Considering Sager, Please Help!

Thanks for looking! Before I start I would like to say I have read the stickies and the FAQ/guides and have googled my questions aswell as googled various Sager reviews. Now I want personal opinions and answers because I'm still not satisfied.

I have been a Alienware fan boy and was ready to buy the m15x until I learned just how old and overpriced the technology is, when I could be getting the same and even better for cheaper from Sager. So needless to say I am really considering Sager, one problem I have is I can't shake the though that it's just some off brand company that will disappear in a few years, this is mainly because I have never heard of them before.

I am planning to purchase the Sager NP8662 from XoticPC, all my research has lead me to believe this is the best possible choice for a 15.4inch gaming monster. Now I know the NP8662 hasn't been released yet, but I do know it is a older body design just with updated hardware so I hope that people who have experience with similar systems can help answer my questions regarding this notebook.

1. Does the notebook has heating issues? Do they usually run warm?
2. I have a NZXT Cryo LX notebook cooler, will this work well with the NP8662?
3. Do the Sagers have any build issues? (Wobbly screen, cracking chassis, dead pixels, etc.)
4. Will the Intel® T9800 be a good investment for the future?
5. How do the keyboards feel? Are they comfortable? Easy to type on? This is probably one of the biggest concerns for me and was why I originally considered Alienware.
6. What is the average battery life and what can I expect of the NP8662?
7. Do the notebooks usually handle well under heavy load? Such as 5 hours of Bioshock on high settings.
8. Are the fan(s) loud when not gaming? How about when you are gaming?
9. This is another important question, how are the speakers? Are they usually good? This is another place the m15x lacked.
10. And finally does the turbo memory really help? I haven't found many reviews or opinions on this.

Thanks for your help and I'm sorry for all the text!

 

3. As solid as you can get.
4. Bad eperformance/price ratio. I'll say P9600.
5. Average, better than HP/Dell, worse than Apple/Lenovo
6. 2 hours
7. Isn't that what it designed to?
10. Waste of $

 

Thanks for the quick reply, I really appreciate your feedback.

 

I can't comment on most of your questions because I have never owned a Sager. However, I can assuage your fears of them disappearing in a few years. Sager has been around for over twenty years--basically forever in the notebook industry. I remember seeing their ads in those old 2-inch thick Computer Shopper catalogs. I just recently purchased my first gaming laptop and considered Sager, but went with MSI due to cost considerations because I am still not completely sold on laptop gaming.

 

Well that's reassuring, I know they have a pretty good history too, I'm amazed that I have never heard of them before.

 

From what I understand, Sager uses a standard case and doesn't seem to update it very often. My guess is that they found a durable build and stuck with it. They are extremely well built and from what I have been told by people that own Sager notebooks, they don't have any cooling problems. Definately worth the money if you have it.

 

Well I do, but I am like the 0.001%

 

I have owned mine for almost a week now and I have to say that this sager is the best built/best performing laptop I have ever owned (This includes Dell, Acer and Alienware). It's not even close to the others.

Overall the cooling is incredible! If it weren't for my HDD temps after a couple hours of serious gaming I'd feel safe not to use any cooler whatsoever! It really is that well built. The one thing to watch though is the HDD temp under big loads. It's not super bad, but it's right on that edge (59-63c at peak). I have purchased a cooler and the temp issue is completely gone.

I was nervous as well, but the Sager was the best decision I have made.

 

1. Does the notebook has heating issues? Do they usually run warm?
The hard drives run warm, so you might want to look at 5400rpms and/or get a drive with fewer spindles (newer,spindles = heat). A cooler would take care of this issue and then some, so no worries.

2. I have a NZXT Cryo LX notebook cooler, will this work well with the NP8662?
Yes, it should work well. Most of us with M860TUs use a Zalman of some sort, which blows air lower into the notebook (near the notebook) but the NZXT's probably a great choice (good coverage, strong fans, no?).

3. Do the Sagers have any build issues? (Wobbly screen, cracking chassis, dead pixels, etc.)
Some of these notebooks have keyboard tabs that are somewhat loose and the keyboard doesn't stay wholly in its seating. This *SEEMS* to have been an issue with very early shipments/models (Aug/Sept 2008), as I haven't heard of many recently. Some of the DVDroms used are questionable (some eject too fast supposedly; I know mine's hard to eject so I do it via explorer most of th etime).

4. Will the Intel® T9800 be a good investment for the future?
I would also go with the P9600 - a bigger issue is that the T chips run on 35Watts, while the Ps run on 25Watts. That's a big heat difference (although the CPU has great cooling on this machine and this probably won't be an issue - likewise, great GPU cooling).

5. How do the keyboards feel? Are they comfortable? Easy to type on? This is probably one of the biggest concerns for me and was why I originally considered Alienware.
Keyboard is well made, a bit springier than I'm used to, and the case in which it fits into can be a bit tight (so squeaky del/escape keys for some people), and the aforementioned tab issue.

6. What is the average battery life and what can I expect of the NP8662?
2 hrs, more with wifi/bluetooth/camera/etc disabled and on silent mode. Not more than 2hrs and change though.

7. Do the notebooks usually handle well under heavy load? Such as 5 hours of Bioshock on high settings.
Yes. Bioshock doesn't really tax this notebook. Crysis and Assassin's Creed taxed it a lot more for me, as did GTA4 on high. Taxing is, uh, GPU hit 69C and CPU is low 50s.... so not very. Considering that every single other gaming pc I've used, tried or heard friends use has responded by overheating and shutting down, freezing, or running hot enough to decrease the life of components (esp battery/hd), there's really no comparison with any other 15incher.

8. Are the fan(s) loud when not gaming? How about when you are gaming?
Fans go ON and then OFF. The notebook seems to not have very low fan speed settings, so it's either completely silent and off or on a bunch, or REALLY on (gaming). I run mine on silent mode 95% of the time (anything but gaming) and it's very quiet. Fans aren't needed when the cooler is quieter and more effective. The fan noise is about the noise of a cooler on high.

I've accidentally run games while in silent (half speed or so) mode, and they ran fine actually (Mass Effect, high, chugged a bit, and I went oh hey it's half speed -.-).

9. This is another important question, how are the speakers? Are they usually good? This is another place the m15x lacked.
The speakers are pretty good actually - better than a lot of Dells I've had. Still, they're laptop speakers and you shouldn't expect a surround sound experience. The headphone jacks in front are fantastic, however. I don't have any interference and it drives my 200ohm beyer-dynamic headphones fairly well.

10. And finally does the turbo memory really help? I haven't found many reviews or opinions on this.
Yeah, gimmick imo. If you run photoshop and other large applications a lot it will save you 10-15 seconds or so upon loading (yay?).

 

i was a m15x owner for a nightmare 19 days (if youve got a spare few hours read link in my sig).
yes the m15x was a nice looking laptop with all the flash lighting but for me that was sadly it. it took 6 weeks to get my refund and i then thought where do i go now.
thanks to the great advice on this forum i took my first steps towards a sager Nexus/m860tu and i havnt looked back since.
ive said it before and ill say it again, this laptop is the dogs dangley bits. built like a tank. i cant give advice on the 8662 but if its anything like the m86tu you will be delighted with your purchase.

 

Mr DJ's m15x story is a fun read. I recommend it. I think there are a couple of other m15x horror stories floating around here as well.

Mr DJ: the NP8662 = M860TU (just new trim revision right?). Yeah, I forgot as well and thought he meant the 17incher until I looked it up -.- We call them M860TUs more often, as many sellers have the model and the base is a Clevo (which is the important part, not Sager - as Sager also sells Compals)

 

thanks Tarentum, glad i kept you amused for a while
so its the same shows how much ive looked up on newer computers cos im so happy with mine.
have to totally agree with you on a couple of points. the keyboard is a little springy and i must admit i did prefer the m15x keyboard (shhh! dont tell anyone i actually bigged AW up on something ) but you get used to it after a while.
also the turbo memory. imo what a waste of time. on the AW i had the 1gb card = never worked (like the rest of the computer) and on my m860tu i had the 2gb card = that never worked either so i got kobalt to rip it out. as you said wow! 10-15 seconds faster on loading. do we really need this. ok you own the fastest 15.4" laptop in the world (at the moment) so its nice to have everything fast but with all its problems even with the new 4gb card is it really worth the hassle.

 

Thanks for all the replies everyone! And thanks for all the info Tarentum! I'm pretty much ready to order, I'm going to get the P9600 thanks to everyones advice! I think I have all my issues worked out except the HDD, what can I do about this? Will a 5400RPM HDD to combat heat hurt my performance? I know a notebook cooler is good and great but I will be taking this notebook between classes, to work, home, and even friends houses. So I obviously can't carry my 3lb NZXT cooler around and setup shop everywhere to protect the HDD.

 

Hehe, I was only amused because I read it after you had it sorted out Didn't mean to laugh at your misfortune, but laugh at the incompetence of Alienware.

Yeah, I got used to the keyboard. I *think* one of the BIOS revisions fixed a small bug that some people have noticed - some keypresses aren't registered, or similar? I haven't updated my BIOS and I might have seen this a few times, but it's minor (and another reason to update BIOS/make sure you get one with updated BIOS).

Hehe, agreed on the memory. I guess I can see it if you're a graphic artist and use Photoshop/CAD/etc a lot and an M860TU is your work-at-home computer or similar, then turbo memory might be a good idea (also your employer might pay for it ). Otherwise it saves very little time, costs more, and has been buggy for people/interfered with other aspects of the notebook (right? I vaguely remember some threads complaining about this but I didn't check too closely).

But yeah, I've been happy with mine.

Second2Last: Apparently the performance of hard drives in recent models depends more on how new it is/the brand than the speed, especially for notebook drives. I've noticed this with desktop ones as well, and a few manufacturers (WD) have dropped the rate at which the spindles spin (rpm) from their drives, as it doesn't always relate to access and transfer speeds. I have an eSATA external that I run games from that's about 25-30% faster than my internal 5400rpm (and I have an *older* hard drive, with an extra spindle, 3x100GB instead of two), if that helps, so that would be about the speed difference between a 7200rpm and a 5400rpm. I think the heat difference is more important than that speed increase - especially since 1) heat will affect the life of your hard drive and possible loss of your data and 2) your battery life is greatly decreased at 60C (for example).

I bought my (cheap 300GB Hitachi, 3 spindle) hard drive with the intent of eventually upgrading the internal hard drive to solid state when 250GB ones are affordable (a year or so, maybe more), so heat and speed issues will be a lot less then. That would be a good solution for you - otherwise try to get a good brand with the fewest # of spindles you can find (i.e. Seagate's rated for higher temps, fewer spindles the better).

 

How would having a 5400rpm drive affect me during game play? Like longer load times, lag, long save times?

 

Longer load times mostly.

Note that playing a game on the same drive as your OS also greatly decreases speed/performance, as is having anything in the background (I yank out every unneeded process from XP, etc).

 

I never knew that! But how do you not play on the same HDD as the OS? Do you just install the game to another drive and run it from there?

 

dont worry Tarentum, i read it now and laugh.
im just soooooo glad i got rid of it before my screen broke.
im not sure if its in that same thread but did you hear about when my 3dmark06 scores dropped from 9000 to 3000 overnight. they received it back at AW and said they couldnt find anything wrong with it. i then pointed out about 4 jpeg pictures id put on the desktop. 1 hour later i get another call to be told my motherboard had fried. when i received it back a week later they had changed the chassis as well but sent me someone elses with their nameplate on it. i must admit i do laugh at that now.

anyway back to buisiness

what part of the world are you from. is it hot in your country most of the year unlike me in the uk. this will also have an affect on your temps.
my 7200 western digital HD stays at a steady 51c even after playing games for hours. it only reaches the 61-62c mark when im defragging. this is because the clevo brain doesnt think defrag is a heavy intensive action so the fans dont kick in so that is why you get higher temps. 65c is when damage can be caused to hard drives. ive never used a cooler and have had no problems so far.

 

I'm in the east coast of the USA so the summers are too hot and the winters are too cold. Do you play very graphics or cpu intensive games? The hd could really make or break this for me, I don't trust myself to monitor the temps properly and knowning my luck I will burn out my hard drive.

 

Yep, well I use an external for games that take long to load (Witcher...) and it helps a lot (more than having a faster internal would, if I only had one drive). A lot of people get multiple drives for this reason (in their desktop, or their 17inch notebooks, some of which can support 3 HDDs). BIG speed decrease if run on the same drive as the OS - just having to do with how many things are accessing the drive.

Mr. DJ: my favorite part was someone else's nameplate

The point about room temperatures is a very good one too. When it was freezing indoors (low 60s) my hard drive sat at the low 40s, without a cooler. Also, I wouldn't worry about monitoring your temps - you can feel if it's too hot through the lower right palm rest (is this good or bad? >.> but temps above 55C are noticeable). Then again, both of us here had early M860TUs, which means early drivers and considering that the new Intel SATA drivers that were released a couple of days ago are *so* much better than previous ones (eSATA was what I noticed, and I guess I should check temps) it might be a driver issue.

edit: I'm sitting here at 43C with my fan on low, normal speed, running a bunch of applications/a lot of HD accesses, and room temperature is probably around 72F. Lower than I remember - hey guys, tell me your temps after new Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers

 

lucky you wanna do a swop and you can come to london. at least you get a summer hopefully off to orlando and vegas this year.
ive played crysis,crysis warhead, crysis wars, cod4 & 5, far cry 1 & 2,bioshok & tom clancys vegas 1 & 2 and have had no problems at all with any of them. while playing games my HD has not gone over 51c and you cant get better than that unless you use a cooler.

 

I owned mine np9262 for about a month now and all i have to say is that sager laptops are one of the best laptops i've ever owned which include sony and hp laptops.

So far no cooling issues as i have my zalman nc-2000 together although the left palm area gets a little warm whenever i'm gaming but not to a distant of discomfort though.

Overall it is a great performing laptops which include it's speaker altough an additional build in subwoofer will be better. Currenty i'm listening to music and gaming as well, no distortion at all with volume up to 90%...

Conclusion sager is a good buy among all laptop brands, mine definitely is .

 

So would you recommend using a external drive for all my games? Would I have to put steam on the external drive since it automatically patches games and saves them to the steam directory? Also would you be willing to recommend a good high capacity drive for use with the NP8662? I have done some searches and there are a bunch of different models and they say to good what would be best for your type of notebook.

@ MrDJ
Haha I would love to but after I buy a notebook I won't have the cash for awhile! And thanks for listing all those examples, I have a lot of those games and will be playing several of them so that's good to know it won't kill the HDD, I also plan to play RTS games like Empire Total War and Dawn of War II and battles in those games can go on for hours and are very cpu/gpu intensive so that's another worry..

I have a few more questions, I'm sorry for posting so many but I want to learn everything I can.

1. My NZXT cooler does a great job but it only cools the upper portion of the notebook, will this work okay with the NP8662? I know the fan is in the upper portion but the hard drive is located at the bottom.

2. One of the optical drive options is 2X Blue-Ray Read/8X DVDRW Super Multi Combo Drive. The problem is I don't see CD-r on that, does that mean it won't be able to run CDs and only Blu Ray and DVD?

3. How well does the mic work? I noticed it's practically right under the palm rest.

Once again thank you to everyone who has replied, I appreciate the help!

 

Dude stop misleading people. Do you even know the bandwidth difference between external and internal drives?

Yea, except the 3 HDDs they have in desktop/laptop are internal.

Longer loading time yes, probably few seconds. In game performance? No, it's all about RAM when you get there. Except games like crysis in single mode.

I guarantee you it will burn CR-R, CD+R, CD-RW

 

There's no such thing as CD+R...

And external drives have the same bandwidth as internal if they are using e-sata, which is what they are talking about here.

I don't think it's practical to have games installed on an external drive, as it negates the point of having a laptop - portability. Besides, as you mentioned it only affects loading times, and not really by that much...

 

actually i think youll find there is.
CD+R and CD+RW are a bit like when videos first came out and you had vhs & betamax.
only a few makes will take + cd discs and that is why the didnt last that long. the majority are now only available in dvd+/r/rw

 

I know exactly what DVD+R and BD+R are, but didn't think CD's ever had the 2 formats

I can also find no mention of CD+R on any website...

 

Yes, do you? My external maxes at 90MB/s (average 75MB/sish) and my internal maxes at 63MB/s or so (average 35MB/sish), with an access time of 14.3ms versus 28ms (significant, probably more so than transfer speed, but as I said I have a very slow 5400rpm older hdd). Have you run badly programmed games like The Witcher, with 30second+ loading screens every few minutes? No?

To be honest, I mostly have an external for extra storage, and secondly for speed (I have a 7200rpm which I would be using that's quite a bit faster than WD green drive if this was the primary concern). I don't game on battery power and I don't move this notebook around much (a 15.4incher isn't exactly portable). It's also easy to have multiple installs of a game if need be, whether with multiple OS's or with programs that remap install paths in under a minute (things like Application Mover, which works really well on every game I've moved around).

But yeah, just loading times, which shouldn't be horrible if a game is well programmed, on this notebook even on slower internals.

 

Esata for the win. I can't wait to use my external hard drive as it was intended.

 

Yeah, it was a good investment for me, especially at the hard drive prices these days. $89 for a 1TB WD green drive and $40 for an AMS eSATA enclosure (my favorite, alum + low speed fan, good chipset, not cheap but I've had bad experiences with cheap enclosures corrupting data/overheating).

Actually, I don't game much and streaming music/video and running applications that access your hard drive with hundreds of connections a second (>.>) have benefited the most.

 

Oh sorry guys, especially to Tarentum. I didn't read carefully, and missed the magic word "eSATA".

 

No worries, I rant at people plenty on here, hehe.

 

Hello,

I just wanted to thank most of the people contributing in this thread.. I was shopping for a gaming laptop for a month or so now, after returning my dell xps to dell.. I was considering alienware and the gateway, but knowing that most of you have been satisfied with little to no problems, ill go ahead and start my pre ordering.

Just one question. What is the diff between the T and the P processors?? besides the obvious wattage, is there any other significance? which is better and why? Thanks alot!

 

A lower wattage should mean a bit more battery life. Not to mention take a little less power consumed while plugged in, if you care about power usage.

 

Both are Penryn 45nm chips, core 2 duos. According to Intel, the 'P' is 'medium voltage' and the T is 'standard voltage' (high). T's run slightly faster than Ps in general (makes sense, more power). For comparison, the two chips being talked about in this thread, T9800 and P9600, compared:

Core 2 Duo P9600 SLGE6 (E0) 2667 MHz 6 MB 1066 MT/s 10x 1.050V - 1.212V 25 W Socket P December 28, 2008 AW80576SH0676MG $348

Core 2 Duo T9800 SLGES (E0) 2933 MHz 6 MB 1066 MT/s 11x 1.050 - 1.212V 35 W Socket P December 28, 2008 AW80576GH0776MG $530

So higher speed (by a bit), slightly larger multiplier, nearly $200 more, and otherwise identical. Small gain for a lot more money and heat. I'm not sure whether one's more overclockable than the other (common sense says the lower one, but I haven't checked, as I don't think it's a good idea to be overclocking notebooks that I want to last a long time).

 

thanks for the quick reply guys..

Well.. im a lil confused as to what processor to get,

1. 45nm Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P9600 / 6MB L2 Cache, 2.66GHz, 1066MHz FSB [+$165.00]

2. 45nm Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T9800/ 6MB L2 Cache, 2.93GHz, 1066MHz FSB [+$360.00]

3. 45nm Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Processor Q9000 / 6MB L2 Cache, 2.0GHz, 1066MHz FSB [+$170.00]

I was initially going to go for the p9600 due to its low wattage, and the slight edge on the battery life.. but i'd like to know what u guys think.. im not an extreme hardcore gamer, but i do put in about 15-25 hrs a week into cod4/crysis/daw2/witcher.. if u were buying it, what one wud u get?

 

Get the P9600. The T9800 offers an insignificant increase for the price you pay. The Q9000 won't really provide any benefit unless all you use are multi-threaded applications, which aren't too widespread at this point. More than likely, you'll actually take a hit on processing performance because the single cores have lower clocks than a P9600.

 

I have a few comments to make on Sager and purchasing one through Xotic.

I have a NP9260. I bought it as a desktop replacement. I run a 3 VMWare servers on it so the 3 drives and quad core were under load a lot of the time.

I was happy with the performance but I must have gotten a lemon on the quality side. I'd recommend buying an extended warranty if you are going to this kind of money on a Sager. The DVD died within 1 month, the integrated camera driver would cause VMWare to blue screen and just as the warranty ran out the NIC died. I use an external keyboard mostly but the laptop keyboard had one or two sticky keys, not as durable as my Dell. The screen had 2 bad pixels unfortunately one near the center, used external monitor so this wasn't so bad. They do run hot but hey it's a quad core with 3 drives...I never saw any issue due to the heat.

As for Xotic, don't expect much from them they will just forward you to Sager if you have any issues. they don't have anyone technical in house from what I saw.

Both Sager and Xotic have friendly peole working there but Xotic doesn't really add any value and the Sager hardware is of poor quality. I've mainly had high end Dell laptops so that is what I'm basing my experience on to date.

 

are u saying sager hardware is of poor quality? im confused..

 

No, Sager's hardware isn't of poor quality; however, it seems (from other folks' past experience) that their quality control mechanisms are a little more primitive than those at places like _Dell and suchlike - the upshot being that a few more bad apples slip past them and end up in customers' systems than would typically happen at a place like _Dell. Of course, given that there's generally a pricing premium to be paid if you want a _Dell or some other national brand, you have in effect already paid for that additional quality control, whether you wanted to or not.

Essentially, it comes down to an honest self-appraisal of your own appetite for risk, and your own evaluation of the cost-benefit ratios. Of course, if you want the same peace of mind, then you pay for the extended warranty, which is tantamount to the pricing premium on the national brands, and more or less puts you in the same place you would have been with a national brand - the only difference being that you got to decide whether or not you wanted to pay that premium, a choice you don't get with the national brands.

 

if i do happen to be the unlucky one to land a bad apple, do the resellers have any issues with returns/exchanges? What has experience from other people conclude??

 

I can't speak from personal experience (unfortunately ); however, from what I've seen on the forum over the years, people have generally not had too many complaints about returns/exchanges with the reputable resellers.

 

PS: don't get the gateway FX. its way overhyped. I bought it and I returned it...I even stomached the 15% restocking fee...did not like it one bit, it had terrrrible cooling, a terrible screen, a non-replaceable GPU, and bad build quality.

 

I've had my Sager 5793 for about a month now and it's definetly the best notebook I've owned ! Prior was an HP and Gateway.

Far superior build quality ! Also using a Zalman Cooler, see sig., and while playing Mass Efect for hours, feels like an air conditioner running under my notebook................no heating issues !

Also, after 8 days of use, my gpu went bad, xotic sent me an RMA, ups shipping label, via e-mail , sent notebook to Sager and recieved it back within a week ..............Good support !