Non Gamer question, DoI need a 1920x1080?

or will a 1360 x 768 15 inch display suffice?

 

If you are working with large Excel worksheets, or any other program that needs to show your 'data' and many toolbars at the same time (think PS, AutoCAD, etc.), you will be much, much more productive on teh 1920x1080 display.

If your eyesight is worse (or you're simply older...) than normal, then the low resolution on the (relatively) big display will be more beneficial to you (fonts, UI controls, etc. will be bigger).

My recommendation: the 1920x1080 display should be the resolution that will make for a more productive and satisfying platform in the long run.

 

My favorite resolution for 15" displays with 16:9 aspect ratios is 1600x900. 1920x1080 may need some fine tuning to make sure the text is not too small, but generally, it's not bad (and this is the only way to get a high quality display; the one and only 1600x900 Radiance display is no longer sold). Personally, I would never buy a 1366x768 15" laptop -- the vertical resolution is simply too low. For gaming and movies, it's actually tolerable, but for everything else (browsing the web, various office applications, etc.) it's terrible: you can't fit much on the screen and you have to scroll a lot.

Thus, you probably don't need 1920x1080, but it's definitely a lot better than 1366x768 (particularly since the quality of the latter displays tends to be much lower than that of the former).

 

Actually I'd prefer 1366x768 for gaming and 1080p for desktop work. More pixels the better as far as desktop goes IMHO. But for gaming I want fewer pixels so I can get more life and better frame rates out of my GPU.

 

I'm with wingnut. But I will still always get as high of resolution screen as I can because there's no replacement for pixels when you want to look at big documents and such.

 

I would opt for the 1080p screen as you can always scale down the resolution and **generally** 1080p screens for most manufacturers have higher brightness and overall is a better quality panel.

Also what laptop are we referring to? Take for example the XPS 15. The 1368x768 screen is god awful. It is worth the 150 or so dollars to get the B+RGLED screen.

 

I was debating between the Sager 3250 and 5160. The 3250 only has one screen available. I like SAGER for their reliability etc.

 

Sager is not a brand I would particularly associate with reliability, but never mind. Where are you buying the 3250? As far as I can tell, it's available with a variety of displays (e.g. at xoticpc).

 

Links? Evidence? Why do you say this? I disagree wholeheartedly.

 

Wow, SAGER not reliable. What would you recommend?
Anyways, i do see that Xotipc has alternate displays available. Thanks.

 

Sager *IS* reliable, not sure where he got that idea. No worse than any other company, and if anything better, at least based on mine and everyone else's experiences here. Don't let his comment deter you.

Sager/Clevo is one of those niche brands that doesn't really advertise much. They'd probably be a lot more popular if they dumped a bunch of money into marketing. I'm kinda glad they don't because that would probably ruin the attention to detail they give their products. They have excellent laptops with excellent support if you order from one of the resellers (like xoticpc) and not directly from Sager.

 

Laptop screen does not matter to me as I have an external the majority of the time. I don't like non native gaming. While I live with what I can do on the laptop for the desktop if I can't handle 1920x1080 it means its time for a new video card. Since AA doesn't matter much to me if its not usable sub $300 cards are usually fine.

 

I said "not particularly reliable", not unreliable. What I meant was that its reliability is about average -- better than most consumer laptops, but not at the level of business machines. Their machines also come with a caveat that is not common to most other manufacturers.

My observations come from personal experience. The machine I am using right now is a Compal JFL92/Sager NP2092. It's not a bad laptop and it's still (mostly) operational after more than 3 years, but this would not have been the case if I did not know my way around computers. There were 3 distinct hardware faults with it.

First, the cable of the adapter broke and I had to repair it and buy a new one. I keep the old one at my house and it still works, but my workplace is not fond of non-standard electronics so the new one was necessary. Second, the cable of the webcam broke. This is apparently a fairly common problem with various flavors of this laptop. I fixed it by disassembling the display and repairing the cable. Finally, the 8600M GT has started to die. I can no longer boot into Windows with any Nvidia driver -- Aero almost immediately gives me graphical corruption that persists even in the BIOS after the computer reboots. I'm working around it by using Standard VGA drivers which work normally, but the machine can no longer run any 3D games and Windows doesn't look as snazzy.

In case you are wondering why I had to fix everything myself, here is the caveat I mentioned above and this is why I don't think they're particularly reliable: the machine itself is pretty solid, but the terms of the warranty mean considerable downtime when something goes wrong. Sager laptops are only sold by small shops. This necessarily means that unless you buy it from a shop near your house, you will not have a service center near you as some of the big manufacturers do. The only way you will be able to get them to fix it is if you ship it back to them (often at your expense!), wait until the shop gets around to fixing it and then ships it back to you. You would need to be very, very lucky for this to take less a week and it will quite likely take a lot longer. During all this time, you will be without your laptop so if it's your main computer, you're going to be inconvenienced.

The first time around (when the adapter was dying), I actually called the shop about the warranty, but they started asking all these questions about the way in which it was broken and ultimately said that if I wanted a replacement, I first had to ship the dying one back to them. This is very different from the way other places do business -- when the adapter of my sister's Dell Latitude was having problems, the only question Dell asked was where she wanted the replacement shipped. I did not want to give up using the laptop for a week so I paid them the $50 for a new adapter. When the webcam and (later) the GPU broke, I was in Europe so I didn't even bother calling because I knew that they would want me to ship the machine back and forth at my expense and this would cost a lot of money in and of itself.

All of that said, I don't regret buying the machine -- it was a pretty good laptop and its greatest flaw (the 8600M GT) was common to all mid-range gaming machines of its time (although Dell and Apple fixed it for free whereas the small shops didn't do anything except what the warranty required of them...). As I said, they're not less reliable than consumer laptops (with some rare exceptions like this poor guy whose machine basically disintegrated). However, I associate reliability not just with how often something breaks, but how fast and inexpensive it is to fix it and these boutique shops are much worse at that big manufacturers. This is the reason I'm trying to stay away from Sager, Clevo and other small stores for my next laptop unless what they offer is so far beyond business machines that the risks are justified.

 

1080p, unless you prefer to see everything in larger size (like if your eyesight is below average). 1080p enhances productivity more than any CPU these days.

Althernai, happily Sagers don't use Compal chassis anymore (right?), they're all Clevo which is fairly renowned. Of course there always be lemons, with any brand, and that's why there is tech support and service.

 

The Compal laptop is actually not that bad -- the problem is precisely how the warranty works and this does not change depending on the ODM. It's the drawback of buying at boutique shops.

 

Hmmm can't say for that.
Mine actually isn't a Sager branded, its other local (Brazillian) brand. I can't complain on the warranty, I got a stuck white pixel in my screen and they changed it without any problem and much rapidly.

If you are worried on Sager services, there are other brands that sell basically the same product (Clevos). Or maybe if you got a Sager from a reseller (not directly from them) its different too, but that I don't really know.

 

I would say 900p is the least I could use, but I actually prefer 1080p (I have both).

But it is very personal indeed and you (OP) should try to have a glimpse on those resolutions if you can... it's the only way to know what fits you best.

But I would say 768p is a no for any serious use of the laptop.

 

IMO, 1080p is more useful when you're not gaming than when you are. Going from my ancient 1280x1024 screen to the FHD+ screen I use now on my desktop was a huge improvement, not necessarily in terms of gaming (though the change in aspect ratio means I can usually see more on the screen, you'd get the same effect with a lower 16x9 res), but in ordinary desktop tasks such as being able to have a Firefox and a Word window open side by side.

 

I concur, 1080p is best for 17" and above, it's too much for a 15" imo.

 

Even then you really shouldn't base your entire decision based on gaming, unless that's all you do 24/7 and nothing else. You can always run games in a lower-than-native resolution if necessary, but you can't make up for the fact that the low resolution doesn't let you fit much on the screen. And games look better running in non-native res the XPS 15's B+RGLED 1920x1080 panel than they do running in native res on the 1366x768 screen, just because of the sheer difference in quality between the screens.

 

Well, Thanks guys. I went ahead and got a SAGER 5160. I will update my signature later. But it does have the FHD screen 1920 x 1080