Current Crop of Sager/Clevo Machines Hardware Cycle - Run Down Please

Hello,

I've been away for a bit and will likely be looking to replace my current X7200 (sig) in the future with a newer machine in the same vein (though likely smaller and less of a monster). I know there is alot of information here on the forum, but in general - in terms of refresh cycles; where are the current breed sitting hardware wise (i.e. gpu upgrades expected, cpu upgrade expected, etc).

Thanks

 

The top dogs are the P150/157SM (15.6") difference is looks and 2nd 7mm bay for the 157. P170SM/P177SM for 17.3". Difference is just looks really on these two. The 370/375SM are the dual card machines with a mobile processor (so are smaller than yours) or you have P570WM as the direct replacement for yours.

 

Thanks for that run down. Hardware wise though, are you aware of any new CPU or GPUs on the horizon (i.e. refreshes) that are due in the near future (i.e. within the next month)? Or have those been recently refreshed? I believe the CPUs are fairly current, but wasn't sure about GPUs.

 

Desktop GPUs are refreshed in the fall usually. Around September-November. Mobile refreshes usually in the spring, or Q2. Announced in May but availability not until late June/July.

But can't always go by that. The 675MX is more powerful than the 770M still just because of the memory bandwidth.

I haven't seen anything significant from either AMD or Nvidia yet. AMD has a few desktop cards using new stuff, but most of it is rebadges. Nvidia supposedly will have Maxwell, but will have to wait and see what improvements there are over Kepler. But for me, I'd forget GCN2 from AMD, sounds like its just fixing the flaws and mistakes of GCN, or not, probably make the same ones.

 

Well the next amd gpus likely wont change anything mobile wise. Nvidia are releasing their next gpu in the first half of next year depending on TSMC's process.

 

Others have covered the GPUs. As far as the CPUs, Haswell was released very recently and there will not be a refresh on that microarchitecture for some time. We are awaiting a refresh on the chipset, however (code named Lynx Point), though nobody seems to know of an exact release date on it.

 

FYI, the Haswell refresh is to fix a USB 3.0 sleep issue. Basically a USB 3.0 drive will not show up after waking from sleep mode. The fix is to unplug and replug in the USB device. Intel says that there will be no data lose. Of course the other fix is this refresh, which fixes the bug. The refresh is known as the C2 stepping, or C2 version.

 

Yes exactly! But just to clarify, it's not a refresh of Haswell the chip, but of the chipset.

 

We also typically see a few refreshes before Haswell is replaced totally. For example the 4700MQ may go to the 4720MQ then 4740MQ before it totally replaced. With each refresh they typically bump up clock speeds by 100Mhz. We havent seen any dates of that happening though, its just what has happened with the last 3 gens.