Just got my clevo D901c

Just arrived, in Afghanistan. I liked the options available from Avadirect and ordered through them. I sent it through a mailing service and requested double packaging. It arrived 9 days after leaving the United States.

I really like the computer, that goes without saying. I got it with a Q6600 slacr chip and 4 gigs of 800mhz memory, a single 8800m gtx and two 80gig 7200rpm hard drives in raid 0. I purchased the windows vista ultimate OS and the score it gave the computer was a 5.8. Avadirect did a 24 hour loop burn in with 3dmark06 and the score they sent with the paperwork is 6747. One thing I like about Avadirect is that they buy the computers from clevo, not sager. The laptop arrived in a nice clean state without any logos or stickers or markings beyong the model plate on the bottom of the computer. I put the intel sticker on the computer because I like that one, otherwise, I don't like logos on my computers. What the hell, its a quad, and nobody has a intel quad sticker on their laptops.

Being in afghanistan, my internet connection isn't the best so I don't think I'll be downloading other benchmark software anytime soon.

I've spent the last couple hours messing with the vista options. I've read posts of the forums about having trouble reading text with the WUXGA display set to the native 1900x1200 resolution but I've managed to increase the display of text to 120dpi from 90dpi and I've used large icons and the extra large mouse pointers and I think its not an issue for me with 20/20 vision to read the display at arms reach. The text size is comfortable.

I've had a couple hard crashes so far but I've been installing devices so I suppose thats expected. Hopefully it irons out as I continue to update.

I purchased a lachesis mouse from razer, the 4000 dpi mouse. I would recommend not to purchase this mouse, one of the first things I had to do was reduce the dpi to 2000. I installed bioshock as well and found the high dpi setting of the mouse to be overly sensative and wasteful. I'll continue to try and tweek it and see if I can find a reason to like the 4000dpi setting. Sometimes the mouse cursor wanders slightly when I hold the mouse steady, this is at 2000dpi. I've downloaded and installed the latest drivers from Razer so I'm not sure how to fix this problem yet.

As I type this I'm finding the keyboard to be smooth and quite but a bit hollow sounding. It feels just fine, my only complaint so far is that I wish the space bar was a bit longer to the right. I used my right thumb to space and I am barly catching the edge of the space bar.

Big computer, nice display, graphics are wonderful but I only played 10 minutes of bioshock.

Any guidance to useful vista tweeking guides or other resources would be welcome. Internet is slow and surfing can literally take days.

Oh, as a side note SHIPITAPO.com is the mail forwarding service I used. While the site is primarily for american APO and FPO addresses I believe they will ship anywhere, and they do the customs work for you which might expedite orders to people in different countries. I've seen thats a problem for some notebook purchasers. I get stuff mailed through them an avarage of 14 days faster than the other people here with me. Its worth checking out if you live outside the united states and are purchasing a laptop from that country.

 

If you want some more benchmarking tools, maybe put up a request asking if someone here will burn them onto a CD/DVD and mail it to you at your APO (which you should probably only give out by PM once someone's agreed to do so).

P.S. Take care of yourself over there.

 

mlongrie,

In OIF support right now, heading to Afghanistan this June (unless a Zama job comes up) - also have a D901c, but with the E6800. Was concerned about the quad cooling and figured the extra clock speed on the 3 GHz was worth more than the two cores. After seeing how cool this beast runs, I shouldn't have worried.

The mobo in your laptop - is it one of the newer (i.e. rev. 6, IIRC) mobos? I have a single 7950GTX - which runs fast as hell in evrerything I've thrown at it, including COD4 and Crysis - but am considering the 8800 GTX, and have heard concerns about that car both in single but mostly SLI. Since you are running one, I was wondering how it works for you, and thus the question about which mobo revision you have.

THX,
Army brother in SWA