My Xotic experience - Sager NP7532

... so far at least.

About a month ago I sat down with my wife and told her I wanted/needed a new laptop. Among other things, I'm a grad student in Computer Science, and this fall I'll be starting on my Master's thesis. One of the concepts I wanted to look into is the performance and usability of transactional memory, and with the new Haswell chips out, there's the potential for evaluating both hardware and software implementations. Furthermore, my little 11" notebook just doesn't have the screen real estate or resources to do what I really want with it.

I started out by looking at the big name brands - HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. I quickly dismissed the Dell and Lenovo, since they don't offer much if anything in the way of customizability. HP allows you to customize a fair bit with their Envy series, so that was a consideration, and after I did some more research I started looking at Sager and MSI as well. I went ahead and eliminated HP for various reasons, and then started looking at resellers. After reading a number of threads here and checking them out on ResellerRatings, I decided on Xotic. I did have a few clarifications and wanted to know what student or NBR discounts were available, and Hutsady was kind enough to answer my questions on those. It turns out the discounts weren't really all that great, but I'm sure the margins are pretty tight for resellers to begin with, and I had no complaints with the prices, so I decided to order the following:

Sager NP7532 w/Intel i7-4800MQ, 24G RAM, 750G hard drive (standard). The other upgrades I added were the zero dead pixel insurance and rush processing (I want my instant gratification... or at least this is as close as I'm willing to pay extra for ). After clearing it with the wife, I went ahead and placed the order last Saturday afternoon. Xotic is closed on sat/sun, so I had to wait until Monday to hear anything.

At 7:53am I got an email from Xotic saying that my order was being processed and verified. Dang... someone is in early at the office. According to their website, they aren't even open until 9am! The email says that this phase typically takes 24-48 hours. Aaargh, did I mention I hate waiting?

At 1:45pm I got an email from Erin who told me my payment had been processed and my system was being built. So much for 24-48 hours. Apparently they take their "rush processing" seriously. According to the email, I should expect this to take 1-4 days...

This morning I got another email saying that my laptop had been shipped and they gave me a tracking number. Checking the tracking number I see that it actually shipped YESTERDAY and it'll be here on Monday! Now I'm going to be giddy with anticipation until Monday... I'll let y'all know how everything goes then. However, so far I have nothing but good things to say about the service I've received

 

Awesome! I'm sure Hoss will be along shortly but I'm glad you enjoyed the order process! Enjoy the machine!

 

Moving you right along , once the computer gets to you, update it with your impression on it, would love to hear em.

 

I certainly shall. I picked up a crucial M4 mSSD and Mushkin Chronos Deluxe SSD for boot drives (one for Linux, one for Windoze) recently when their prices were too good to pass up, and I fully expect this laptop to run rings around my current desktop.

 

OK, it's been about a week, and I've had my first impressions so far. As soon as the box got here, I had it opened up to install my mSSD and SSD. Remove battery, check. Remove access panel, check. There's slots for 2 DIMMs and the secondary HD bay there. Conveniently, the system came with 2 extra screws and a caddy to install the SSD, so I get that installed no problem... but, where is the mSATA slot?

I ponder this for awhile and call up Sager's tech support. The guy tells me that the mSSD slot is under the keyboard, and he offers to email me directions on how to remove the keyboard. The instructions show up in about 10 minutes, and they're pretty straightforward, just needed to remove the rear cover, poke the speaker cover to release it, pull off the speaker cover, and then remove 5 screws that hold the keyboard on. Once the keyboard is off, the mSSD slot (and 3rd DIMM) are right there. The screw for the mSSD is already in the little hole, and the only trick is that you need to re-route the wireless antenna to get the SSD to fit. No problem.

So I start using this for my classwork ( I haven't had time to really do anything else with it yet ), and it screams. My desktop is a quad-core Phenom, and this laptop runs rings around it. My current course is a database class, and doing a set of queries in MySQL Workbench takes about 30 seconds. The same set of queries runs almost instantaneously on this box. Whether that's the faster processor or the SSD, I really don't care.

The only downside so far is that this seems to run kind of hot, and the battery life isn't quite what I was expecting. However, I think that's partly due to a defect I'm seeing in VirtualBox, where an idle VM is pegging 2 CPU's to 100%. Once I get that resolved, the power consumption and heat should go down. I may end up picking up a second battery for long-term use, since the batteries are pretty small and (hence) portable.

All in all, the experience was excellent -- the laptop was exactly as described and showed up quicker than I anticipated. I'd give a 10 for the buying experience, and an 8 for the overall quality and experience with the laptop itself. Once I get these (software) issues resolved, I think the overall experience will become a 10.

 

That will definitely help out with the battery life. Running the CPU at 100% on two cores is going to suck that battery down. You could use a third party app to limit those cores to a more manageable speed when sitting idle, then close the program when you want them to start working at max again, but it sounds like a future program update from them should resolve the issue entirely if they're not needing that kind of performance.