5680 Comments/Review

Everyone,

Well I finally got my 5680 yesterday at about 9:55AM EST. I ordered it on 8-19, but the place where I purchased told me that my order went through on 8-20. I was told that I was between 10 and 20 on the 'big' list and I did order overnight shipping. From what I read last night, it sounds like Sager is now at their expected shipping numbers/day.

Here is what I ordered:

Sager NP5680 FORCE
15" UXGA "WideAngles" TFT Active Matrix w/ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO w/128MB DDR,
3.2GHz Hyper-Threading Intel Pentium® 4 Processor w/512k L2 Cache - 800MHz System Bus Speed,
60GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive at 7,200 RPM,
Secondary Hard Drive Bracket,
1,024MB (2 SODIMMS) PC3200 DDR400 Memory,
Combo 8X DVD/24x10x24 CD-RW w/Softwares,
NO Second ROM Drive for Modular Bay:,
3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive - Swappable in Modular Bay,
Built-in IEEE 1394 (Firewire),
Built-in 56k V.90 Modem,
Built-in 10/100/1000BaseT Ethernet LAN w/RJ-45 Jack,
Built-in 802.11b Wirless LAN,
NO Bluetooth Wireless,
USB 6-in-1 Memory Card Reader w/64MB built-in,
Smart Li-ion Battery,
Secondary Smart Lithium-ion Battery for Modular Bay,
No Windows Operating System,
Free 3-CD Bundle - $389 Value,
NO Microsoft Office XP Software:,
Full Range Auto Switching AC Adapter,
NO Car Adapter:,
NO Port Replicator:,
NO External Numeric Keypad:,
Standard Carrying Case,
1-Year Parts and Labor, Lifetime Telephone Technical Support

Let me start off with my complaints/neqative comments and get those out of the way. First, the big one for me, is a red hot pixel that appears to be right outside of the warranty zone. I haven't measured it yet, but it's so close that I have to measure it. This is a big deal to me and I'm not sure what I want to do about it yet. I waited so long to get my lappy, I want to enjoy it for a while before deciding. The good news is this won't be an issue for the rest of you 5680 owners, hopefully. The 6in1 card reader is not one that plugs into the smart bay, matching the notebook. It is an off the shelf USB one made by Apacer. I expected to get one that mathed the computer exterior and plugged into the smart bay, especially for the price. I think it was $40. Also, the manual even shows one that matches the exterior of the lappy and plugs into the smart bay. My last complaint (more of a comment) is the DVD/CD-RW drive seems rather slow when loading programs.

My inital impressions of the notebook are all good. The computer was well protected in the packaging. Opening the first box lead to a second which held the lappy in a couple strucutural foam pieces. Another smaller box contained the manual, CD's, etc. on one side of the computer and the free case was on the other. There was a clear LCD protector and a sticker on the lid stating 'Fragile...'. The power brick is pretty big, but not overwhelming. Once WXP was installed (read below) I noticed how nice the UXGA LCD is. Very nice!

Here is a link to different resolutions on the UXGA LCD. BTW, I thought they all looked great.

800x600
1024x768
1280x1024
1600x1200

Here are a couple images that show how nice this LCD is (yes those are my daughters).

LCD1
LCD2

I ordered mine without an OS so I created one large partition, loaded WXP-Pro then used Partition Magic to repartition the drive afterwards. I tried to partition it first, but WXP would not load on any of the partitions. I resized the OS partition to 5GB, created a 2GB swap partition and moved it in front of the OS partition. I did this for performance reasons and it is the first time I tried to do this. It works fine. Following the OS partition I created a 10GB programs partition, 25GB work files partition and about a 15GB games partition. I will likely resize the games partition later on and load Linux. So far so good. After all of the partition changes, I started loading the drivers in the order that is stated in the manual. This went very smoothly until I got to the NIC drivers. The Realtek RTL8139 was not listed in the adapters in the Device Manager. I selected Ethernet Contoller, which had one of those yellow icons showing that it was not installed properly, and selected update driver then pointed it to the correct driver on the CD. I went through a similar process with the wireless NIC, selecting Network Adapter and updating the driver. So not a big deal here and Windows was up and running with a clean install. The wired and wireless NIC's where both easy to connect to my network and both work great even when connected at the same time. The wired NIC takes precendence over the wireless which is great for obvious reasons. One issue I was concerned about is I have some software that uses a license manager (FlexLM) to float license which is configured using the MAC address of the NIC. In the past I have had problems with one NIC being loaded by Windows before the other and the license manager would fail because it looks at the first one that gets loaded. I have not had this issue so far. Another big positive for me.

I loaded all of my programs and several games without any problems and everything runs without a hitch. I am very impressed by the overall speed of this notebook. The processor, HD and video are all fast. There's no doubt that this is a desktop replacement. I ran a few benchmarks just to make sure my machine was on par with the 8890's and it is as far as the games are concerned. However, when I ran the Spec7.1 Proe (Pro/ENGINEER, solid modeling) benchmark it didn't score as well as I had hoped. That being said, it is definitely fast and I am comparing it to the Quadro FX Go 700 spec listed on Nvidias site. It scored a 23.5 (according to Nvidia) and my Sager scored a 13.8. Now I know this isn't an apples to apples comparison as the FX card is optimized for OpenGL. Also, I have a friend who has a new Dell M60 with this card in it and in the real world, my Sager will hold its own against the Dell with this program. I'm anxious to put them side by side. Here is a link to a low res movie of part of the Spec7.1 Proe benchmark.

I took a couple pictures with the standard unit of measure (CD cases), that I saw on another post, to give you an idea of the size. Here they are (sorry about the bluriness)

Top view
Side view

I tested the primary battery last night and it appears that I'll get just over an hour watching a DVD. I will be testing the dual battery life soon. Well that's about it for the first day. I'm enjoying this lappy so far and if it wasn't for the bad pixel, I'd be elated. I'm still happy with my purchase and look foward to trying out some more programs and games today.

Best of luck with your new Sager!

Yeah, that pixel is a real bummer for me.

BTW, I forgot to mention the reason I included the Spec7.1 video. The car model that is used for the benchmark is the model of a real car. These models were used to create the tooling, etc. to make the parts for that car. Every single part of the car exists in the assembly except for some bolts and washers. I thought it was pretty impressive at how well the 5680 was able to rotate, pan and zoom a true 3D model of a real car.

Well, I tried, but wasn't able to get a good enought picture to see it. I admit it is very small, but it is quite noticable. It's in the lower right region of the upper left area on the #. It pretty much stares right at you. If it were in one of the extreme corners of the LCD, I wouldn't mind it at all.

Well this is my first Sager and I haven't heard a 8890 yet. I think the fan noise is fine. It's not to loud and near as loud as my Dell 8100 when it kicks in. And I don't notice a high pitch noise.

Woops! See below.

So far I have tried both drivers on the CD. The Beta rev gives me a little better numbers in the game benchmarks, but not the Spec7.1 benchmark. Here is the what I get:

-----------------Beta------- WHQL
3DMark 2001.......10,500+......10,300+
Spec7.1 Proe.......10.7.............13.8

I am going to try the new drivers next and use whichever scores better in the Spec7.1 benchmark.

Has anybody had good luck with any other drivers?

First I tried to load the 3.7 drivers from ATI's site. I couldn't get them to load. I was able to get the Omega drivers to load. They showed similar results in the benchmarks to the WHQL driver and I noticed my hard drive was running sporadically which slowed things down quite a bit, even selecting programs from the start menu would stall for a second or two. I uninstalled those drivers and I'm back to normal now. I'd be interested in hearing what others have tried.

Thanks gsferrari. That worked like a charm. The only thing I had to do that wasn't in your list is browse to the \Driver\2KXP_INF dir and select the CX_10735.inf file after step #9.

I'll test these out a little and see how well they work on the 5680.

Also, I have not seen ATI's POWERPLAY in any of the drivers that I've loaded. Am I missing something? Do I need to download it seperately? Is it worth using?