NP7660 unboxing

UPS should be here anytime in the next hour or two.

Stay tuned for initial thoughts/impressions.

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Update:

Ok! Posting this from the NP7660. Sorry it took me a bit, had to run into work to look at an issue with it (see below), locked my keys in the car, and then had to jump back in the car and run some errands.

I'll have pictures forthcoming, but I wanted to get the initial impressions out to you all asap. Brief background on myself; I'm a graduate student by trade, and a computer tech to pay the bills, so I'm fairly familiar with laptops.

Purchasing Experience

Donald and his team at Powernotebooks were both helpful and knowledgable. Being a computer tech and formor salesman myself, I appreciate the way they run their business. I received my notebook about 6-7 business days after the order was placed. Nice.

Unboxing (pics coming)

Everything was pretty simple here. Well packaged. Notebook comes with Driver CD, Nero, a screen cloth, and of course the power adaptor.

Upon taking it out of the box, the first thing I noticed was the glossy black finish. Looks great, but is also a huge fingerprint magnet. Still, my hands stay clean and dry, so I love the look. It's also nice not having lots of gaudy stickers to take off.

Notebook feels solid. Hinges feel great. The "white" keyboard/handrest isn't really white. Sort of a sandy/granite look. Very very nice.

Screen

Beautiful. 1280X800 Glossy on a 15.4" looks great. I was originally going to get a 10" MSI Wind, so this is tons of realestate for my needs.

Hinges

Feel pretty solid. Granted I'm not stressing them just to test it (my new notebook!) but they open and close smoothly and without any noticable flex.

Heat and Noise

So far it has been very quiet, and fairly cool. Slightly warm air comes out of the vent, but it's not audible unless the system is cranked, and even then it's quiet. I haven't run prime95 or anything, but it didn't become annoying while installing Windows.

Keyboard

Right away I noticed this notebook's one major problem. The Keyboard. I knew that I'd be getting a keyboard a bit louder than I'd prefer, but this basically is so bad I consider it defective. Left side is fine, but right side litterally "rattles" with every key that's pressed. Before even loading the OS, I took it into work to have the other laptop tech take a look. I called Sager, and told them I'm comfortable taking it out to see if I could identify the problem, but I wanted permission first so as not to void my warrenty. They were helpful and told me to go for it and let them know.

I pulled the keyboard out thinking that it wasn't fully set, or that perhaps a piece of rubber behind it could brace it, but sure enough it was set in fine. It's the keyboard itself that is rattling, and not the keyboard hitting the body like I first thought. I'll call Sager back tomorrow and ask them to send me a new keyboard to see if it fixes the problem. Hopefully I won't have to RMA the entire unit.

For those of you worried, unless more reports of this start cropping up, this appears to be an individual unit problem. Given the left side of the keyboard is fine, I wouldn't expect to see this issue in any other units, so any of you looking at the NP7660 or NP7680 probably have nothing to worry about... just yet.

Touchpad

The touchpad is the best I've ever used. Really. The "single unit" design with the buttons looks sweet, and feels nice as well. I'm not sure what I like about it so much, but it feels very smooth and responsive. It doesn't have that "touchpad friction" that most units have.

First Impressions

All around a very nice unit assuming I can get the keyboard fixed. After putting another 2gb of ram in for $35 (my store cost) and paying for shipping, the total came to $895. If I had to do it all over again, I would strongly consider that new 16.4" Sony which I saw on sale for $999, but my Sager has ESATA, so other than Sony aesthetics and a far better keyboard (Sony keyboards are the best out there, period) I suppose my new Sager is technically supperior.

Overall, I'm quite happy with my new laptop, and will enjoy the freedom that a ODM unit brings, like open mini-PCI slots and a nice bios.

I'll update this with further heat/noise tests, and get some idea on battery life, etc. I suspect I'm going to just positive things to say after this post.

I'll get some pictures up asap. It's been a crazy day.

Update 2

Pics!

 

Pix! Pix! Pix!


I hope I wasn't too long-winded or inscrutable.

 

Cool, I have not had a chance to see the new models... that werent the high-end gaming ones.

and Shyster... that reply was still too long for my tastes... (I like books with pictures)

 

Preferably the pop-up style.

 

Be careful what you wish for

 

Where's your initial impressions?

 

nice! looking forward to this

 

can the integraded graphics handle any games let us know...

 

disappear..

 

hopefully Bardia is not like the "I got my alienware m17x" guy.

 

lol hopefully not =P

 

^^I think you should post the review in the first post.

 

Doh!

(/self smack)

 

nice to hear the notebook is good hopefully the keyboard problem will get fixed soon =). knowing that it has entegraded graphics i was wondering if it can do any gameing well not hardcore gameing obviously. just wondering =D

 

Based on other benchmarks, I'm sure I'll have no problems with basic stuff. All I play these days is high end FPSes (which I won't be playing on this) and DOTA. So as long as I can play DoTA and maybe Starcraft II when it comes out, I'll be quite content.

I'll be loading my software onto it over the next few days, so I'll let you know how the DoTA pwning goes.

 

sounds great

 

After some very minor undervolting (-.1v) coretemps only read 58C after 5 minutes of full orthos. Haha. Neat.