Sager 9860 review - Page 7

This may be a stupid question, but humor me. How do you route the audio to the 9860 when using the TV tuner for either cable TV, XBOX, PS2 or whatever you use it for. The jack looks to me like a normal RCA video jack which doen't carry audio, and S-video doesn't carry audio. Am I missing something?

You can plug it into the Line-in or Mic input with an RCA to stereo-mini plug adapter if the 9860 doesn't have its own RCA input adapter.

How much of a pain is it to order the laptop without an OS installed and just install it yourself? Also do you run a higher risk of getting a bad machine since it hasn't had a OS installed and up and running already?

Intel says only the 925XE chipset supports the future 1066 FSB P4s, so far, according to every review I've read on the subject, which is quite a few. I'm doubting the 915P will support the EM64T P4s, either. The chipset pages don't mention the support anywhere, yet that support information is plastered all over the 925X chipset pages. The 915P is a value chipset, features were left out so that people would have to pay more for the more expensive chipset in order to get those features.

Edit: I'd love to be wrong on both counts, but I'm too familiar with Intel's business practices to believe these features are part of the 915P.

Summery and Inquiry

Greate review Adam, but please let me mention some things it hold me some of it where I coudn't get a clear answears from the reviews :

1- SATA vs PATA HD, you said that RAid 0 with SATA is faster, but if its one drive, SATA has high throughput and lower RPM and the PATA is the oposite so which one is faster , and is there a SATA drive with 7200RPM, and what is tha brand of the HD used in this notebook.

2- DDR2 RAM brand, Tom told me its brand is Apacer can i choose a corsair insted, and would that affect the price .. How much

3- WUXGA vs WSXGA+ LCD ... Glossy, why its not so glossy as the 8790 as we see in its reviews, Also is it worth to wait for the WUXGA is it glossy as 8790, what is the binifits from such scrern is it just the higher resolution and how much the price difference will be.

4- P4 EXtream and 64Bit Edition, No Extreme edition on SPU options, dose it mean that it dosn't support it, Also P4 64bit CPU is a nice issue mentioned in the reviews here but we didn't get a certain answear about it from Adam or Luke

5- Battery, become 12 cel and its still can hold for 1 hour, and the more strange thing that they insist mounting it by some screws insted of easy mounting way. I think most users for such thing will prefere to unmount the battery most of the time to reduce the weight and to extend its life time, or it shoud be mounted all the time even i use the AC power supply ??!

6- Video IN... dose it have a vedio IN, any info about capturing cabapilites.

7- Bluetooth , is not included in current orders,dose it and will be a available as separate upgrade in December. If that right, so I have to wait again, cause i'm In Cairo,Egypt. and I will pay more shipping to get it separatly

8- Floppy Drive , Its Not optional, that is strange, hope it become an optional item to save some moeny for more important items.

9- Alumenum Carrying case, Is there a hope to add an to the case options, Specially ZERO HALLIBURTON

10- Aleinware Area-51m 7700, any soon review about it.

As i'm new in assembled notebooks, could anybody tell me what is the realiton between Clevo, Sager, PCtourk who is the manufacture and the distributer where i found many other brands (Voodoo, Xotic and Prostar) have the exact chape and configuraiont of the Sager 9860, so how that come are all of them for one notebooke and each one just put his name, and how the Sager and clevo site itself don't have the 9860 although it has the Notebook name.

Finally, To sweet my review I invite all sager lovers to check Tomshardware review - who didn't check it yet - about the 9860 in http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/2...e_6800-20.html

Thanks for all friends here for this nice place and for your apreciated help.

Clevo is the ODM(original design manufactorer). Sager, Voodoo, Pctorque, ECT. are resellers of the laptop. The Sager 9860 is the same as the Voodoo, Prostar, ECT. The difference is the options that some of the resellers offer as in paint. PcTorque is one of the best resellers, and you can't go wrong with them.

All,

You showed pictures of Counterstrike Source, but I fail to see the benchmarks. I don't care about image quality if it's goign at 20 FPS. The only thing hinging me from throwing my desktop away for a laptop, is the ability to play Half Life 2 at a reasonable FPS (for me, that means 50+ at 800x600). Is this laptop capable? Is the Geforce GO included BETTER than the 9800 Mobile?

I'm sure most of you do'nt care about the benchmarks at it's native resolution, how the heck is the GPU going to keep up with 1600x1050 res? What is a downscaled resolution that's similar to 800x600 on a non-wide monitor? How does it look when it's not at native resolution?

The images in the review are from running at native resolution, they aren't what the benchmarks are. How are you running the games at 1024x768 benchmarking on a widescreen laptop? Does the image get stretched?

I do'nt see why people owuld care that the review shows pictures of 1600x1050 when that's not what is being benchmarked (do people care to plya at 10 FPS?) - lol.

Please tell me benchmarks for counterstrike source so I can suitably judge how Half Life 2 will play. I will just keep my PC and buy an X800XT if this thing is incapable (??).

I do'nt want to be playing HL2 at 800x600 with only 30 FPS...a big watse of money to me then!

Thanks,
ELmO

When using single drives, the higher RPM drive is faster.

You have to buy the laptop with its current RAM, then swap it out yourself. They don't get enough requests for different brands of RAM...I think.

They've said repeatedly that Intel claims this chipset supports their 64-bit CPUs, but they can't be absolutely certain until the 64-bit CPUs from Intel are released. It's not exactly a vague response.

If you're taking out the battery, then it's obviously hooked up, so what does the weight matter?

It's generally better to leave the battery in. These batteries seem to be good for a long time, and it's very useful being able to recover from a minor power fluctuation. Certainly you can take it out, and you can even allegedly use a coin as a screwdriver, but there's not much reason to.

If you select the TV tuner option, it has S-video in and an RCA jack. This is mentioned in the FAQ.

It's ~$30 and it's required for installing the OS.

They haven't changed their carrying case options in a while, but they may eventually do it. You could try ordering one separately.

Ask on the Alienware board.

Dear YuriSEAL, thanks for your time and your help replaying my inquires, but I didn't understand will the battery issue. I understand that taking off the batteries wil long its lifetime and also reduce the unit weight. am I rong.

Oh, yes. That'll help the battery last longer (in theory, at least) and will reduce the weight...

But if you plan to use the laptop away from an adapter, you'll need the battery. If you're using it at an adapter, you'll probably not need to move it. There's the possibility of moving from space to space, and you would see a difference then (probably ~2 pounds). However, failing that, there's not much actual benefit. These batteries seem to be extremely high quality and long life.

That works fine for an XBOX or similar that actually has an audio RCA cable, but what about a coaxial TV cable that carries both audio and video and is being converted to just RCA video?

So you can't boot off the optical drives? Isn't that a throw back to the dark ages?

From what I was told by PCTorque the 915p being same architecture should have the capabilities to support those processors, yes Intel doesn't state it specifically (perhaps to get people to buy the 925x just to feel safe) but hopefully the features they left out of the 915p aren't those that support of the 1066 FSB or the EM64T's, but I guess we won't know for sure until the chips are actually available and they can test it out. . . I'm fairly confident about the support for 1066 FSB (again with my 533 Ram theory), but less confident about the 64bit chips. Guess we'll find out for sure when those chips come out

You can boot from the CD but inorder to load windows you WILL need to load the promise raid controller drivers first.(from the floppy disk) This is only in effect if you have the raid configuration.

No, that's not true, floppy is only required if you're installing with RAID. You still boot from the CDRom, but if you're installing RAID you have to load the RAID drivers from floppy during install. It IS fault of the Windows install I hope they remedy soon, you should at least be able to swap in a cd, but you can ONLY do it with a floppy for now, unless you burn you're own customized coppy of a Windows install which is way more trouble than just sticking in a floppy (unless you have a bunch computers you are installing instead of just one laptop.)

Ah... makes sense now. Thanks for clearing that up for me guys!

How quickly do you guys think this thing will end up on backorder. I am awaiting the last couple hundred this week to order and would really hate to end up on a weeks long backorder list.

I wouldn't doubt if its already in back order status.

Read the review - you plug your coax adaptor into the NTSC-looking port, and then plug your coaxial cable into the adaptor.

Throughout the thread some questions were asked about the speed of the GPU, including one of my own. But none of them were addressed. I don't know if they were intentionaly left unanswered (because of NDA's or lack of info) or mistakingly overlooked. Either way, if this post goes unnoticed, I think it'll be pretty obvious its the former and not the latter .

Someone asked whether the Go 6800 could be clocked to 450/600 or not. I'd just like to clarify something. The current GPU in the 9860 uses DDR1 memory and has a core speed of 250 MHz (Nvidia says 300 MHz but it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer) and memory clocked at 300 MHz (600 MHz effective due to the nature of DDR memory - this is the number in the PCT review). However, there is another nvidia GPU (supposedly with the same name) that uses DDR3 memory with core and memory stocked at 450 MHz and 600 MHz (1200 MHz effective) respectively.

So, going back to the first statement, it is probably not possible and actually harmful to clock the current GPU to any where near 450 MHz. Traditionally, I would think a 200 MHz overclock on a processor stocked at 250 MHz without any external cooling is not very smart, but I could be wrong.

Nonetheless, the point here is that I doubt u can overclock the current Go 6800 to 450/600 speeds, so what I wanna know is when is this other Go 6800 stocked at 450/600 GPU gonna be available? Is Nvidia holding it back to fight the M28? If the new Go 6800 is gonna be available, can anyone who buys the 9860 with the current Go 6800 upgrade to the new one later? Is the upgrade even possible considering the new module is rumored to have higher power requirements (60W estimated) and, inherently, higher thermal requirements? Or is it really possible to overclock the current GPU to 450/600 without any harm done to the chip itself? If u guys are on an NDA or just don't know, please lemme know that. Also, any dates when more info will be available are always appreciated.

BTW, I am sorry to get caught up in semantics, but with regard to the whole hybrid MXM/AXIOM modules for the GPU, I believe it was Luke who said that this technology was developed by "Sager/Clevo". Are u saying that this technology was a created by Sager and Clevo together and is only available in Sager notebooks? Or is it available in all other Clevo-based notebooks, from the likes of say, Eurocom, Alienware, Voodoo and all the other big time resellers? Again I apologize for being so precise about this, but having the freedom to upgrade to either IHV's GPU is a very important feature to me and I need to know how limited my options are. Thanx.