Buying a Pro Star Sager 8150. Help!

Hey Guys, Im looking to buy a Sager 8150 in the relatively near future and I just wanted to ask a few questions. Ive been trying to research a while, but opinions of owners would be great. I should add im canadian, which adds quite a bit to the price

1) Should I have any concerns about getting a 256GB Crucial M4 SATA III SSD instead of an intel SSD? Pro Star seems to be the only reseller offering it as an option, which concerns me a bit. I was told by the reflex notebooks reseller that Intel is the most reliable by a significant margin. Does anyone have any input on this?

2) Is applying thermal paste on the model quite simple? Seems like an easy place to save money, but im worried about opening up the case as Im a technical noob...

3) Is an extended warranty/dead pixel guarantee recommended? I currently only have a 1 year warranty.

4) Is SATA III a decent upgrade over SATA II for gaming, browsing, movie watching ,etc.

5) Care to tweak my build? Id love to know if I have unnecessarily expensive parts in one area with weak ones in another. Id like to spend my money where it gets the most value.

Screen- 15.6" Full HD LED-Backlit Display features 95% NTSC Color Gamut in Matte Finished Surface (1920 x 1080)
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6990M w/2GB GDDR5
CPU: 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM Processor
Thermal Compound: IC Diamond Thermal Compound - CPU + GPU
Windows
Memory: Memory: 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz -4 x 2GB
Primary Hard Disk Drive 256GB Crucial M4 SATA III Solid State Drive
Optical Drive: 750GB/7200RPM Harddrive
Wireless Network Card: Bigfoot Networks Killer™ Wireless-N
Warranty: 1 yr+ Free shipping
• Final COST: $2460 (Includes all taxes, fees of all sorts)

 

Can't you choose a different reseller and save tax?..

Also, although the intel is the most reliable, m4 does not lag far behind, crucial and intel are both well known for reliability and speed.

Applying thermal paste can be hard for a newbie, especially because you need the right cleaning material. Doing it however, isn't too hard, there are guides over the internet and are easy to follow.

Extended warranty.. this is a personal preference, I'd stick with 1 year warranty.

SATA III is a decent upgrade, but in terms of real life performance, you aren't likely to see too much of a difference between the two, just synthetic benchmarks.

I think the price right now is a bit too high compared to other resellers' configs. Try LPC-digital, Malibal, or XoticPC and ask them for a quote on your exact same build, and see what they give back to offer..

Also, it would be better if you can get the SSD somewhere else like eBay or craigslist, that way you could also save some money.

 

I can take some of your concerns and maybe others will chime in.

Clevo - Sager does recommend the Intel SSD's. They test these systems with the Intel SSD's.

Yes, applying thermal paste on this model is quite simple. There are service manuals on the forum that will help in this. If you cannot find one you can PM me for this....
_

 

Convenient!

Larry's the one I got my machine from, and his price is pure awesomeness.

Try asking this man for a quote.

 

1) While Intel is highly recommended for reliability reasons, you shouldn't have any issues. The only drives that have had marked incompatibility is the Vertex 3.

2) Yep, you just need to remove the bottom panel (4 screws) then unscrew the 4 screws on the GPU/CPU in reverse order (they're numbered). Clean off the old paste, put on a pea sized amount of IC Diamond, and put it back together. It only takes a few minutes.

3) This is up to you. If you're spending significant amounts of money, a warranty is probably worth it. The dead pixel warranty is only necessary if you are worried enough to be guaranteed a perfect screen. Most retailers offer a 30 day money back guarantee regardless.

4) You probably won't even notice it. Only the fastest SSD's can use a full SATA III connection. Even then, the differences in the real world between SATA II and SATA III are nearly unnoticeable.

5) If you plan to have more than 8GB of RAM in the future, you may want to order 8GB as 2x4GB so that you have 2 empty slots.

 

Please see the below link for the service manual for this model...


P15xHM-SagerNP8150-8130ServiceManual.pdf

_

 

I just purchased a 8150 (not too many bells or whistles, just the base model plus the 6990M) for over a thousand less. I recommend getting your SSD separately since you can probably get it for much less. A much cheaper alternative is to get a smaller SSD to boot off of and use the regular HD to store stuff. For day to day use, the extra speed of SSD over 7200 RPM is not worth the premium IHMO. You might also want to look into the Seagate Momentus XT. Of course, you may not be as price sensitive as I.

 

I went with the 128gb cruicial m4 and love it. leaves me plenty of room for windows 7 to magically grow, keep 3 or 4 of my most played games installed, office 2010, dreamweaver, and photoshop installed on it and have about 40gb left over. personal preference totally but 128gb vs 256gb on the ssd front is a bit of a price difference at the moment.

 

If you want the least amount of worry and work then order the Thermal Paste, it's a headache (be it small) that you won't go through.

Intel SSD's are awesome. You won't notice a difference in real time.

Extended warranties are personal preference. Most issues will arise in the first few months which is well under the warranty.

Your build looks pretty good to me. Depending on what you need your laptop for 8GBs is more than enough for gaming. Any editing/photoshop you'll see more of a benefit with more RAM.

 

If you want speed then 60~128gb or more ssd would work and a external hard drive or the dvd hd as storage. This is a better option.

The 256gb drives does not perform as well as say 128gb in SATAIII, rather get a 128gb ssd SATAIII + a better 2760qm cpu as there is a huge difference from the 2630qm to the 2760qm + the SSD's you can get on specials + more choice than the limiting website ssd choices. You should then be able to get a 500MB/s / 500MB/s and not the 500MB/s 300MB/s crucial.

If you are serious about speed and the 8150 has/has not ?? raid ?? then 2 128gb ssd's in raid0 or windows lvm would be ideal + $100 1tb / 3tb external usb3.0 hard drive or dual 2.5" drive USB3.0 $30 enclosure. This should allow for close to 1000MB/s in raid0 or windows LVM and raid0 or lvm = 128gb + 128gb = 256gb usable space at this speeds.

Intel don't know if they fixed the 8mb bug already, Samsung 470 or 830 is highly recommended, they might be a bit slower than the rest but you know you will get at least 1 years life out of them or more without any issues as compared to other buggy ssd's.
Also Samsung has a auto tune / auto update tool for the firmware to optimize it to your laptop for optimal speed, think it is the only SSD's that can do this instead of driver and registry hacks .....

Just keep in mind to get decent drivers, no MS drivers for gpu / intel chip, intel download the *30 or higher driver that fixes a lot of bugs and gives you full hd/ssd performance.

The choice is your what works and how technical you want to go.

My choices would be 2760qm + 6990m + killer net + default hd's + usb3.0 enclosure then swap dafault hd's to usb enclosure/s and use the "$400" 2x 128gb ssd's in raid0 or lvm for close to 1000MB/s speeds.

LVM = 30gb win7x64, 2x96gb "192gb" for LVM raid0 and 30gb for extra space.
c:\ , d:\ , e:\ and have games / high speed needed data on the lvm.
Not sure if win7 LVM can use the full 2x128gb raid0 "256gb" and boot from it.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks guys, the responses are much appreciated. Im going to tweak my build a bit more and contact some more resellers, see what I can do.