I am trying to help a friend pick between these beasts and am curious as to which has louder fans (both with a 8800M GTX)? And does anyone have the 1680x1050 LCD? We're leaning towards it primarily to save the GPU from having to push 1920x1200. I have a 8800GTX desktop card and even with that much faster product I sometimes wish that I didn't have to push it at 1920x1200.

And, how do video drivers work for laptops these days? I have been very pissed off about how my 7800 GTX in my laptop hasn't seen a new official driver since 2006. Until recently, the hacked laptopvideo2go drivers haven't worked right on it. So for a long while I was stuck with very old drivers.

Any other impressions are certainly welcome too. Disappointments and things that impressed you.

The 9262 is louder because it has more fans then the 5792. The 9262 has four fans and the 5792 has two. The major difference in these two models is that the 9262 has the ability to have dual graphic cards and up to three hard drives where as the 5792 can only hold one graphic card and one hard drive. All of the drivers for these notebooks are available to be downloaded from Sager's website www.SagerNotebook.com. If I can be of further assistance please contact me at 1-800-346-6986 or Steven@PCTorque.com.

I have a fairly similar Dell 9300 and I just ordered a 5973 with a T9300 and 8800M GTX. My desktop uses a 8800 GTS 512MB overclocked quite a bit. If you want, I can keep you updated as to the difference between the new and old notebooks.

I'll have to disagree with you on this. My friend has a M570RU and I have the D901C. With full fans on both units (with the new M570RU fan upgrade installed also) his unit is louder than my D901C. It is a much more of a higher pitched whine than my unit. With fans on auto for both units (and just normal web browsing etc) I can't tell a difference. The D901C is fairly quite machine as is the M570RU.

IMHO 1920x1200 is too high for a 17" screen. I have the 1680x1050 version on my NP9860 and the text size is on the verge of being too small as it is. Since you're probably not going to want to play 3d games at 1920, the only real advantage I see is for 1080p playback.

Since Nvidia does not maintain drivers for their mobile GPU's (probably because companies like Sager chose to proprietize thier GPU's), you are left to rely on the manufacturers for driver support; Sager aint to great in that department. Fortunately lv2g, nbf mobileforce, and maybe a few others are around making modified inf's and drivers. I've also had some luck in using modded inf's with Nvidia's unified drivers.

I don't recommend purchasing a Sager seeing as how the price advantage they used to have has disappeared and the more reliable and better supported larger vendors offer performance DTR's as well now. In fact, by far the best deal right now on a gaming notebook is the Gateway P-6831FX which is currently on sale at Best Buy.

Well first off, as you said, 1920x1200 is too high *in your opinion*. The best way for someone who hasn't tried it to see it, is to go to a computer store like Frys or Best Buy and see some 1920x1200 17" screens. It will be up to the individual to decide. Heck, I used to use a 1920x1200 15.4" screen and I had no problems with it.

I wasn't aware Sager tinkered with the video card at all. The nVidia Forceware drivers have a static list of the models they support, which they identify by ID. nVidia purposely doesn't include the IDs for their laptop chips in their drivers, although they leave every other piece needed for laptops, such as power management. The Forceware drivers even have a "Mobile" section for just laptops. The "hacked INF" drivers add the IDs and whatever else is needed to nv_disp.inf to properly identify the chipsets, but the rest of the laptop infrastructure support is already in the drivers.

The Gateway laptop you mention here seems to *only* come in this one configuration. Sager doesn't even offer a processor that low in their gaming notebooks, nor a screen with that low a resolution. From one perspective Sager doesn't have the "price advantage" but on the other, Gateway doesn't offer enough (ie. any) customization to suit someone's specific needs. If you want a faster processor, get ready to insta-void the warranty, and bend over, because laptop processors aren't exactly cheap.

Sager's ODM is Clevo; Clevo makes the GPU's which are based upon Nvidia's MXM standard, but not identical to it. Sager provides the drivers and BIOS which, if I am not mistaken, are based on Clevo's offerings. This is why you can't go out and get any old MXM replacement GPU an use stock Nvidia drivers for it. Instead, you have to go to Sager for both the GPU and driver upgrades. Moreover, with Sager, it is often the case that in order to upgrade your video card, you also have to upgrade your motherboard and BIOS.

My understanding was that "Forceware" is the name Nvidia gave to the drivers it develops for it's Nforce desktop chipset. I don't think Nvidia makes an I/O chipset for mobile computers, so I find it interesting that they would include hw id's for mobile GPU's in their Forceware drivers (which are different from their GPU only drivers).

I wondered about this myself, but I wasn't sure exactly what the modders tweaked since they often develop different driver versions for which they claim that they have tweaked the drivers for performace and/or quality. Moreover, they don't just provide a modded inf and link to Nvidia stock drivers, rather they provide their own inf *and* driver downloads.

I don't know of any laptops sold at retail for which the store supports upgrading the CPU. However, considering Sager doesn't sell in the retail channel and Gateway also sells configurable machines online, I suppose it's a mute point.

The example I gave is an exceptional value. GPU and RAM are the two most important components for gaming performance and for $1299 you could get the store version which is top notch in both categaories for what I'd guess is at least $1000 less than what you would pay for an equivalent Sager DTR.

I'm not sure gaming DTR's have the lifespan necessary for upgradeability to be practical (unless you've got money to burn). When manufacturers proprietize their hardware to retain customers at high prices, this is even more true. So a well spec'd machine that you can upgrade at your own risk seems acceptable to me given that by the time you decide to upgrade, you probably wont have much (if any) time left on your warranty anyway.

Having been burnt (pun intended) by a Sager DTR in the past by what many consider to be heat related problems, I'm of the opinion that it's better to get a true mobile proc in a DTR since the performace improvement with a desktop processor is minimal compared to other considerations. In addition, unless you compile a lot of software, or encode media streams, or do other CPU intensive tasks, I think the performance improvements due to CPU upgrades are minimal.

My NP9261 is very cool and quiet. The cooling systems in this system are excellent.I don't know about the 5700 but this seems to be a more compact build with more noise.

My previous laptop had a 16 inch 1280x1024 display and I thought the 1920x1200 to be a far leap. Not so however. It is a fine screen. Good contrast and colorful.

The MXM format never really worked out as I think nVidia had imagined. In fact aside from being a modular card with a loosely compatible set of screw mounts, there's little "standard" about it at all.

Nah, they use the ForceWare name for their video drivers. The nForce chipset drivers are just called "nForce drivers".

They do this because they usually offer a bunch of different versions. I know laptopvideo2go supplies drivers because the INF files they use are meant for the "international" version drivers which have extra localization files and such, and nVidia makes those difficult to download for some reason. However, aside from the INF, they are no different, and the INF file can be downloaded alone. I used a hacked INF on the 163.75 drivers I downloaded right from nVidia, on the XP64 notebook I am typing this message on. 8)

Actually the MXM standard is comprehensive and well defined. If you download the standard from Nvidia's MXM web page you'll find that it specifies the physical measurements, cooling interface and capacity requirements, and electrical signal levels and tolerances for each MXM classification level.

The problem is that some companies (Clevo is one) decided to modify the standard in their own implementations. As a result, companies that chose not to proprietize their hardware are left having to support upgrades using hardware that they themselves provide. Nevertheless, mxm-upgrade.com has a table of laptops for which MXM cross vendor upgrades have been successfully performed according to user feedback. Unfortunately that table appears to be unreliable since they list 2 Clevo laptops that I know use proprietary modules. My guess is that some of the entries are there because those companies falsely advertise the use of MXM modules for those laptops.

If this is true, and all the modders do is add some generic cross platform hw id's to the inf, then I have to ask: why can't Nvidia just add the identifiers themselves so I don't have to use unsigned drivers?!? The only answer I can think of is that they won't support MXM standard modules because there are too many vendors who provide driver files that are custom written to support their own proprietary hardware. So then I have to wonder why Nvidia provides stock drivers for the 7800Go but no other mobile card? I'm confused.

Sounds just like the one I would order, glad to see at least one happy customer, i'm going with 3 drives though 200 7200 for OS and 320 5400 for storage

I have a Eurocom Divine-X (Sager 5792) with a Zalman ZM-NC2000 notebook cooler and it's nice and quiet.

I highly recommend this notebook cooler.
http://www.zalman.co.kr/ENG/product/...ad.asp?idx=280

Cool I just orderd one from ZipZoom Fly $58 for a black one. Should do wonders for my Gateway 675 P4 3.2 until I decided to by the 9260

well worth the investment, especially for a person like me with an 8800 gtx and plays games a lot, heat is my enemy lol.