My NP8660 noob review

So I just got this baby 2 days agoi. It is important to note that this is my first laptop thus my humble review will be [not sure what the word I'm looking for here, biased, one sided?].. Though I've used friends' laptops on occasions..

specs:
- Display: 15.4" WSXGA+ "Glare Type" Super
- Processor: ~Intel® P9500 45nm "Montevina" C
- Video Card: 512MB PCI-Express nVidia GeForce
- Ram: ~ 4,096MB DDR3 1066MHz Dual Chan
- Primary Hard Drive: ~ 200GB 7200RPM (Serial-ATA II 3
- Battery: Smart Li-ion Battery (8-Cell)

Almost all the reviews here are great and pretty accurate.. this is the closest thing to the perfect little laptop. Except that its much lighter than I thought, the battery life is much longer too [3 hours serving the web, watching videos, and installing stuff on high performance power setting g[I didn't notice it wasn't pluged till it warned me at 10%. and about an hour and a half playing COD4 on high settings]

My 200GB 7200RPM doesn't seem to heat that much, it gets considerably warmer than the rest of the laptop but no noticeable problems

For those who are interested, it goes up to 12 million polygons in Zbrush with the redault memory setting [compared to my desktop that goes up to 16 mill with 8 GB of DDR2]. and it handles 700 thousand polygons in maya nicely.

It looks much nicer in person than all the pics I found online. It is actually pretty slick and unique, I love it. As soon as I saw it I scraped all my plans design and order a sticker for its cover.

problems/issues [which you might be able to solve] :

- speakers' sound is pretty low. its fine for almost everything but sometimes it is a problem watching videos on youtube with bad or low sound quality it is very hard to hear. I'm wondering if there is a little utility tool to boost the volume beyond what windows allows me to

- the volume when I connect ear phones in it is very low. on max vol and playing the loudest music I have [the green sound visualization bar in vista reaching the top] it sounds about 40%-50% the volume I get from my 20$ MP3 player.. not sure if it is ahardware problem or what.

- the alarm sound when the battery is at 10% is way too loud. I think it generated by a different speaker than the laptop's main speakers.. I'm just wondering if there is a way to lower it.. today it freaked out my friends.. it sounded like a fire alarm or something.

conclusion:
over all, I'm very pleased with this laptop. It is everything I hoped it would be and more [excluding the issues above]. I bought the laptop mainly to be able to do the work I do on my high end desktop at school, with friends, and at work meetings, thats when I'm most inspired and in the mood to get work done and it is doing its job very well. I'd encourage anyone looking for a laptop to consider this one or other Sager models

PS: this is probably filled with typos and grammar errors, my apologies. It is 3 am. I will keep you updated.

PS2: if you have any questions about the laptop's performance in 3D programs like Maya, Zbrush, Vue, Boujou, Blender, unreal and crytek engines.. let me know.

 

You can turn the battery warning sound off in the BIOS, press f2 on startup I believe, before it boots your operating system.

 

Nice review.

you can increase the sound quality and volume of the on-board sound card:

The sound quality is good, its need some configuration within the RealTek software (Sound Manager).
Set the Environment option to Carpeted Hallway.
And if you want even more quality, set the Equalizer to Soft (as in Soft Rock)

Try it, it worked well for several people, using WinAmp especially.

As for volume control, make sure to open the full Volume Control in windows and make sure that the WAVE and MASTER volume settings are max... sometimes they are not by default.
- you might have to go to Options > Properties and check the boxes to show all of the volume options.

 

Hey 'Psycho', I guess you can change your sig from 'future laptop' to 'current laptop' now. Don't worry about the errors either, the review doesn't read half-bad. Good to see you're happy with the notebook.

 

oh cool, I'll check it out on my next reboot. I hope they have a vol control instead of a simple on off switch, thanks.

Actually I've always thought of all those sound filters as useless, till today. I just messed with it for a bit and it got rid of all the hissing noise keeping the same volume.. The settings I chose:
Environment: Padded Cell
Equalizer: Classical
I use winamp too.. I'm pretty sure it plays music at max vol since its pretty loud and the green bar in vista reaches the top [checked all the settings adn subsettings of subsettings.. my main problem is videos [mainly on youtube] with an already low volume so low that its hard to hear on max vol .. I'm just wonderng if I can boost it even more than what vista allows me to..

Thanks for the tip. the filters made a huge difference, I'm impressed.

lol.. I've been dreaming about this moment for years.. changing my sig now!

 

I agree with the sound issues, but it seems to be a problem not with the sound card or its programs but the videos playing - and the lack of a good program for windows that does the equivalent of OSX's "Audio Hijack Pro" (which lets you equalize sound and gets rid of low volume ceilings in web videos and the like).



Edit: PS - not a noob review

 

Hahah, I love how you underlined 'Current'

Also, sadly there isn't a volume control for the battery critical sound, since its actually a motherboard beep. It's just an on/off switch.

 

cool review.

 

good for you dude

some pichurs would have been nice

 

how was the delivery process with Xotic? Was it UPS Express+GST+PST as usual? any random/hidden fees?

 

ive ordered mine from pro-star hope it gets here in montreal safe ^^

 

I believe he had the same experience like me except the UPS-pain-because-there's-no-one-home.

 

Xotic customer service is one of the best out there. everything went smoothly. I payed via wire transfer the order was processed and shipped 2 days after the payment arrived. I just had to to pay tax on the door which was 300.

just make sure you read Livesoft's importing guide http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=290458
most useful info is that if you get UPS regular service which is about $50, you'd have to pay about $70 of brokrage fees. while if you get express for about $110 there are no brograge fees thus its slightly cheaper and much faster

hm, what kind of pictures would you like?

awesome.. I gotta mention that when I received one of the box's corner was flattened [it probably had a pretty bad drop/hit on that corner] which freaked me out at first but everything was fine inside, it was VERY well packaged.Also I was carrying the laptop when I accidentally bumped its corner into a wall, it actually chipped the paint off the wall without a scratch on the beast.

your reviews, guides, and replies were big help and what influenced me to get this beautiful machine. Thank you.

 

No I'm just kidding ya', it makes the reviews more, appealing , though.

But I have seen enough of them! I want one for myself!

 

Yeah I just ordered one from pro-star. I'm playing the waiting game at this point.

 

Not a "noob" review, rather a...

Splendid review.

 

Man $300 tax, that sucks! I'm curious as to what hard-drive you got Psycho but other than that nice review

 

Welcome to the rest of Canada. You dam Conservatives in Alberta are the only ones being spared of these socialist style taxes it seems.

 

Bah, its alright once the price of oil drops and people realise all these planned refineries and upgraders aren't going up we'll get a PST too.

Haha I can just imagine Albertans flipping out

 

Thank you.

on another note, I just learned something new [to me] today.. the ESata port also works as a USB port. I'm not sure if that is a standard thing with ESata ports.. but I'm impressed even more.

 

The only other laptop I've seen with that feature is the Dell Studio. Hey, if you have an esata hard drive, please let me know how its handling with this system.

 

I don't have an Esata drive. I'll let you know when I test one.