Clevo P150HM vs W150HRQ

Alright, so I realize that that is a strange comparison, but I will be buying a laptop for college (computer engineering) very soon and I need your guy's help. (Also, this is my first thread on NBR, I hope I put it in the right place) Feel free to correct any mis information too.

My first option, and for quite some time my favorite, is the P150HM:

CPU: i7 2720qm
GPU: 6970m 2gb
RAM: 16gb ddr3 1333
HDD: 120gb Vertex 3 Max Iops
Caddy: Seagate Momentus XT 500gb
Wireless: Bigfoot Killer

Price: $1961

From a lot of research, I should get 2.5 to 3 hours battery life on light web surfing, word processing, etc. The GPU and CPU are very well cooled and as such fan noise on battery and light work like described above should be pretty minimal.

Second Option, W150HRQ:

CPU: i7 2720qm
GPU: GT 555m 2gb Optimus
RAM: 8gb ddr3 1333
HDD: 240gb Vertex 3
Caddy: Seagate Momentus XT 500gb
Wireless: Bigfoot Killer

Price: $1529

Biggest difference in terms of specs here is the GPU, which is slower, the RAM, which is halved, and the SSD, which is much bigger. Its also considerably cheaper. My biggest reason for considering this is the battery life. From what I have read, it will do 4-5 hours or so on light use. I feel like as a college kid on a big campus, this could be a huge difference maker for me. My biggest concern is the cooling, which I believe is a single heat pipe for both the CPU and GPU. Will this thing be noisy, as it is trying to make up for inadequate cooling with higher fan speeds? If so, I think I would rather have a quieter laptop with less battery life than a noisy computer that is always whirring in class, library, etc.

Lastly, the most recent laptop I have started to consider is the P151HM:

CPU: i7 2720qm
GPU: 460m 1.5gb
RAM: 16gb ddr3 1333
HDD: 120gb Vertex 3 Max Iops
Caddy: Seagate Momentus XT 500gb
Wireless: Bigfoot Killer

Price: $1606

This is beginning to look like a happy medium. Is the battery life substantially (or at all) increased over the P150HM due to its lower power GPU? I still haven't been able to figure out exactly what makes this different than the P150HM. Is it just that the GPU isn't upgrade-able? Or does it feel like a stripped down and cheaped out P150HM all around?


Here is a link to a spreadsheet with more specific information about each computer: Welcome to Windows Live


My biggest priority is this: I need the laptop to be able to last me for 4-5 years as a main/primary computer. That is the biggest reason for my early on attraction to the P150HM and its ridiculous specs. I want this thing to be able to compete with an $800 Best Buy laptop in 4 years. Seeing as I am in Computer engineering, I won't exactly always be using it for light web surfing and such work. In 4 years, the culmination of all my studies could be resulting in allot of work on computer intensive tasks, I don't want this thing to be a pain to deal with. Its gotta keep up, even 4 years down the road (as much as possible). Will I be gaming on it? Maybe, a little, but I'm not a huge gamer and don't generally spend allot of time gaming; and for social gaming, I know somebody will have an Xbox. My biggest interest in the W150HRQ is the way better battery life. In fact my biggest wish for the P150HM is that it would have Optimus. My biggest concerns with it are excessive noise from bad cooling, and that the GPU is underpowered. I don't want to be sitting in class with a noisy laptop with fans constantly screaming or kicking on. I tend to think of this laptop as the little brother to the P150HM and so naturally I think of the GPU as being weak; even though I see it being branded as "Gaming" and "Powerful" by Alienware and others, I still tend to think of this as a weak, mainstream, $800-off-the-shelf-at-Best-Buy type laptop GPU, which is what I want this laptop to be in 4 years, not now. But I may be totally wrong, is this GPU more than adequately powerful for a computer engineering student? The battery life seems like a big plus to me, and the smaller power brick is just a bonus as well. And Lastly, the P151HM is something that I have started to look at more recently. With its less powerful GPU (and smaller PSU) it appears like it will be at least theoretically easier on the battery, and have longer battery life than the P150HM, while being much closer to it in terms of GPU than the W150HRQ is. But I don't want a laptop thats had corners cut in the name of price, if thats the case, I'd rather have a P150HM with the 460M. Basically, I want power and a very fast laptop, but battery life and a bigger SSD (which may make the laptop much faster) are tempting me!

I realize I asked allot of opinion questions, and the main purpose of this is to get the opinions of experts so any help or advice will be greatly appreciated!! I really want to know what you guys think will be the best laptop for someone in my situation.

Also I plan on posting a review of whatever laptop I get, along with a documentation of the build and some mods I plan on doing (minor)

Thanks for the help!

 

All the GPU's in this thread are fairly powerful, the 6970M > GTX 460M > 555M
and should hold up well for at least two years. Do any of your courses benefit from the extra power that a GPU could provide? or are they more processor based?

Sager computers are generally looked upon as being fairly upgradable, the only worry I have towards the 555M is that it's probably not upgradable.

I have a 460M in my laptop, and I'll tell you this. Generally, my fans don't really pick up until 60 Celsius; it's fairly quiet unless I do something demanding like playing a game. GPU's are more adaptive these days, most likely, it'll be on clock speeds on battery power; super-performance will only be available while connected to your charger.

I honestly doubt that the 555M (an Optimus GPU) is as loud as the 6970M or 460M because simply, it's not as power hungry ~ and it will only turn on when tasks determine it's needed.

If you get either the GTX 460M system or the 6970M - you should know that you're paying a premium for a powerful GPU; if you don't need a powerful GPU; then your money is better spent on the processor.

Overall, laptop technology is quickly surpassed in a matter of several years, 3-4 at most. To be honest though, an i5-2500k or i7-2600k custom-built desktop system would be better suited (and a much more cheaper, frugal use) of $800 / (thinking bestbuy laptop cost).

I don't know that you'll see all that much benefit to having a massive 16GB of RAM unless you're using programs (or extensive VM's) that make use of the surplus. I honestly wouldn't recommend more than 8GB.

If I had as big of a budget as you do I'd honestly go with the W150HRQ, and build a custom desktop further down the road if necessary.

The 555M is a pretty powerful GPU, in fact, it's probably the most powerful optimus capable GPU that I know of right now.

Battery life - 555M trumps all. The more components (and the more power-hungry components you have) the less battery life you're going to be coupled with, that's just rational logic. You'd be lucky to get 2 hours out of the extremely upgraded laptop with the 6970M.

-http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-555M.41933.0.html
Benchmarks will show that while it's certainly not a tippy-top tier GPU, it's no slouch either. The difference between the strongest GPU's and the slightly weaker GPU's only really shows during high resolution (gaming).

You need to understand that the GTX 460M maybe the base model, but the sager laptop models you're looking at are primarily marketed towards gaming. They may be 'lower powered' -- but they're not low performance parts.

The GPU should be upgrade-able, but honestly if you're only doing casual gaming then a 460M should be fine, (if not great). Upgrade able varies - depending on the power requirements - TDP/(etc).

It's not that they're cutting corners fro the 555M vs 460M it's just that because of Optimus capability they're marketed towards slightly different target audiences.

Tl;DR if you want power, build a desktop. With the budget you're debating on a laptop you could build an enthusiast desktop that could last 3-5 years.

-If you spend the $2000 on a laptop, it's going to be outdated really, quite fast to be honest, whereas with a desktop you can extend performance via overclocking, which is why I think that the Optimus option is best for you, as a college student.

 

Thank you so much for the quick answer and information, its very helpful.

Regarding classes, unfortunately I don't even know what they are yet, let alone what I'll be doing in them.

You say you have a 460m, what laptop is this in? I can't seem to be able to find any information regarding battery life differences between the 460m and the 485m or the 6970m, is there any information on this?

And in hindsight, that paragraph was pretty long...

 

battery life on the P150HM with the nvidia card greater than 3 hrs is possible (I get max just shy of 4 hrs on lowest brightness but with wifi) , but if that is important you could optimize the configuration by putting in less memory (2 modules instead of 4) and not including the caddy drive and research your choice of SSD for low power consumption...

 

Are you going to be gaming at all on this machine? Or will this be strictly for your engineering work?

 

Really? 4 hours would be incredible, I'm sold if I can get that or close to it. Battery life isn't all important, but it definitely is very nice.


AnandTech - Eurocom Racer: Why the Radeon HD 6970M Rocks

Does anyone have any information regarding battery life of the 460m vs the 6970m besides this? It appears that both Nvidia cards are much more efficient at 2d stuff compared to the 6970m.


Am I going to be gaming? probably not much if at all, right now I'm not a big gamer, but that could change. It will probably be mostly for engineering work. My main reason for wanting the power is future-resisting and I would really hate to need the power and not have it much more than I would hate to have the power and not need it.

 

On another note; if you're going to be doing mostly engineering work, then I'd get an nVidia GPU for CUDA, assuming that some of your potential software will be able to make use of it. CUDA is hardware, it's not something that the AMD 6970M will ever have. I too can verify hearing that the 6970M is less efficient at 2D activities than some of nVidia's cards.

While I'm rambling on, I may as well mention that XoticPC just changed their P150HM base GPU's from a GTX 460M to a GTX 560M, which will definitely be a great card. You should try to specialize and optimize your system as best you can.

Most of your engineering work is probably going to rely more heavily on the processor; that's the part I'd place the most consideration into because engineering work generally leans towards the ability to make use of multiple/cores & threads. The 2630QM is all you need for gaming, but if you're doing a lot of engineering work, then a processor upgrade may be worth investigating.

Optimizing the configuration would definitely manage to squeeze some battery life out of the system. However, batteries are, well batteries. They degrade over time, and I wrote two hairs that was while considering the long haul, especially if you'll mainly be plugged in.

On the optimization/specialization: emphyrio is definitely on to something suggesting that you pick up a nice SSD for higher power-efficiency. The only thing that bothers me is how much space you'll actually need for your engineering programs, and whether making use of an external hard-drive would be cost-effective versus the battery life gained/lost trad HDD space.

I don't actually have a Sager laptop, I've just been researching them since my warranty on my dell-alienware laptop is running out (17 days left) and I've also been thinking about the P150HM/W150HRQ as someone working towards an associates/IT.

 

For pure engineering work, getting this notebook for the upgraded 95% wide gamut screen would be reason enough already.

I would be personally getting this notebook for my engineering course. Do consider that the power brick is really a monster though.

 

Get the 5160 (or 5165) for about 300 dollars cheaper than anything else you've configured.

 

well, this is the actual measurement I base it on



(3.52 hour if measured conservatively)
this is while browsing, emailing with wifi, brightness set to lowest or next to lowest (I was not straining to read the screen). I am using Linux, but I don't think Linux has especially aggresive powermanagement so it should be valid also for windows..

 

Bear in mind that emphyrio has the GTX 460M, not the 485M.

 

Sweet! Thats starting to look like exactly the gpu I was looking for, more efficient and powerful than a GTX 460m. Thanks for the heads up.

By nice ssd, are you refering to any ssd, or saying that certain ones are much more efficient than others? It seems to me that an ssd can't be to huge of a factor when the processor uses 45W and the video card uses 75W, while the Vertex 3 only uses 2W. But I could be wrong, does a difference in ssd really have that big of an impact on battery life?


Rykoshet, If I go to a 460m (or 560m) from the 6970m the p150hm will be within $100 of the NP5165 (W150HRQ), so at that point the price difference is negligablefor me. Its just a GPU and RAM vs bigger ssd decision at that point

 

And 2 more questions:

1: If I have an hdd as a secondary drive, won't it be spun down unless needed, so battery life should not be very affected by it unless I was constantly loading files off of it? versus having an HDD as the main drive in which case it would almost always be active.

2: Does anyone think its a good idea to have the Seagate Momentus XT as a secondary drive? after reading alot of reviews on how its hybrid technology works, it appears that most of its benifits are going to come from application loading and general windows tasks, all of which are going to be handled by my ssd. As a secondary drive it will be mostly storing media (music, photo's, video's) and maybe a few very large programs. This seems to be knocking out any advantages it has over a regular 7200 rpm HDD.

 

Skip the Bigfoot NIC and go with the Intel 6300 or 6230 instead. There have been reports of past users having issues with Bigfoot products, not to mention that it costs more than the 6300, but is only comparable to the 6230 performance wise.

 

Not sure if it's public knowledge, but the Vertex 3 drives currently have compatibility issues with the Sandy Bridge chipsets, until these are resolved it may well be worth choosing another SSD drive if the laptop is urgently required or waiting a while to see if the problem is resolved.

 

1. SSD's don't save as much power as you think. With an SSD and an HDD, you arguably will be using more power on average than just having one HDD, so you won't be saving any power over 1 drive.

2. A hybrid drive essentially has all the benefits wiped out by being used as a data secondary drive. It's a great primary when SSD's are expensive (so as to get the benefit of size and speed), but it doesn't have much use as a second drive. A standard 7200rpm drive will work just as well for that job. When SSD caching becomes a standard feature and more models can use mSATA or have more than one drive, hybrid drives will be less useful due to limited flash size.

 

Current hybrid drives are only useful if you are doing the same tasks over and over. If you use a variety of applications, the drive has to constantly "learn" your usage pattern, thereby negating any performance benefits. I had a hybrid drive on my previous notebook, and because I played many different games on it, I saw no performance benefit. In a few cases, performance actually decreased, causing annoying stuttering in a few titles (mainly those based on the Source engine). Switching back to a traditional hard drive resolved all those issues.

 

What exactly is the compatability issue you mention?
Guide Vertex3 FW now uploaded and available using toolbox to update vertex3 drives

And does this sound like the fix for it?

Thanks for the confirmation, I had a feeling that using a hybrid as a secondary drive was pretty pointless

 

This is from another reseller's forum page, read into it what you will but the problem as of now has yet to be resolved.

Vertex 3 drives are still unavailable as an upgrade option for the same reseller's laptops.

 

having two storage drives in your sysem will make a considerable difference in battery life. i suggest going with the highest intel 320 you can afford, or crucial c300/m4.

 

the 45W and 75W are the TDP=thermal design power, so the maximum amount of power that these components are supposed to use at any time. In practice CPU and GPU use much less power when not running anything demanding (say a 3D game) - the example I gave works out to approx 20W use for the whole system under light load. so 2W would be 10%=24 min of battery life. If you could find an SSD with 1W this would gain you 12 min. Same goes for other components (memory modules are rated approx 2W).

the TDP do show that if you do put your system under full load, getting long battery life is hopeless...

btw for the same reason I would not assume that the 485M necessarily uses more power under light load than a 460M...

 

To answer my own question from earlier regarding a GTX 460m vs 6970m battery life comparison:

AnandTech - CyberPower's X6-9300 and MSI's GT680R: Fighting for Your Mobile Gaming Dollar

Here they are in a p150hm on Anandtech. The P150hm with the 460m is called the CyberPower's X6-9300. Very interesting results, the 460m gets over an hour more on internet usage...wow.

 

And thank you very much emphyrio, that is great info.

Each memory module is rated at 2w? So with all slots taken my memory itself is pulling 8 watts?

 

I think that is the ball park TDP, again there is a dependence on the load of the system:

How Much Power Does Low-Voltage DDR3 Memory Really Save? : LoVo Means Low Voltage

has a review where they save 1W at idle for 2x2GB changing from 1.5V-> 1.25V memory, so removing the memory module altogether should save more than this but maybe not the full TDP....

(in my previous laptop I upgraded from 2x512->2x1GB modules and I also noticed a decrease in battery life consistent with a 1W difference)

 

Thanks for all the help everybody!

I ended up going with the following:

P150HM

CPU: i7 2720qm
GPU: GTX 560m 1.5gb
SCREEN: Matte 95% Color Gamut
RAM: 16gb ddr3 1333
HDD: Vertex 3 240gb OEM
Caddy: WD Scorpio Black 500gb
Wireless: Intel 6300

Once again thanks for all the help everybody, I'll have a review up hopefully soon, once I get all the parts.

 

good luck with the battery hog options and hope your vertex doesn't poop on you.