NP8660 - Good mixed with bad...

Hi all,

Well I recieved my Sager NP8660 about a week ago and only just had the opportunity to give it a proper try (although I'm still writing this on my T61p, will take a while to change it over!).

I'll keep this short:
+ve's:

• Bright, clear screen - I have not seen ANY graininess, and I use my screens all the time. It matches the beautiful Sony Vaio SZ screens I've had recently and is far superior to the one on my T61p.
• The noise is actually fine, it's not too loud and you will not notice it in an office or anywhere other than silence. The Quiet fan mode is very useful, it will slow down the fan - and CRUCIALLY will start it again when it needs to rather than letting your new laptop melt.
• The keyboard is good, I prefer the lenovo keyboard but few can match this. To you Lenovo owners, I'm still getting used to having Fn and Ctrl round the 'right' way. It has no flex.
• The build quality of this model is excellent, it's a rip of the Vaio SZ only bigger, with the same brushed metal finish.
• Fingerprint reader - unfortunately didn't have this on my Lenovo and missed it from the Vaio SZ. Works well where it is.
• Not as hefty as it looks in pictures, very neat in person.

-ve's:

• Issues I have been having. These may be just my laptop so will reference these later.
• There are no volume buttons...I know, I'm nitpicking...
• No option for a larger battery, so don't forget your power brick. My 'brick' has NO fan, and doesn't get that hot.
• The Bluetooth seems to disable every time I restart the system? (It took a while before I realised the bluetooth shortcut was Fn+F12!).
• Speakers don't seem to be the best. Again, compared to my T61p.

Big Issues (Please help me here!):

• Laptop will randomly freeze while in operation. By freeze I mean STOP processes. The stuff on the screen will stay the same, but the hard drive may spin down (even if the light stays on) and the hotbuttons at the top still work. Only option is to power off completely to reboot. Have tried reinstalling drivers to no avail. It will simply stop, the mouse won't move, etc.
• In DX10 games (these are the only ones I've noticed) there is a momentary frame drop every x seconds. It lasts for less than a second and I have seen other users mentioning it. Can be solved my removing the battery during gameplay - but WHY. And How can I avoid having to remove the battery when playing DX10 games like Crysis? (It has happened on Crysis and Mercs 2)

Help me fix these issues and the only negs will be small things. I have not encountered heat problems with the hard drive like others, I put this down to avoiding the 300GB seagate and going for the 200GB 7200RPM instead. For the issues above I have tried all the drivers under the sun and can't avoid the problems. Any specific thoughts are of course very welcome

I can post pictures of any needed parts if requested, they are all already on my T61p.

 

Hi sourcez and nice mini review.
can we see some temps please and 3Dmark06 scores.

the volume can be +/- using the fn key

 

Will do, I'll run it again now. Got 9500+ earlier.

Ya I knew about those, I'm just being annoying and wanting extra hotkeys

 

Manuals... Who reads them anyway?

Luckly, we have MrDJ to save the day...

 

what you mean you havnt read the 220 page manual yet milcs
i thought you would have learnt it back to front by now.

ps. its tuesday milcs, heard anything yet

 

This sounds like a video driver problem to me. I suggest you try a different one.

 

Scored 9588 3dMarks (06) and temps reached 60 on the HDD and 53 on the Cores.

Note I had been playing a game for about an hour, followed immediately by these readings. Will try to retest tomorrow.

I've just noticed that I didn't mention my specs.
It's the P9500 at 2.53GHz with 2Gb RAM, 200GB 7200RPM and Windows XP.

 

Also, I have tried changing the video drivers to all sorts and it hasn't solved the problem.

 

run a hard drive diagnostic test, see if you got bad sector. also are you on vista?

 

Nope.
..........

 

good 3D score.
temps are ok but if HD goes over 65 then start worrying.

 

all your issues beside complaints about low battery life i think are software based.. and not your laptop...

i really think the battery life on the np8660 is very poor.. 2hours power saver is pethetic i think... esp with a 8cell and esp considering what alienware and dell have got out of sim hardware.... i would very much encourage clevo to rerelease the m860tu with mabye a nivida motherboard and hybrid SLi or some thing.. to boost the battery life to 3hours+

lucky for me ive found that for my use its ok.. as i need to be running on high performance all the time for my games/work... but yer..

would have liked more battery life sigh thank god it feels so nice in the hands gosh i love its finish makes me sqweeem

 

^^ seems software based.

the benchmarks seem fine.

then it means the game(s) needs to be updated and tweaked, and/or the drivers need to be updated or tweaked.

 

I also think it's software based.
Temps are fine, and you`re within the benchmarking values.
Might be the hdd, though.
Get HDTune and to a full test, it has an option to check for errors.

 

I know Clevo/Sager is mainly hardware but I believe that's their job to ship us some correct drivers. When I try to go on sleep, the computer crashes half the time and Vista says windows was not shutdown properly.

But I believe the system freeze is more Windows related... As a last resort, you should try to reinstall.

 

Once again you have a gaming computer, if you don't like the low battery life then get something else.

 

aahhaha ? : You think something is wrong with that?

 

This is what it sounds like as well to me, or a bad OS install / corrupt sector in some crucial OS component. It doesn't sound like a video driver issue to me if the hard drive spins down. Alternatively, it could be some sort of driver conflict, but that shouldn't freeze/hard crash you; you don't get blue screens, sourcez?

As for the directx10 issue - as far as I'm aware, DX10 doesn't run as well, and few games handle it correctly (still?), so I'm planning on staying away from it for most of the time. It sounds like attempting to charge the battery interferes takes up a lot of resources and/or interferes with some DX10 function. The lag spikes/etc don't appear in DX9 games? Really odd!

 

Sorry for the delay in replying!

I've done chkdsk and some other HDD utils to make sure and there were no reported problems so looks like the HDD is ok. The funny thing is it's often quite cold when I'm working so I miss the warmth of the HDD when I'm using the T61 - lol.

No blue screens thankfully, had my fill of those. I've been using the laptop without the battery and it seems to alleviate most of the problems...just unfortunate that I can't use it with.

I may try reinstalling XP to see whether that was the cause; as I only have the T61 for a couple more days and the workstation is going to...leaving me with a laptop I hope will be reliable

No lag spikes in any DX9 games I've tried...and like you I'm lost. Do they utilise a part of the chip that's not used in DX9 play or something?

And I am disappointed about the battery. Perhaps I missed a driver or something. Does anyone else have a estimated time remaining? This is the first laptop I've ever had which is incapable of working out how much life I can expect.

Thanks to all of you for your comments so far!

 

Today i took the back off of the machine while it was running. Ive been making some custom heatsinks, and im going to place so small custom fans in the machine to make it run cooler.

Anyways, while poking around, i touched the gpu/fairly warm, i touched the cpu/fairly warm. Then i touched the harddrive, and holy crap i burnt my finger. I mean literly, its to hott to touch. I hoping my exta cooling will fix this.

 

what spec have you got morbidrazor and what make of hard drive.
have you done the heat tests yet.
when you get a chance could you fill out the mini forum heat survey in my sig below. thanks

 

Ive got the 5400rpm 500gb harddrive. The max ive seen on it so far was 66c. Which is way to high for something with all of my important busniess information on it. Im hoping my heatsink mod will help.

 

Hdd@66°c.......

 

Same here. I reached 66 once, but now, the max is like 63 and I idle at 53-55.

 

Wow that's quite hot, don't think mine gets that high and it's a 7200...

Will try fixing my issues tomorrow - I think I may have narrowed it down to the ACHI....will wait and see...

 

its recommended that over 65c for the HD is worrying.

 

Well I'm reinstalling XP and the drivers and monitoring the latency as I go.

Was below 20 with just XP on, it rose slightly after loading the chipset, LAN & hotkey drives.

It then rose quite a lot when the sound drivers were loaded. to 50-70 idling.

No change when Video drivers loaded or the rest of the drivers loaded.

Just activated Windows, and updating to SP3 then will test the Wifi drivers.

Nothing has changed, this is yet another reinstall yet I haven't seen the problem yet :O

 

With SP3 back to 20-30 idling.

Makes me wish I still had my desktop - I could always rip out components I didn't want

 

Going on the same lines as sourcez, I am having the same problems with my NP8660. It freezes up, specially while watching videos, however it has done it otherwise too. I am running Vista 32-bit, and have reformatted and reinstalled everything, including the drivers. Ran a checkdisk, but nothing showed up on that. The laptop runs cool, and I really dont think its a cooling issue. The freeze just locks up everything. No mouse, keyboard response. The screen stops exactly where it was, so does the sound, if in a video. Updated vista, and no new updates are available at this time. And this happens pretty often, a lot more often while watching videos.
I tried the video driver on the CD provided by sager, are there any other 9800M GT drivers which are compatible with NP8660, or is it not related to the video driver at all?

 

Run Memtest86 as well, as it could be bad RAM (and stuff of this sort, random freezing on a new system, tends to be RAM related).

Oh wait, I said this in the other thread ;D It's the same person.

 

Are you talking about the hard drive?

 

LOL!! Yeah you did. Sorry about talking about this on 2 posts.
i uninstalled the older driver, and tried installing the new one, but it gave me an error (on a different computer, hence cant post a screenshot of the error) which had something to do with SP1. Tried installing the older driver again from the CD provided by sager, but now even that is giving the same problem. it says the driver is available, but cant be installed. And yes, i did cleanly uninstall the driver before i tried installing a new one.
So officially, i am really bummed. and how long does the disk check take? Its already been over 2hrs, and its still running. Should it last this long??BTW, still havent gotten to the RAM check till now, so cant say what is wrong.
I will be really cross if i have to reinstall VISTA, AGAIN!!

 

Disk check or memtest86?

Disk check depends on the size of your hard drive, but 2 hours or so sounds on the low end. If there are errors or bad sectors, it goes slower on them too. Memtest86 takes ages - leave it overnight (like 8 hrs or so?). Have you tried running any other operating systems, since it might be a Vista problem?

 

Well I didnt need to run memtest86. My disk check hung somewhere around 53% and on the 5th out of 5th stage. This was when it had been running for 4hrs now and stuck at the same place for 45mins. I just restarted it, and now its not freezing up any more. I hope this has solved the issue. thanks a lot for all the help everyone.

 

Cool; glad to hear it. I would personally run check disk overnight until it completes successfully - as there may be more corrupt sectors that it hasn't repaired. Those two programs are usually the first line of defense in figuring out "why am I crashing? :/"