15" or 17"

Hello.

Looking to upgrade my G73JH to a Sager with 3610 and a 7970M.

I can get around the same price for both 17" and 15", except the 15" is 95% Gamut Matte, and the 17" is the standard super glossy.

Which would you recommend? Is the 95% matte a huge improvement in color than the 17"? I enjoy using a 17" laptop now.

How is gaming on a 15" notebook? Haven't gamed on a 15" in so long now.

Mind you I don't do any photo editing or video editing. Just some InDesign/Photoshop for work/web, and gaming.

Thanks

 

I was prevously a G73JW user, after switching to 15" P150EM, I didn't find the screen that small really. The screen on this P150EM is the 95% gamut matte, I found it has a much better visibility against G73JW's glossy screen in bright places and the colours on this 95% gamut matte are very strong also the viewing angles are better than G73JW's glossy screen. The P150EM I got came with a GTX675M so can't comment on the GPU since you stated you are getting the HD7970M. The differences between the P150EM and P170EM is that P170EM comes with one more harddrive bay, and the board supports XTU which P150EM's board doesn't (If you ever go for XM's). XTU allows you to control XM CPU's Multiplier and TDP using Intel's XTU software. As I haven't used the P170EM before, I can't recommend which one best yet.

 

I would personally go with the 17". In addition to better cooling, you don't have to give up an optical drive to get 2 hard drives in there. If you don't need the optical drive, then you have 2 SATA III ports and 1 SATA II, all of which can be filled with drives for storage. You get all this and a 17" screen for only a quarter of an inch more on either side of the laptop and roughly three quarters of an inch more from front to back. Oh, and you get the brushed aluminum chassis as opposed to rubberized.

 

This ^ 10Char

 

Not much advantage in having the second drive slot since 2 HDDs in RAID 0 won't beat a single SSD in performance, and since you won't be able to use 2 SSDs in RAID 0 (apparently the HM77 chipset can't handle it well).

If you really want a lot of storage space I would recommend an external HDD instead of an internal... I have a 1TB external HDD and it is excellent, I use it to store all my media content, and it makes transporting and transferring content extremely easy (whereas with an internal HDD you would have to carry the whole notebook around).

 

The P170EM's cooling is not much better than the P150EM. They use the exact same cooling system and the difference between the two are virtually negligible.

The difference between the two computers likely comes down to aesthetics and the issue of better screen vs an extra hard drive bay. I don't mention portability because it doesn't sound like a big issue to you, but it surely is a plus for the P150EM and nice to have.

 

The main difference between 15" and 17" is portability, really. For a lot of people, 17" is not portable at all, and even 15" is pushing it. I don't think a lot of people move their Sagers around very much, but I could be wrong

Mr. Mysterious

 

Their dimensions are nearly identical though...

 

And weight?

Mr. Mysterious

 

Actually, 2x Seagate Momentus XT 750GB (the 8GB NAND versions) in RAID 0 perform about the same as an SSD in real world situations. Synthetic benchmarks of course they get wrecked, but for example booting into Windows, they work the same speed. Additionally, 1.5TB is more storage than you will be able to get for the same price with SSD + 1TB HDD. I'm getting this info from here, and the fact that you can't get 512GB (or 480GB) SSDs for less than $200. The page links to Windows boot time, and you can see PC Mark scores the page before.

Haha yeah, that's the one case where it really loses. But in a backpack, 1.5 lbs isn't a large difference, at least in my opinion. Since we're talking about my opinion, I would only carry a laptop in a backpack, the shoulder bag torques your arm an unnecessary amount when backpacks are so simple and relatively the same price.

 

Hybrid HDDs use SSD memory as cache, which means that it will speed up the things you use frequently, such as the Windows boot, but everything you don't use frequently or is new (and therefore wasn't used enough yet), will be accessed at HDD speeds, which is a lot slower.

Personally I like very much to always get maximum speed when accessing anything on my computer (specially newly installed games and programs), not just what I use frequently.

Besides storage space is very cheap nowadays, there is no need to buy 1.5TB if you can always buy more latter (and we come back to the external HDDs )...

And since we are on this subject, a question has come to my mind: Can the HM77 handle RAID 0 of hybrid HDDs? Since they basically are part SSD shouldn't this chipset also have trouble with the Raid 0?

 

Ooh, I had not considered that. You might be onto something...

About your other points, to each his own really. Seek times of a second or two the first couple times really aren't that big of an issue for me, but I think I have lower standards than most people on this board so I may be biased.

 

Consider the following.

The 17" has slightly better cooling, 2 SATA-III ports and a bigger screen, not to mention weight AND brick too. Overall it's bigger.

The 15" is everything above just w/ one SATA-III port. Smaller brick and screen. Overall it's more portable.

The GPU & CPU power is the same..

Choose the 17" if you sit at home and game, the 15" if you move around.

 

I won't be getting an XM CPU, it costs nearly same as the entire laptop . Thanks for the reply, I think I'll go with the 15". Was told the default 17" is a glossy hannstar which is what our G73s use, and you said the screen is much improved with the 95% matte. I hate seeing my reflection in the screen.

And you said for gaming you didn't see much difference between 15.6 and 17.3"? Hmmm.

I'll go with the 750 hybrid drive.

 

If the gaming you mean is between the P150EM and P170EM, not considering the extra hard drive bay, there isn't much differences except the screen size, but for the screen size 15.6" it didn't give me the feeling of "The screen shrinked huge", this is the main thing I can tell you since I have also used a 17.3" ASUS like you did. And yes the gamut 95% matte is brighter, colour seems to be stronger, wider viewing angle and no reflection compEdiared to G73's glossy hannstar.

Edit: By the way G73's keyboard is more sensitive than the Clevo's so when you are typing on the Clevo's you have to put a bit more force on it or you'll find few letters missing on the screen .