Sager 9860 slowdown on battery

yes and unlike the 8890 there is no setting in bios setup to disable the downthrottling of the cpu

It's not only slower than the 8790 on battery power it's slower than the last five laptops I've owned over the past four years - and that's when the CPU/GPU scaling ISN'T turned on, I don't think it has anything to do with the GeForce 6800 Go though, as for an X800 based Centrino laptop it may happen but they're really designed for two different markets at the moment - so we may not see something like this for quite a while (by which time the X800 will probably be superceded).

Even the new 2.1GHz Centrinos are still a fair bit slower than a 3.6GHz Prescott P4 - especially when it comes to audio/video encoding, 3D rendering or some other equally FPU/Memory intensive application, as for games - once again the 3.6GHz P4 is still notably faster. The Centrino is built for maximum battery life and as such is used almost without exception in smaller systems no larger than 15.4" widescreen - at the moment these systems (with the possible exception of the DELL 9100/XPS) have neither the space, the power nor the cooling capacity to support PCIe based GPUs.

well, it isnt really a notebook (not with 13lbs) its more a desktop replacement. but i agree competely with andre, i dont think it has nothing to do with the gforce. also they are geared for different markets. i never noticed the battery prob before since mine is all the time on ac or car adapter. but running some tests i got similar results. got to say it s*cks.

Actually a 2.0 Ghz Dothan is pretty close to a 3.6 Ghz Prescott in gaming when things are equalized out. Granted you can't get the better video cards with the Dothan which is annoying as that's the processor I want. Would be better for travelling and watching movies/playing games while on the plane.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...ngaming&page=4

You guys have to remember it is a DTR. A power hungry DRT that with all its downclocking still barely pulls one hour of battery life. I bet if it stayed on full throttle your battery life will be complete crap... I mean what is the point at running full speed for 15 or 20 minutes? Sorry guys it seems you can't have both. If you want desktop GPU power this is your notebook.. if you want battery life it is not..

Intel Speed stepping is horrible. It just locks you at half the clock speed of the chip regardless. Similar to the old P4-mobile chips. The user had no control on the power management of the chip. Intel should have taken a page out of AMD's book and implemented PowerNow which allows the CPU to throttle inself according to the load placed upon it.

Actually. I only plan on using my battery as an uninterruptable power supply. If the power goes out I could have 15 minutes or so of battery life on full power before I needed to finish up what I was doing and shut down. So I would prefer that the power did not step down. I am never going to use this system on the road without the AC adapter, be it a normal outlet or in the car, especially not as a totally gimped machine with a measely one hour of battery life if I am lucky. Perhaps Sager/Clevo did not foresee the battery being used in this manner.

Cheers!

Same cpu but thats all thats the same..isn't the power requirement lower already for the 8790 compared to the 9860?

Yes but not by much, the 9860 uses a 180Watt power adapter whereas the 8790 uses a 150Watt adapter (which is a 16% difference in output), this difference is reflected in the life of the battery - in PCTorque's own testing the 8790 lasted for 92mins playing a DVD on it's 12-cell 6600mAH battery whereas the 9860 lasted for 66mins (with the same size battery) which is a difference of 28% - so the 9860 is drawing roughly 25% more power than the 8790 which is relatively consistent with the different power outputs of their respective power adapters. The problem is that the 9860 runs upto 80% slower than the 8790 when running on battery power even though they both run down the battery at about the same speed relative to their respective AC power consumption.

Unplug the 8790 from the mains while running and it'll continue to run at the EXACT SAME speed for upto an hour before the battery runs flat, unplug the 9860 from the mains and it'll run for less than an hour and at 50-80% less performance than the 8790 - this is with NO APPARENT CPU/FSB scaling taking place. What I'm saying is that this looks like a MAJOR MAJOR design/manufacturing FAULT, a flaw - something that can't be explained by a difference in power consumption or CPU/FSB scaling since none appears to be taking place.

Ahhh..ok that makes sense.. when i went on battery..eq2 was completely unplayable..it was so jerky and choppy I restarted the system not realizing at the time my power cord had came unplugged.

why isn't there a setting in the bios to disable this downthrottling? the 8890 has this, and was and is a dtr also. 3 7200 rpm drives, 2 gig ram, p4 3.06, 800 fsb, etc. Is it possible for sager to upgrade the bios to allow this?

That's almost besides the point because this performance degradation is happening even when the BIOS enabled CPU scaling/throttling ISN'T happening. You have to BOOT off battery to enable the BIOS CPU/FSB scaling, but even if you don't and even if it's still running at 3.6GHz CPU/800MHz FSB AFTER you've unplugged the power (which is what happens if you unplug after booting on AC power) - the 9860 runs DOOOG slow.

dosent Nvidia have battery display settings downclocker like ati's powerplay?

why and how is that happening? seems like the sort of thing that could be controlled or disabled