Advent 7555 GX - MSI GT725 again?

Yeah, that's my point, they are clearing the stock out and they are doing it FAST! Even Dixons and PC World has the same price (but apparently the discount code can't be used on these 2??). But the rate that this is going, it'll be all gone before the week is out! Arrgghhh....

I was thinking... can anyone help with ordering this lappy and I'll send that person the amount + shipping via Paypal? Hehehehe.... just wondering out aloud...

I can only say, for those living in the British Isle, go and get this lappy and enjoy... I'll be green with envy... LOL!

 

OK i bought the 8555gx for £999 with the 4670 in and windows 7. Gutted, so after reading this forum i found a discrepency on the pc world website saying that 8555 came with 64bit win7, well it was 32 bit.

I called them and whined and said "you've sold this to me wrong" they gave me a refund , gave me the 7555gx at a price of £699!!! with the hd4850 and chucked in a win7 upgrade retail worth £80, it worked to upgrade from boot to 64bit too. Just installing latest drivers right now.

so spent £999, refunded £999 then spent £699 saving £300, got the "in the boox free upgrade to win7" as well as a retail copy.Thanks to this post, cheers fellas.

 

Grats sny, welcome to the forum .

 

It seems the code "XMas5" isn't working anymore

 

Hi guys, glad you posted about this deal. I just snapped one up for £664 (waiting for dispatch confirmation so hope they've still got stock!).

The screen resolution doesn't bother me too much, as I will be using it mainly as a mobile desktop when I'm abroad, so I can plug it into a monitor. Anyway, 1440x900 might not be so great if you're on a 24" widescreen monitor, but on a 17" laptop screen it's absolutely fine.

My only concern, as I will be using this for gaming, is the slow 5400 rpm drive. Has anyone who owns one considered installing a second 7200 rpm or SSD? Can it take a second HD? Alternatively how hard would it be to replace the primary?

You can pick up a branded 500 gig, 2.5", 7200 rpm drive for under £100. I will definitely do it if it's feasible, then use the 5400 rpm for storage.

Also does this have a Win 7 upgrade option? (Bought from Currys).

 

yeah. I bought from currys and got a win7 voucher it seems.

http://www.win7upgrade.co.uk/ is on the slip and not much other info.


Shipping and handling fees apply.
*Offer only available from June 26th 2009 until January 31st 2010 for Vista Premium, Business and Ultimate operating systems.


worth upgrading? Its not like how vista was when it first arrived is it?

 

I've only heard good things about Win 7 so I would definitely upgrade. Be warned though, I did the Win XP to Vista upgrade back in the day and "Shipping and Handling fees" somehow turned out to be about £50. I felt a bit conned to be honest.

 

I have bought one today for £664.97 too which will replace my ageing Acer 5920g with the 8600m GT!

Its coming Sunday and I cant wait yay

Hope it comes with the Win 7 voucher as I plan to install W7 64 on it as soon as I can. Hope there are enough left for those that are still after a decent gaming laptop for a realistic price...

 

oops i just put Xmas5 and it worked again

 

yes the code is still working and will get you this awesome laptop for 664.97, im sadfaced now that i had to get it at 712, thats another 50 i could have saved, this laptops bombing in price, i might ask customer service if they can give me the difference back, since dhl is cant seem to find my address and has been wandering around cambridge without a clue.

As stated for those of you without an option to use your country's billing address try it with the uk shipping address if you have it,

for example i have an american check card (with the credit card logo) and i entered in all the info but used my uk address even though its registered to my american military address and it still worked, try it and see.

 

I'm really glad you found a loophole, lucky that their website descriptions are nearly always innacurate

Your very lucky really, you must have panicked when you realised you had spent £1000 on a laptop that not quite as good as its predecessor at £650 now!!! Good result though.

Just had a count and it looks like 6 people have ordered a 7555gx because of this thread! I'm suprised that there are any 7555's left still.

Really is a shame that after the 6555 & 7555gx's Advent have sold out on the 8555, good things never last.

 

Hi

I really need a quad core to edit AVCHD video, does anyone have any experiance with the advent 7555 gx, ive seen it for £700 which seems a good price, but will it handle it?
anyone have any prior experience

cheers guys

bobby wood

 

I have the 7555gx and video decoding is very fast due to the quad. I don't really edit video but I'm aware the same sort of processing demand is used to decode.

I use it mostly for CAD rendering which is about as hard as its possible to hammer a CPU. Its quicker than I thought, easily as quick as the 2.66 quad in my desktop in fact.

Ignore speed for this sort of thing, choose the quad over the 2 core any day.

 

Video encodings faster if you get the avivo video encoder sorted, ive used it once, it burnt hd video encoding to shreds lol.

PS. im currently editing AVCHD, I cant edit it in after effects as i need more ram (the quad wants 512mb each to run multithread), but i am converting videos regularly, sometimes multithreadding works on my converter, overs not so lucky, but when it does, its brutally fast.

 

if im not mistaken, since the advent is literally an msi gt725, i would go so far to say that the system can like the 725's and 720's support 8gb of ram, which programs like video conversions will easily gobble up, though the adobe suites, like photoshop and after effects, they can directly access the ram without windows' help, so the usage of ram becomes more efficient.

the point is it will scale with the amount of ram you have, so you very well may be able to gain a huge boost in performance there alone, with roughly 2gb max per core. now only if ram wasnt so stupifyingly expensive...

 

Surely you have enough ram for each core as you have 4gb. I'm assuming you're running vista/7 64 bit.

 

2 GB for multicore, 1 GB For OS and essentials, and 1gb for AE is definately inadiquate, it bugs out on all the 1080p stuff, but if Open GL worked, i wouldnt have a problem.

The mobo has definately been confirmed to sport more, but 4gb banks are danmed stupid in price, and i havent the money for SSD for using AE disk cache either, but the encoding on the machine is generally rediculously great.

 

I'm also planning to get one of these soon as I can get it with my employee discount

I hope the resolution is bearable though.

 

Can you post your experiences with 775GX when they get it ?

 

I received my 7555GX today and I'm very pleased with it. I'm still on Vista (32bit pre-installed), waiting for my Win 7 upgrade to be sent at the moment.

The first thing I noticed is how incredibly light it is. As it's a 17" machine I was worried it would be a bit of a brick to carry around but it's not at all.

I'm planning to replace the harddrive with a 7200 rpm, although to be honest, since I've been using it I'm beginning to wonder whether it's worth it. The standard drive seems pretty responsive. I will probably do it anyway as I can get a 500 gig and use the default one as an external.

My only problem at the moment is trying to get the screen colour settings sorted out as the default settings are pretty bad.
What settings did you guys alter to fix this? If you could tell me what you changed your brightness/contrast etc to I'd appreciate it.

Only tried one game so far, Majesty 2, runs flawlessly on maxed out settings better than it does on my desktop gaming rig!

I don't mind the resolution at all, it's plenty on the smaller lap-top screen and the graphics card is powerful enough to mean you can run with decent AA settings to counter the jaggies.

If you have any specific questions I will try to answer them.

 

Quite a few of us already have

In summary; perfect apart from the screen, which is adaquate.

 

Had mine for a couple of days now and I`m loving it. Absolutely eats Dragon Age Origins for breakfast....best (and least amount of money spent on a) laptop I have had bar none.

I`m waiting for the W7 disc to arrive also, cant wait to get that back on my system.

 

On my previous laptop (samsung) I could disable clicking on the touchpad through a control panel option. Anyone know how to do it on the Advent? Really annoys me.

 

Disable the touchpad entirely? Fn+f2

Disable tap-to-click? you probably need the synaptics drivers, which can be installed just fine (at least on the MSI verison). Try them from the synaptics website http://www.synaptics.com/support/drivers

 

This thread is awesome. When I first posted people were still saying you couldn't get a gaming laptop for less than £1000!!!

Now almost half the posters on this one thread seem to have bought one for around £600 -£700 lol

I think that those lucky enough to stumble on this thread and buy one have genuinly been lucky. I'm willing to bet the vast majority of laptop gamers don't realise how cheap its possible to buy a rebranded gt725 quad.

So far nothing has slowed my 7555gx, nothing has run anything less than silky smooth. and to be honest I havnt even got round to thoroughly updating all drivers etc yet. The mix of components just works well and provides really suprising results. I always knew it was a bargain, but I never expected everything to run quite so well

My gaming desktop is now a little rudundant in fact...

 

That's great info, thanks a lot. If I'm using WASD to move in games I keep inadvertantly touching the touch pad and firing off rounds etc. Hopefully this will cut down on the friendly fire incidents :laugh:. Much appreciated neilnat.

 

can anyone confirm for me if the hard drive is a 7200rpm drive or not? i imagine since its a 725 rebrand it is, but im curious, got a 500gb WD for a steal and im tempted to drop it inside for max capacity. Still havent gotten mine, DHL fails at reading adresses, its back at currys now, hopefully they have the more intelligent driver get the address right.... =[

 

It's a 5400 rpm drive. A WD 320GB Scorpio Blue to be specific.

/edit: Do WD make a 500 gig 7200rpm 2.5" drive? Can you link where you bought it?

 

Thats good, there just about as fast as the 7200 rpm ones anyway from the o'l nbr review.

Mine was a toshiba .

 

im pretty sure the drive that i have is a 5400rpm drive, though i cant confirm till i open the enclosure, more than likely its another wd blue 500gb drive, however they do make 500gb 7.2k drives, they are included in new alienwares and dells.

 

You can get the model number of the drive in Device Manager and google it to figure out the specs.

 

only problem with that bro is im looking at the configurators on line and the say nothing about the drive model or manufacturer. =[

theres two drives on newegg, one being seagate, i wont bother to mention the model number as that comany is complete crap now unfortunately...

the other is the surpisingly reliable hitachi Model #: HD20500 IDK/7K this drives got decent reviews, pusing 100MB/s apparently, though it pulls a good 800mah so be prepared to own your battery life. Personally id go for the more expensive hitachi, i have the 5400rpm drive here and its been a solid performer since april.

it makes me sad to see the days of barracuda drives as well as the laptop counterparts sucking soo bad now, seagate + quantum was amazing... seagate + maxtor = terribly.

The hitachi is pretty new, apparently it hit the market the 1st of september.

 

mine is 500gb 5400rpm, which suprises me as its as quick to load programmes as the desktop with 7200rpm drives.

The spin speed is only half the story though. Good seek times and more accurate drive heads could easily offset the real world difference between the two drive speeds.

Look at online/magazine group tests and you can see that more often than not cheapo 7200rpm drives often perform less well than solid 5400rpm equivilants.

Also, other than boot times how often is hd speed actually an issue? Especially if you have a decent amount of nippy ram. Even a slow hard drive can fetch data as fast as it can be processed in most instances.

Before buying a faster drive I would urge anyone to consider swapping to 64bit os and buying more ram instead.

 

Look where mine says "WD3200BEKT". If you google search that, you will find it's a Western Digital Caviar Black 320 GB 7200 RPM model. I've never opened my machine, but I know.

 

Hello, newbie here!

I'm considering getting one of these to replace a desktop (DinoPC custom: Core 2 E6750, Asus P5N-E, 3GB DDR2, 250GB SATA + 160GB IDE, 512MB Zotac 8800GT, Vista 64-bit) chiefly due to the bulk of a desktop and monitor combo.

Would the CPU be suitable for playing games still as I've heard that Quad Core isn't that great for games compared to Core 2 Duo due to no support for more than 2 cores? I'm not talking Crysis here: as long as it plays such titles as Fallout 3, Oblivion, Football Manager 2010, Empire Total War, Left 4 Dead (1+2), World in Conflict, Dragon Ages Origin etc with a decent FPS i'm happy.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

Quad will kill a duo on them games, even when the games dont support it, the quad is more then capable, and the 4850 is very powerful with the advents resolution (and its priced better then oem desktops, lol)

CHEAP POWAAA

 

Some members tested this theory in a thread

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=415786

Long story short... Q9000 will play any game that's out now, and any game that comes out later WILL be multi-threaded if it needs that much CPU power.

Get the quad.

 

Cheers for the advice. I've now ordered it.

Anyone want to buy a desktop?

 

I play crysis all the time at 1080p on my hd tv at home, powered by my 7555gx. At that res its not always silky smooth but certainly playably smooth. On the laptops native res you can turn all settings to high and it plays perfectly. So by that standard assume anything else you want to play will be fine. Most of what you mention will be approaching 100fps I would think.

quad core is not worse for gaming, it's either better if the game uses the extra cores, or idetical to a the same speed and architecture duo chip.

All you need to worry about is clock speed, and with any processor pushing 2ghz plus accross at least 2 cores you are fine with todays games. That ensures the processor is fast enough to not be a bottleneck to the graphics card. For general desktop apps you will see a big benefit from quad core.

 

Received my new laptop a couple of days ago and overall am happy with it.

One concern though is the screen (as we all know). I've downloaded the latest Catalyst drivers using Mobility Modder and tweaked contrast, gamma and brightness however I'm still not happy with the colours. Can somebody post their settings that they think are pretty good please? Also the horizontal viewable angle on my laptop seems pretty good but the vertical viewable angle is not good at all. A slight angle off and the colours, contrast, brightness etc change dramatically! Anyone else have this problem?

 

Each screen will differ slightly, as does your perception of colour. Playing with the settings until you are happy is the best solution! Also use this image to set contrast/brightness before you start with colour:



The viweing angle is what it is, the only time it concerns me is if a group of us are watching a video or DVD on it. If at home we use the HD panel in the lounge so not an issue at all.

 

Look at deuce go

The screen doesnt need heavily tuning, and you will never fix the viewing angles im afraid i mean its not like my sony viao (handles like 180 degree rotation without colour loss lol)

But try some contrast and gamma blends, then work on your hue and saturation, i've been able to match the screen of my monitor on a few occasions, but i use stock for now as its good for gaming in my oppinion.

 

I found that connecting it to one of these helped no end



Probably the easiest solution

 

Agreed, an external monitor/fat 1080p tv is perfect with this laptop .

 

I have a strange problem with the games I play after the windows 7 upgrade, when I play modern warfare 2, which runs at 60+ fps maxed out it seems to stutter during gameplay or crash the computer (the screen pauses and the picture starts to slowly fade away) , I thought it was a one off but nearly every time I've played the game for over 30 minutes it crashes.

Also when playing GTA 4 which ran amazingly well on vista, now I only get about 18fps, even though it dips to less than 5 fps a lot and that plus the stutter has made the game unplayable (the strange thing is I get the stuttering on GTA even when I lower the resolution and settings). I have played crysis on this laptop with all settings on very high and once I get the CD back I'm going to install it and see if it's affected as well

Haven't got a clue what's going on, any ideas?


Also if you are on Windows 7 what is your windows experience score, mine is 5.4. The lowest is the hdd at 5.4, the processor and ram are 6.9 and the graphics is 7.2.

Is it possible to overclock the RAM on the laptop and is there a danger of reducing it's lifespan? the important question being if I will actually see a difference?

 

Gah its wei, dont look at windows experience index.

Check your temperatures, i occasionally stutter in MW2, but never crash pc, and what do you mean when the screen fades away?

Sounds like overheat

Grab hardware monitor and play some game, alt tab, play some game, do some pretty close up monitoring, and overclocking is silly for this laptop

http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php

 

I've always used hwmonitor to check my temps but they always seemed ok to me.

I took these readings about 20 minutes ago
these were my max temps after an hour of playing modern warfare 2 maxed out
RAM:65c, CPU:~61c for 3 one was at 65c, GPU: max was 73c but most of the time it didn't break 70c, HDD:37c
the temps are around the same for gta4

I dont mind the stuttering, but you get bits where the game pauses, the screen goes blank for about 20 seconds (even though you can hear the music) and then the game resumes, but like I said, when it crashes it's like the each pixel starts to slowly fade away and I have to press the power button until the computer shuts down

 

Well it is a fairly bad port to pc, is this happening in all games? Prehaps something to do with the screens actual connection, your temps seem very good.

I can only at this time suggest prehaps updating the GPU driver, and then if your still having problems, phone up about it, unless someone has any experience with this issue.

 

i cant say that ive ever seen a software error do something like that, only thing that i can think of is a gpu driver problem like cat said, it sounds like youre having gpu issues, with the driver not responding, and having to be restarted in the background, id say get drivercleaner if they have an approved version for win7, if not uninstall the driver completely, restart, you should be using the generic drivers, then, if you are, goto the ati website and get the latest from there, dont use the generic manufacturer drivers, yes win7 is backwards compatible but they long since have made native drivers for 7.

After you get those you should be good to go, i really wish there was an option to upgrade from the upgrade edition of 7 they give you to a full for just a little more, i hate upgrades, every time ive seen one they always cause problems like that, and they end up taking the crap from the previous os with it, in this case, vista =[

but in any case, yeah man check those temps, one thing you can try is get riva tuner and use the statistics server, itll monitor load, fps, temps and memory usage for your card and give you the lowdown on if your card is physically freaking out or if its a driver issue. you can get the latest rivatuner build on guru3d.com

 

Will the MSI GT 725 charger work on this?