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Well, here it is. Almost a month after I purchased a brand spanking new 4750 I am ready to report on what my experiences have been so far with this new unit.

First of all, I would like to thank all those that have purchased the 4750 models over the past year. Their experiences and feedback in this forum helped me choose this notebook to begin with. Thank you.

Second, I would like explain why I decided to purchase this notebook so that I can make it clear to anyone considering a similar purchase why you should or should not purchase a machine like this.

Over the last 20 years (give or take 1) I’ve had luggables, portables, laptops and notebooks as my mobile business platform. In every unit I’ve had, concessions had to be made either in performance or mobility. In the last year I was up for a platform renewal since the ThinkPad T42 (Centrino) was hardly the machine I needed. Don’t get me wrong this Thinkpad is a great machine for folks who run basic productivity applications such as Office and similar software. In my line of work, the Centrino got hot and noisy under load and still did not offer the computing muscle I needed.

In simple terms I needed a machine that could run CAD/CAM Apps (Multisim 7, Autocad and Microstation), VMWare professional as well as Virtual PC, and Visual Studio .NET.
Support for 64 Bit Windows XP, Server 2003 64 bit, and Linux FC x64 is also mandatory. As you might have guessed, my options were reduced to a very small set of contenders. Upon reading several reviews on the available models I settled on the Sager 4750. After reading a little more, I identified the re-seller I was going to buy from: PC Torque !!

Anyway, on July 28, 2005 I placed the order and received the machine roughly 1.5 weeks later.

Three days after I got the new unit, it failed. It would not even power up. The prompt response from the PCT and Sager folks enabled the machine to be RMA’d and delivered to me 9 days later. Obviously, I’ve had this new machine for much less than a full month, but given the stress I’ve given it, I feel that perhaps I may have broken it in well enough to write this review.

The Sager 4750 is manufactured in two form factors (A) and (B). The model A appears to be a smaller footprint notebook and will obviously have a smaller screen as well as fewer installable options. I opted for the Model B, which I configured as a desktop replacement:

Athlon 64 (Clawhammer) 3700+
17inch (1680x1050 to a max of 2048x1536, plus external display)
2 GB DDR 400 RAM
60 GB 7200 rpm HD + External (250 GB USB drive + 160 GB Firewire Drive)
ATI 9700 mobility (supports the full Open GL extension for CAD and rendering)
DVD writer, Firewire interface, and WiFi with support for b and g protocols.




My apologies for the dust on the screen. I know... it looks bad!



When I first opened the box delivered by UPS, I noticed the notebook securely packaged in a foam cradle. In a separate compartment in this cradle I found the cables and adapters along with the software and user’s manual. The Notebook itself was clean, without any scratches underneath the protective plastic coating. This plastic coating was very easy to peel off and left no residue to clean.

I had ordered the unit without an operating system since I had those already (Windows XP 32 bit and 64 bit). So I proceed to installing Windows XP 32 bit and partitioned the internal hard-drive to also accommodate Windows XP 64 bit via dual boot. Later that day I managed to install a second set of bootable partitions for both XP32 and XP64 on my external Fire-wire HD (more on this later).

When I finished installing the available drivers for XP32 I was simply amazed by the shear perfection of this screen. I have never seen a screen with such clarity and color fidelity. Also no dead pixels so far- None !!!

Folks, this is the speed demon I was looking for. I am no stranger to Norwood and Prescott P4’s as I have 2 of these. I also had through the years many AMD K6, K7’s and K8 – but this one ranks right up there. This is my first true desktop replacement. For those wanting to gauge its relative performance here are some benchmarks:

SuperPI – 38 seconds
Aquamark – 38162
3DMark 2001 – 15102
3DMark 2003 – 4399
3DMark 2005 – 2097
POV Ray 32 bit- 27 minutes 11 seconds
POV Ray 64 bit- 21 minutes 41 seconds

Now, if you look carefully at the native 64 bit version of POV - that should be an indicator of what to expect from Windows 64bit. The same benchmark was faster in 64 bit by almost 6 minutes!

As I said before this is the best Desktop replacement notebook I’ve had but it is not without compromises. Since I required a machine that emphasized performance over mobility I accepted the weight, size and battery considerations. However, compared to some of the HP DTR notebooks my colleagues have, the Sager in not only more elegant but also smaller. So I feel pretty good about it. If I needed mobility as much as I need performance I would be better off looking elsewhere.

One other annoyance is the fact that this notebook is noisy. For instance, when powering the unit up, the fans spool up and then slow down to a still aggressive rpm. The rpm of these fan increases as the unit is under load and then returns to its idle (still noisy) level.
I took the internal and external temperature (with a laser meter) of the notebook and found it to be very reasonable 34 to 42 when idling, but the fans always remain with a persistently high rpm.
Mobile meter never records less than 49 degrees (Celsius) when idling and under load it will reach as much as 78 !! This of course after deploying and configuring Windows XP32 with RMClock and CrystalCPUID in XP64 bit!


My current Voltage and CPU stepping mods:





After playing Doom 3 (or BF2) for 40 minutes my left hand felt very uncomfortable and I started looking for ways to cool this beast. Lifting this unit was not enough so I tried locating 17 inch notebook coolers. The only one I had found was produced by Bytecc but was not sold in my location and the folks that manufacture it did not answer my calls. Well, before I got frustrated I decided to design and produce my own. You can see several photos of it below.

This is still an unfinished prototype. I expect my next version to be better looking and perhaps more compact as well.




The cooler is not as small as some of the commercial ones, but unlike most I can control the fan speed via a small 300mA variable AC adapter that provides voltages between 3 and 12 Volts. Additionally, I can power the unit with the USB port but, I fear that it would worsen the heat issues within the notebook itself so I prefer an external power source. One other thing I like about this cooler – It helps cancel the noise produced by the notebook’s built-in fans. At 6 volts the cooler’s fans are still inaudible and the foam the notebook rests on actually helps to greatly reduce the noise. Additionally this cooler helped lower the Hard drive temps from 56 degrees to 33 ! The CPU temps showed less of an improvement under load by providing a reduction of only 6 degrees at best. The cooler’s fans are directly under the notebook intake fans (just off the dead zone).

All in all, not too bad. I get cooling and sound deadening action out of something that took under two hours to make and can be carried in my wheeled laptop carrying bag.

I still would like Sager to provide people with the means to control the fan speed or at least change the rpm trigger points. I noticed that the CPU temps reported by the internal diode (using mobile meter) are exaggerated and I believe that this may be responsible for the aggressive Fan rpm. I also believe that Sager did this intentionally, but heck barring an alternative, I may as well be deaf unless they fix this.

As some folks have already mentioned, the 4750 platform could use a better thermal design especially when paired with a 3700 ClawHammer. For now, this is a very capable machine that out-muscles most of the contenders I laid eyes on.



The GPU could definitely be better, but that is only something I would miss if I had the time to be a full fledged gamer. I mostly needed the graphical feature set under OpenGL but still - the "modest" fps prowess of the 9700 more than fits the bill.



The sound no matter how good, can only be enjoyed with a good set of headphones. The six built in speakers are betrayed by the consistent noise of the notebook’s fans. Overall, with headphones, I noticed little distortion and good spatial integrity.

The Hard disk speed parallels the performance of a common 2MB cache 7200 rpm desktop drive (measured with HDTach and Sandra). While this is measurably better than most slower notebook HD drives it still pales when compared to the external hard disk (WD) running on the firewire interface.

The WiFi module has good selectivity and sensitivity and I’ve had consistent good performance from it at more than 50 meters.

The built-in camera is a BIG plus. I was amazed at the quality of it. At first I would swear I was looking at a CCD camera but I know that this is actually a CMOS camera. In the past I had to carry a USB Logitech camera with me. Now the whole thing is buit-in! Nice, very nice !



Battery time. – Well, I don’t really care about it since to me the battery is nothing more than a smart UPS. Very handy indeed especially when there’s a power failure on the grid. As a result I have not tested it. My colleagues are getting roughly 1-1.5 hours out of their 3.6 GHz P4’s and I believe I could do marginally better than them but that’ is it.

Now the stars of the show for me - in my line of work is the CPU and memory. I would call this brute and raw power on demand and this notebook delivers. It now takes much less time than it did before when rendering, simulating and compiling. This is just what I needed and to me this is desktop performance in a small attractive package.



And this concludes a quick review on this 4750 unit. I bought a 3 year warranty with it and yes, I expect it to last that long. Maybe when Clevo/Sager releases a new BIOS supporting the Turion I'll upgrade the CPU. Until then, this is going to be the main "barn burner" on my desk at the office.


Regards and thanks for reading.

WOW at the performance! That is just huuugh 3DMark scores for a MR9700 notebook!!! Just incredible. Beats any X600 notebook, and several 6600 GO and X700 notebooks reviewed only got like 1900 in 3DMark05. Makes me want to get one maxed out like that!

Nice review.

Maybe I will purchase these 4750V with 3700+ 60GB7200 DVDCombo for second pc,
will have it for programation. Anyonne can give me the results of PCMARK04 and sisoft Sandra 2004 for fpu ( graphics don't interest me a lot, but compiling and programmong of course, 12 hours/day)

thanks a lot

From my personal experience, this has been a rock solid machine thus far.
It just flies through a dev environment (Studio .NET) especially when compiling large projects so I believe this unit is a pretty good fit as a developer's machine (especially with an Intel x86 compiler/assembler ).

I don't have PCMark or Sandra 2004 but I do have the scores for Sandra 2005.

ALU=10300
FPU=3810
SSE2=4990

Best regards;

MS

great
Thanks a lot for the quick response

regards

Emmanuel

M Santos,

What drivers are you using for your 4750? I've been trying to upgrade mine to the latest Catalysts or Omegas and I get weird vertical lines on the screen.

Besides this issue, I love my 4750.

Jon

In terms of Video drivers I am using the ATI catalysts 5.8 for Windows XP 32bit and ATI catalyst 5.9 for XP 64 bit. In both OS's I use ATItool to keep the GPU and memory rates downclocked to 200/166 until a 3D app is detected.

I would sugest you remove your existing driver set and remove any registry references and files belonging to to those drivers. The Driver Cleanup utility will do that just fine. Then re-install the ATI or Omega drivers of your choice. I found that under XP32 the catalyst 5.8 are the most stable as they are less likely to induce artifacting at higher clock rates (go figure).

Best regards;

MS

Thanks MS,
I've been trying to load the Catalyst 5.9 drivers and those ones aren't working. I'll try to get the 5.8 ones.

Thanks again,

Jon

im wanting to buy a sager and install linux on it, but im not really sure what kind of compatibility i can expect. How were your experiences with fedora(specifically with the webcam, sound, keyboard/touchpad, power management)?

Thanks. Nice review BTW.

Well, I never succeeded in installing Linux FC4 on the notebook will all the devices operational. On my attempts, some devices were picked up and some that were not simply had drivers on the web for them. But in the end, I still did not manage to get the camera operating. So I decided to install and run FC4 on a VMWare virtual machine, which by the way, resolved all my driver concerns under linux.

Best regards;

MS

is it difficult to remove the heatsink to clean it from the dust? cause my 4750 is idle @ 67C when i play COD2 or BF2 it reaches 75C easily and so exceeds CPU threshold

No, it is not difficult. But you do not need to remove the heatsink. Just buy a can of compressed air from a local stationary or computer store and blow some bursts of air through the vent ports to help dislodge the dust within. That should help a great deal. Have a vaccumm working nearby to ensure that the exiting dust gets caught and put away.

However to really do a good job you may need to open the computer. Please see an example of how to open the unit.

Regards;

MS

Great Review

sorry