Baterry life in the 8662

Hows the battery life in the sager 8662 with the lights on full and playing games that arn't too demanding(Anything below CoD4 such as Source engine games)?

how about when playing demanding games such as crysis?

thanks

Edit: oh and if i want more battery life can i buy a bigger battery pack?

 

What kind of crazy person games on battery? As far as I know, you can only buy a spare battery for the NP8662.

 

I cant really charge my laptop while on a bus to school =/

 

You can't really do much while on a bus to school. Are we talking public or school bus? Either way, I'd be a bit weary of damaging the laptop. I get motion sick too when trying to read/game while in a vehicle.
Expect between 1-2 hours while gaming on battery.

 

Its a school bus.
and anything over 1 hour should be fine since the bus usually takes around 45 minutes unless there is *Beep* load of traffic.

I hope the sager 8662 is rugged enough to survive a couple speed bumps and sudden stops. Well anyways, thanks for the help.

 

haha, you should be fine then. Just make sure to read up on undervolting, and steps you can take to extend your battery life like decreasing the screen brightness and turning off the wifi when not in use. The NP8662 is pretty rugged, I was just worried about you getting it stolen or dropping it between your legs.

NBR Undervolting Guide

 

Remember put it on your backpack on your lap or ur swimmers will be baked lol

 

1-2 hours with 9800M at full blast? You can't be serious. 30 minutes sounds more realistic.

 

Some of us prefer melted butter on our biscuits . Interpret that as you may xD. Do you have a nice laptop backpack for your Sager?

I was referring to the less intensive games. Surely running Crysis would suck up battery life like nothing.

 

Ya i try to never use it directly on my lap =x

Ill turn off the wifi and try undervolting it then to save some battery but i probably wouldn't end up turning the brightness down since i read that even on the maximum brightness it is still a fair bit dimmer than other laptops.

I don't currently have a backpack for my laptop just a general carrying case though i can go buy one i suppose.

And ya, i wouldn't be playing Crysis on the bus i was just wondering how long it would last on really high performance games.

 

Four Tips to Increase Laptop Battery Life

If you are going to invest $1300 for a laptop, it'd only seem right to invest in a backpack that will protect it while you carry it around. At the very least, a decent sleeve.

 

How about a monster sleeve? =D
those things are so cute
http://www.ohgizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/monsterbag.jpg

But the problem if i buy a laptop backpack is i might not be able to fit all my books into it because i already have trouble fitting them in my current backpack without the laptop in it.

Ill probably just buy a laptop sleeve and a laptop carrying case with a decent amount of padding just incase =p

 

You can get some beastly laptop backpacks that look like refrigerators. I looked at some Swissgear backpacks at Best Buy yesterday, will cost between $50 and $100, but you won't have to worry about your laptop getting damaged by your books.

That cookie monster-looking sleeve is awesome. I was thinking something like Ballistix PTAC Stealth
Laptop Sleeve

Also ZeroShock III 15-Inch Notebook Sleeve

 

Ya, i'll look into some backpacks tomorrow.
the Ballistix PTAC Stealth looks like it would protect the laptop very well
Anyways, night rivera-thanks for the help =p

 

Anytime! Good luck finding the perfect fit!

 

Slappa Bags are really nice to.

 

actually being that on battery the gpu is limited to the 3rd state, even playing a more intensive game (like crysis) would yield you > 1hr. Given, it won't play very smoothly on high settings lol

 

You can't play modern games on battery very well. You can, however, play older games on battery effectively. A friend of mine plays N64 ROMs on battery with his NP2096 to pass the time on buses, and he gets about an hour and a half of play time on it. That's fairly decent.

 

Anyone know much about performance playing, oh say, americas army? I just plink around on it now. I am looking at the NP8662 or possibly the NP9280, but i am not wild about hauling a 12+ pound laptop around to class :/ Any suggestions?

 

I have been playing a little AA on mine recently (just started back up, haven't played in a long while!). Are you asking about battery performance or game performance on battery or in general? I have been playing while plugged in so I don't know about battery performance, but the computer handles the game just fine and everything runs smooth.

 

Well, since you mention it, I am wondering mainly about on battery, but numbers while on power are fine too. Any qualms with performance like lag, or things like that?

 

Also, I assume you are pretty happy with you new rig given the great reviews and such you have provided. I am getting a new rig for college, and want the best combination of general usability with plenty of gaming muscle.

 

What sort of performance numbers in AA are you looking for, just FPS?
I can also try playing on battery and see how long it lasts and how well it performs.

 

Sure FPS sounds good. I play (not so well) on my dying DV9000 series HP. It overheats SOO badly though

 

Well it took 1 hour and 15 minutes to go from full charge to 10% while playing AA.
That was full brightness, high volume, 1680x1050 on normal/high settings via wifi. I also had HWMonitor and ESET Smart Security running. I never dropped below 52 FPS and was usually between 55 and 62 FPS. This was on the Border map the entire time too.

Here are the temps, just in case, after playing for a little over 2 hours:


Hope that helps!

 

Thanks so much for the FPS and battery info. Do you think the game would benefit from using the Q9000 processor, given that the drawback is it draws 45W compared to the P9600 drawing 25W?

Yet another question...do you know anyone with the Intel X-25M 80GB drive in their lappy? I have an external storage setup with 2.5 TB connected via eSATA, so storage volume won't be an issue.

 

The Quad will kill about 20 minutes of your battery life.

 

In y'alls opinion, which would be the better buy for performance and "futureproofness" and money-wise, not portability wise, the 8662 or the 9280?

 

Well I don't think a quad core would help AA perform any better... yet. I say "yet" because they are supposed to come out with a new version of AA soon(3.0) that will supposedly use the UT3 Engine, which, if I am not mistaken, is an engine that can make full use of a quad core. Whether they take advantage of that fact or not, I don't know. Maybe check their forums and see if they are saying anything about that.

As for the 8662 vs. 9280, if you can afford it and don't care about portability, it looks like the 9280 is going to be a better bet.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I don't play so well either! I die a lot!! But still have fun!

 

Yeah I definitely can't wait for AA 3 with the Unreal Tournament 3 engine. It looks SOO cool with all of the new upgrades and AI rebuilds. I am really trying to decide between the 9280/9757/8662 for college. A couple of my friends told me the awesome deal!!! the 9280 offers with performance from i7 and GTX280M and a netbook for scooting around classes

 

The 9280 is much much better than the 8862... The 9280 uses an I7 core processor with dedicated processing cores 8 of them... it also has a MXM 3.0 pci slot, which is the new standard for mobile gpu's which will mean you can also upgrade the gpu in the future

 

That is incorrect, the i7 has 4 real cores and 4 virtual cores = appearance of 8 real cores but technically isn't.

 

Well yes your right, but it uses the virtual cores for specific tasks making them usable cores

 

I'm not sure how much you know about how multi-threading CPUs work, but basically they double the registers (a set for each other thread the core can run) and add the necessary buses to connect it. So, the virtual cores can be used in the same way as the real cores (giving them tasks of course) but without technically using a "real" standalone core. The threading ability allows the core to (while the "main" thread is inactive) run another thread, which under most conditions increases performance. So obviously, if you could max out the 4 cores/4 threads without any breaks (ie. always having work to fully utilize every component) it would outperform 4 cores/8 threads because of the slight overhead that carrying 8 threads has. However, I digress since this is incredibly OT.