But considering the huge backorder of this model I'm still undecided. Maybe some CoH/Doom 3/Far Cry time on this thing will change my mind.

Bah. I don't know if I'm being really picky or if this is just how the laptop is. But when I lightly pinch the LCD panel between my thumb and finger there's some distortion on the upper left portion of the display. It also occurs when I lightly poke the back of the lid with a finger. And it only appears in that specific part of the screen. This worries me because the laptop will travel inside a JanSport Lapstation backpack. I'm sure some amount of pressure will be placed on the LCD lid when in there. So much for the WSXGA not having a poking issue. I'll post some vid caps shortly.

Rather than post pics I've made a MPG video comparing the displays of my 2800T and 3790. You can also see the poking issue towards the end of the video, where the 3790 has the black wallpaper. Here's the link

Second Impressions

Still in the process of installing software. Drivers went in without a problem. Windows XP had some problems managing the WiFi network so I opted to use Intel's ProWireless client instead. The display is absolutely stunning. With my wallpaper up, one of the dead pixels is completey concealed while the second one is barely noticeable. This is evident in the video.

The palmrest tends to get a little warm. I expected as much with the 7200 RPM drive and 1.8 Dothan. The Hitachi is a definite improvement over my Compaq's old 4200 RPM drive. The combo drive is loud but not loud enough to be annoying.

The input devices are pretty good. The touchpad is very responsive. I wish there were larger buttons for the touchpad. They're a little too small for my taste. I'll eventually get used to it. Keyboard is fairly tactile. There is some keyboard flex, but there was flex on my old lappy as well. Haven't missed a key except for the arrow keys. Placement is a little off the beaten path. I'll get used to that, too. I'll post more when I have everything running smothly.

The only thing bugging me at this point is the poking issue. Hopefully I can get someone at PCTorque to check out the vid when I send them an e-mail. I think it'll be covered under warranty if it turns into a problem.

Fixed the link! Sorry about that.

Also note that the MPEG is about 45 megs. It might take a few minutes to download.

Disabling the download till it's up on a T1 line. Should be done within the hour. Encoding is whatever the default MPEG encoder is for Pinnacle Studio 8.0. ;P

It's actually not that long. Maybe a few minutes. But the resolution is around 460x460. Wanted to get it as large as I could for quality. It looks pretty good on my system so don't why it doesn't look so hot for others.

Note: Upload is back up on a faster connection.

Benchies

Here is a becnhmark result with all the included drivers.

3DMark 2003: 3154

Tests were done at 1024x768 at default program settings. Not too bad. I'll see if I can get a bit higher with newer drivers. Not a priority though.

Also, those who've seen the video, did you notice the ripple/distortion in the top left corner of the display when I lightly pinched/poked? It tends to distort the same way if I use that area to hold on to when closing/opening the laptop. I guess we'll see if things get worse after carrying it around campus in my backpack.

The stuck pixels aren't as noticable on colored backgrounds. On dark wallpapers they stand out a lot. I figure the LCD will have to be replaced eventually if the poking thing develops into a problem so I'm not too worried about the pixels right now.