7200 Week Review

Hello all,

I have had my 7200 for 2 weeks now. My stats are as follows:
980x
480m SLI
12Gb RAM
Blu Ray burner
Win 7 Ultimate 64bit
Primary Drive: OCZ Vertex 2 240GB
Secondary Drive: 500gb hybrid 4gb SSD drive
Vendor: Xotic PC

Look and Feel:
This is a nice looking laptop. The brushed aluminum surfaces and lighting scheme give the laptop a nice professional look. Downside is the the aluminum shows every slight smudge or speck of dirt. There are vertical line running along the top of the lid from touching the laptop compartment in the backpack. This laptop is a pain to keep clean. The palmrest area is the same problem.

Functionality:
The keyboard is not my favorite. I prefer the keyboard in my Sager 9262. I am a lefty so I use the numberpad for gaming. The 7200 has nerfed the layout of the number pad so that it does match standard keyboard layout. I prefer the old style. There is minimal keyboard flex. The keys are not as "Clicky" as I would like.

Touchpad works well. Fingerprint reader is good as well. Power button is a nice big button that is easy to push. On the 9262 the power was much smaller and a little more annoying to operate. Touch buttons for volume and mute are OK. They could be a bit more responsive.

Chassis is nice and stiff, no flex. Lid hinges are tight and open smoothly.

Speakers are good. Loud enough except for when fans are on full. The audio really shines with headphones. The audio quality is head and shoulders above my old 9262.

LCD is very nice. Bright, vibrant colors and I am starting to like the 16x9 better than the old 16x10 on my 9262. I have heard people complain about NITS on this LCD. I am working in a brightly lit office and the LCD is very bright and easily readable.

Blu Ray drive work well but the placement of the open button is not well designed. The side of the laptop recesses about 1/2 down and the open button sits right were the recess meets the upper part of the side. This makes is difficult to push the open button because your fingers hit the side of the upper portion of the laptop. The open button should be located lower on the Blu Ray drive.

Performance:
This laptop flies. Windows boots up and shuts down very quickly with the SSD. I play Battlefield BC2, L4D2, Mafia 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Civ 5 all at max resolution and highest settings. All of the games run quickly with no slowdowns. I see an occasional graphical artifact in Fallout NV, I attribute this to driver issues. My benchmarking is right in line with others posted here.

Noise:
Fans come on full at startup and they are loud. Lound enough to be annoying and they are whiny at full speed. After windows boots and you are at the desktop the fans throttle back. The good thing is that the fans have never kicked on to full during use. I have to force them to full. When gaming the fans get to what I would call a medium level, which is a bit loud but not annoyingly so. YMMV. During web surfing or work use the fans are on low and are very quiet.

Size and weight:
This laptop is huge. Longer than my 9262 but a little less deep because of the 16x9 vs 16x10 LCDs. The laptop is also tall. A bit uncomfortable to type while sitting on a desk because of how high it rises off the desk.

The power supply is huge. Gigantic, larger than you imagine. It is the same length and height as my 9262 power supply. It is 1/3 larger depth wise than the 9262 power supply. Think of a thick, oversized paperback book. Gigantic.

Connectivity/Peripherals:
USB 3.0 rocks. I got a USB 3 external drive and the throughput is amazing. You can use all 3 USB 2 and 2 USB 3 ports with no power issues. My 9262 did not like to use all 4 USB 2 ports.

No VGA out. This has caused some issues at work because some of the projectors are VGA only. I had to get a DVI to VGA adaptor. I have not tested the HDMI out or ESATA ports.

Stability:
I do not overclock this machine. It is my work laptop so I do not want to possibly damage components. I need this to be available at all times. I have never had a PSU trip while using the 7200. Gaming, benchmarking, surfing all have had no issues. Prime 95 running 12 threads did not trip the PSU. Furmark did not trip the PSU. No, I did not run them together, only seperately. The 7200 is stable as a rock while running stock clocks.

Conclusions:
I very happy overall with the laptop. A few small issues I would fix, primarily the keyboard layout. Lets face it you would buy this machine for the power. As a semi-mobile desktop replacement the 7200 is a fantastic machine.

 

is your 9262 SLI? i consider the 9262 really quiet for the power of 8800m gtx sli it packed back in 2008 even at full fans. is the new laptop louder at max fans? what do you mean the system goes into max fans during startup? are the temps high or something? it sounds like a step backwards in terms of thermal design. the 9262 only turns on the fans at a certain temp. so a cold boot the system is dead silent while booting into windows.

can you also state battery life?

 

I have 8800 SLI on my 9262

I feel that max fans on the 7200 is louder than max fans on the 9262. I am certain of it.

When I start my 7200 the fans immediately come on full. They stay that way for a minute or 2 and then throttle down to normal speed. It seem to me that they turn them on full at startup by default. I have not investigated if there is a BIOS setting to control this. It is not a heat issue.

Battery life on these is a joke. 45 minutes for normal use. 15-30 minutes for gaming. In my opinion you should not buy this machine if you are concerned about battery life. The battery is more like a UPS.

I travel for a living and need the mobile power. If I need long battery life I will have to buy another much less powerful laptop for that purpose.

 

Can you please do a battery test with brightness on lowest and everything turned off? That includes sound, wifi, bluetooth, etc. So basically a idle test.

 

Out of curiosity, if you activate sleep on your X7200 and then run it off the battery until restart, how long can the battery maintain sleep without forcing the PC to shut down due to lack of power?

 

I have no idea about the sleep mode. My normal routine is to shut down my laptop instead of putting into sleep.

Why would I do an idle test? I would never, ever use the machine in that capacity. Just refer to the manuf specs for battery time. I am pretty sure that battery time is with a minimal load.

 

Just asking since I find waiting time for laptop activation cut down using sleep and then running off battery. At any rate SSD drives more or less eliminate waiting time during start up and shut down anyway.