NP9262 arrived, pics, benches, screenshots

Here's some teaser pics guys. If I can get a few shots later that are less cluttered (work desk is a mess) and some internal shots with some of the covers off, I will post back. I'd love to semi-disassemble this thing, but I am loading partition #1 with stuff for work, and partition #2 for personal use...and I haven't even started on the personal stuff yet. The other laptop pictured is an Acer Aspire 9300 17" WS, just to give you an idea. The laptop is surprisingly quiet, and to be honest, does not get as hot as I thought it would. Here's some pics for now:








here's a gpu-z shot, 4 cpu-z windows, and superpi mod 1M shot. Since this thing runs on a P965 chipset, I bet I can OC it! First, I'm going to go pop covers and take some more pics.

Full View link:
http://s125.photobucket.com/albums/p72/sabregen/?action=view&current=tests1.jpg
Thumbnail view:



okay guys, here's a few more of the new "work" laptop

bottom


Hard drive bays. This laptop can do 3 drives in RAID-5. Mine is setup for 2 in RAID-1


Picture of the MXM IV module slots, and you can just see the SO-DIMMS under the fan on the right.


Processor Heatsink/Heatpipe/Fan assembly for the Q6600


One with all of the covers off


Top of the lid, from the front


Right side has 4x USB 2.0 ports


Oddly, the rear is very uncluttered. This is due to all of the vent space required for cooling. Power, DVI and S-Video/Component output jack


Lots of things on the left side - VGA port, TV tune S-Video input and Antenna (covered by plastic cover), Modem, GbE, FireWire, ExpressCard 32/54, 7-in-1 Card reader, and Dual layer burner down below


Laptop w/lid opened. I can literally see myself as if it is a mirror when the display is not powered.


And finally...don't see these on too many laptops...yet



First run of 3dMark06, had things going on in the background. I will see if I can get a better score by pumping the card using ATiTool, and I'm looking for a prog that can read the PLL chip on the board to OC the processor.



Windows Vista Business x64 Experience Index...damned boss made me do RAID-1 instead of RAID-0



For those of you looking at this, keep in mind that the 4.8 score for disks is on the following:

Fujitsu 160GB MHW2160BH SATA 5400RPM in RAID-1

I'd love to test a RAID-0 just to see the difference, but the boss wants RAID-1, and he did pay for the machine. I guess I should be a good employee. That reminds me, I need to bring in my home machine and hook up the QuadroPlex 1000 version IV (dual quadro 5600's w/1.5GB of RAM each) and bench it against my new laptop!

 

Nice pics man, but my browser goes beserk when veiwing.... Maybe you can resize them?

 

I wanted to show full detail, but You're not the first to tell me to figure it out! It's done now, all set to 800x600, so it should be better. I have 2 partitions on this machine, both running Vista Business x64 edition (our work MSDN Partner license doesn't give us download for Vista Ultimate...but we get the key...weird). I tried to get XP Pro x64 on my personal partition, but the driver disk from Sager said that the OS wasn't supported. I'd rather run Vista Business for the work partition, and XP 64 bit for the personal one, but I really didn't want to go through the trouble of hunting down immature drivers for this machine's hardware for XP x64 edition, so I just went with Vista Business x64 instead. It's most likely due to the fact that I was getting impatient with the OS installations. My boss had us order the machines with no OS, so unlike most of you with these machines, when we got ours, I had to take to building a gold image for the first partition, using Vista Business x64 on 40 of the 160GB (RAID-1) that was available. Ours didn't go from the box to gaming immediately. Then, after I got that nailed down, and imaged to the other machine, and pushed to the domain, and checked that profiles were setup correctly, and logon scripts were mapping the drives correctly, then I got to move on to my personal partition. When I loaded XP x64, then got the "unsupported operating system" error from the autorun on the Sager driver disk...I kind of just said "AWWWWW....F-IT!" and went with Vista Business x64 on the personal partition too....tired of not playing games already!

I've got STALKER installed (was going to play through it again), but need to move The Witcher (Chapter IV is where I'm at on my home machine), Race07 (5th race of a career), and BioShock (I got stuck somewhere and moved onto The Witcher...need to finish it) over to the laptop, and take some FRAPS movies and caps and add them into the mix.

I can't believe I'm seeing people with over 10k in 3dMark06, but most of them seem to be on a flavor of XP with RAID-0, which is a bummer. We're thinking of going to 8GB on this machine, if we can get confirmation from Sager (we ordered direct) that the machine will suupport it. We also intend to drop in a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burner drive (or Super multi-format) when they get cheaper. We are also actively hunting a 320GB 2.5" SATA drive for realtively cheap to throw into bay #3 as a storage drive, as what I really want to do on the business side of the machine is run a few different flavors of virtual machine servers and play with them.

 

FRAPS averages between 35-65FPS during normal gameplay. Resolution set is 1920x1200, on High detail, and I'm running under Vista Business x64.

 

wow, that is a seriously nice rig.... and powerful too... drool.

 

Thank you much, sir. Coming from you, that's quite the compliment!

I am copying over my Witcher saves as we speak, and getting ready to run FRAPS in that game as well. Expect results in less than an hour.

 

O_O' its freak en huge..... looks nice though, but I'm kind of glad I didn't go that route.

 

I saw your post on Hard OPC, quite positive reactions you got there.
Usually it's like "gaming laptops are glorified pda's" etc. Nice you impressed them. congrats on your setup and let's see some numbers pls

 

Quite right. Honestly, this is my first gaming laptop. When the boss put up the chance to have one, I cound't pass it up. I only joined NBR just yesterday, but I've been at the [H] for quite a long time. I was not really surprised to see the reactions that I got over there. The thing about [H] is that I knew there'd be no respect unless it was a DTR notebook, period. That's just not how we roll over there, which is just fine by me! I'm immediately posting results from The Witcher.

 

I get the same responses (well, almost). My friends say that laptops aren't meant to play games on. Well, this kind of kicks the hell out of that affirmation. When you want portability and power this is what you get. People should be more open minded to this kind of solution.

 

Here's some screenshots of the settings used in The Witcher. This is version 1.1a running under Vista Business x64.

Resolution is 1920x1200 @ 32bit


Here's the detail settings




FRAPS data
2008-01-12 13:25:16 - witcher
Frames: 5724 - Time: 180339ms - Avg: 31.740 - Min: 0 - Max: 127

Gameplay Screens

 

Try Clockgen to read PLL, nice numbers btw

 

I have tried ClockGen, Systool, AtiTool, Intel TAT, SpeedFan...all will not load under Vista Business x64 even with driver signing disabled.

NOTE: Race07 and shots of the laptop hooked up to my home screen / speakers. Warning: need a new desk!

 

A few shots of the NP9262 at my house, on the desk that needs to be replaced (it will be, soon). Other peripherals featured in these shots:

Westinghouse LVM-37w3 firmware 1.0 (non-SE model)
Klipsch ProMedia v2-4.1 400w
Logitech G25
Logitech G7
ViewPoint full actuating wall mount
Viewpoint speaker mounts

 

Amazing!

But why did you go for 5.400 rpm harddisks?

 

Long story short - I work for an HPC (high performance computing) integrator. The boss is a big fan of really fast disks, but doesn't believe in "fake-raid" on desktop/laptop motherboards being any sort of speed increase. If it isn't an FC SAN, he thinks it's ****, so he wouldn't budge for the 7200RPM disks, or let me test out RAID-0...although I'm sure I will, somewhere down the line.

 

Here's the Race07 Offline settings used:




Here's the FRAPS Data:
2008-01-12 16:17:11 - Race07
Frames: 19621 - Time: 164885ms - Avg: 118.998 - Min: 49 - Max: 241

Screenshots

 

Thanks much for all of the pictures and other information.

 

no problem. If anyone needs GoW, BioShock, ET:QW, Q4, or something else, let me know. I probably have it, just will have to install it to bench it. No biggie though. If anyone else needs more pics/info, just ask!

 

hows the fan noise?

 

Very quiet, actually. I was expecting it to sound like a freaking 1u IBM server, but it's much quieter than I expected. It also doesn't get as hot as my bosses older Sager (P4 w/HT, 2GB RAM, 60GB disk, 7950GTX, 17") does. The only thing that makes it hard is when you want to put it on your lap (directly) because you'll end up covering the intakes for the fans (on bottom of chassis), then you can hear the fans spin up as they try and dump the heat. Using it in bed, on your lap is a pain in the ass.

I wish that I had a partition to install a 32bit OS on, just for OC'ing the CPU and the GPU as well. I'm not sure what to do about that. I'd like to have a 32bit OS on disk for a day, to nail down the clocks, then just flash the GPU with NiBiToR and be done with it. Freaking Vista Business x64 won't let the cards BIOS get read at all, even with driver signing disabled.

Here's an idea...say I break my RAID-1 on purpose...like by moving one of the disks to the spare SATA port for the HDD...the other one should still function just fine (that's what RAID-1 is for). I could then wipe and load a 32bit OS on the secondary drive in the tertiary SATA connector postition, OC the parts, and flash the GPU BIOS...then wipe the drive, and move it back to the secondary SATA connection, and let it rebuild the array. That should work, right? Might be worth a shot, since I don't have any spare 2.5" SATA disks around.

Comments?

 

Wow Man!!! I play GTR2 and I still play Grand Prix Legends. I didn't know some people on here play racing simulations. BTW, you have the same wheel as me! How do you like RACE '07? I've been thinking of picking it up.

 

Yeah I am getting into racing sims. I tried GTR2, but it was before the G25 came into my life. I think I would have had a different take on GTR2 if I had tried it on the G25. Race07 is pretty fun. I am giving serious consideration to picking up two 20-22" screens, and wall mounting them vertically next to the 37" for expanded view in all games.

 

That would be really cool. You should try and find a copy of Grand Prix Legends. It is a seriously accurate racing sim and the online community for it is very strong. It is a game from 1998 or so, but it is kept alive by mods that are unbelievable in detail and accuracy.

 

Installed and ran Crysis. Here's the Setup information. Keep in mind, this is Vista Business X64 edition. First fun is all options High, no config file edits, 1920x1200:



2008-01-13 17:40:33 - crysis64
Frames: 737 - Time: 40968ms - Avg: 17.990 - Min: 11 - Max: 24




This one is with visual tweaks


2008-01-13 17:41:24 - crysis64
Frames: 1035 - Time: 68187ms - Avg: 15.179 - Min: 7 - Max: 21







DX9 Mode w/tweaks

2008-01-13 18:05:09 - crysis64
Frames: 5571 - Time: 309814ms - Avg: 17.982 - Min: 5 - Max: 29

 

Bummer I was expecting more.

 

With All options on high, NO AA
2008-01-13 21:19:43 - iw3sp
Frames: 22387 - Time: 357193ms - Avg: 62.675 - Min: 33 - Max: 115

With all options on high, 4x AA, 16x Ansiotropic Filtering
2008-01-13 21:50:09 - iw3sp
Frames: 70981 - Time: 1433358ms - Avg: 49.521 - Min: 0 - Max: 392

 

Thats a nice system. Anyways i am with my 9261. Love them. They are not that heavy as people were saying.

 

Hi,

Should have mine within a couple of weeks, similar spec to yours! Can I just ask what drivers you are using? Are they out of the box or have you tried others??

Enjoy the gaming!!!!

 

These are all downloaded drivers (newest from manufacturer site, as of 1/8/08), with the following exceptions:

Webcam
7 in 1 reader
GbE port
modem
8800m GTX


the 8800m GTX does show up if you download the modified drivers floating around, but I decided not to go that route, as people were not seeing significant gains with them.

 

If you want to use it on your lap or bed... I recommend to get something like a "Lap Desk" And/or a notebook cooler/stand

 

agreed. that would be a good solution

 

HI,I am going to buy same configuration,its about 3000buks on xoticpc, I hope it will drop at2500 until may enjoy your gaming mashine )

 

Can you do me a favor and post some pics and performance of ET:QW? Really nice rig. Thanks for all the pics and info an such!

 

Will do. I am working 2 jobs ATM (lots of stuff coming up) and I'm not getting home until about 12:00, so it will likely be tomorrow before I can fill that request, but it should be do-able. Any other requests?

 

what about ESIV Oblivion with everything maxed?

 

another good one! I was actually thinking of playing through that again (this would be the 5th time)

2 times in just normal Oblivion - once as wood elf, once as Ogre
1 time in Knights of The Nine - Redgaurd
1 time with Shivering Isles - Katja (I think that was what it was called...the feline ones)

 

Update:

Two things:

Thing #1 - All of the interest, and the quantity of screenshots that I have posted to my photobucket site has caused me to come damned near busting my 25GB/month bandwidth limit, and I can't afford to pay for one. I will be registering somewhere else to host the remainder of the pictures.

Thing #2 - Working 2 jobs at 16 hours a day is taking its toll on my brain. I forgot ET:QW and ES: Oblivion at home.

If you guys want to make some more requests for games, I will fill them, first come, first served as soon as my brain starts working again. Sorry for the delay.

 

Take all the time you need! I will be getting mine soon hopefully and just wanted to quench my curiousity on how it runs QW . Thanks again for all the info you have been posting on your machine!

 

No problem. I'd never have imagined that there'd be all of this interest, and that it would pop my monthly limit on photobucket. That's pretty crazy!

 

Well, I have had the machine for about a week now, and everything I throw at it, it just devours. The only thing that irks me is that I can't do RAID-0 (because of my boss....jerk ) and that the HDDs are only 5400 RPM (looking into getting a HDD for the 3rd slot that is 7200RPM, 16mb cache, like one of theose little Seagate 250's or something...but I digress), and that the Optical 8x reader is exceptionally slow at installing my rather large games, and that Sager did not (at time of my order on 12/19/07) offer the 2x BD-RE drive that is now an option.

Despite those gripes (two of which were my bosses configuration requests), and the other was due to availability of the optical drive, I really am loving this machine. I have had no issues with the video at all. I had intended to install XP 64bit, but I was having a terrible time hunting down the drivers for all of the parts, and the Sager driver disk was of no use, and only threw out the error "Operating system not supported" when I ran the autorun. I decided that I would just use Vista Business x64 on both partitions, and call it good (I was too anxious to play with the machine).

I've not experienced any video anomolies at all. Everything has run pretty smooth. The exception is Crysis in DX10 mode, at native res os 1920x1200 at all detail settings high, then the frame rates are hovering in the low 20's most of the time. However, all of the others (check the first part of this thread for screens and FRAPS information, 3dmark scores, etc) seem to do just fine. I've watched multiple movies, run them in windows, and full screen, while compressing images, and surfing the web at the same time, and never saw anything happen that made me question the video driver.

Obviously, since we cannot currently get the second 8800m GTX 512 from anywhere (and they have them, right....I mean, I have one sitting here in my laptop right now, as I type this, so they're obvisouly being produced), that definately points to drivers not being mature enough to support SLI configurations properly. I will say that the driver is not very mature.

If you go to Sager's website, there is no listing under support downloads for the NP9262, and nvidia's site does not have a driver download package (beta or otherwise) for the 8800m GTX or GTS.

I'm currently using the drivers that came on the disk with the laptop, as it is a work machine (technically...they paid for it) and I need it to be stable. The version is listed as:

7.15.11.6744 for all driver files

I know that there are hacked/modded INF files that are just adding a listing to the currently available 8800 series drivers, and that some are seeing anywhere from 300-500 points in 3dmark06 with them, but like I said, the machine is a business purchase, so I need to ensure that I am running the latest stable release drivers. When they update the availability, I will run Driver Cleaner, and update them. The last e-mail I recieved from Brian Law at Sager regarding availability of secondary 8800m cards for current 9262 owners, or pre-configs sold with dual cards would be end of February before we would see availability (as I previously stated, due to driver issues with SLI functionality). That's all the information I have on that.

 

Well, we purchased the laptop with company $ with end of year funds. We setup a reseller account with Sager, so we didn't pay retail. This lowered our cost, and changed our potential configuration options as well. The company will pay tax on the purchase, just not to Sager. At any rate, we used the lowered cost to go to the better display, the Q6600, and 4GB of RAM. It was after the fact that my boss realized what sort of performance hit we were taking by using 5400RPM drives in RAID-1.

We're a high performance computing shop, and as far as my boss is concerned, unless it's 15k FC SAN with an ASIC and tons of cache, it's "crap-RAID" and not worth the extra $. I, personally, have used 4x WD Raptors, and 8x U320 15k drives in my personal rigs, and can attest to the speed gains from RAID-0, even in a dekstop implementation, where there's no ASIC, or battery backed cache, but explaining that to my boss...well, that's another story. I am with you all the way, and I'm working on getting him to let me do RAID-0. His big thing was, that since it's a business purchase (although I am allowed to have a personal partition on it with whatever I want), it needs to be RAID-1 in case of disk failure, so that there's no downtime, and we can just go buy another disk (local, if need be), and allow the RAID volume to rebuild itself.

I'm leaning more towards purchasing my own 7200RPM w/16mb cache to plug into the 3rd HDD slot, and call it good. I get the impression, that despite my efforts, the boss isn't going to budge on this one. He doesn't want me rebuilding a dual boot box when I can just go get a new drive for ~$100 and let the array rebuild.

 

First of all ty for the great information that canot be found no where else on the web.
Im buying NP9262 with Q6700 processor 4 GB ram and for what ive read is it worth to go for 2x 100 GB 7200 rpm in raid 0? sorry but im a computer noob
This computer is just for world of warcraft what kind of results should i expect with everything maxed out? i hope the lappy handles WoW hehe
cheers

 

If possible sabregen can u test world of warcraft? its completly fine if u cant cheers

 

The 9262 will spank the pess out of Wow with everything cranked... if that is really all you plan on using it for it would be a waste of hardware as well as your money. That is, unless you sh*t gold bricks

 

I agree, this is a bit overkill for just WoW but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get it but perhaps you will find a different game (Crysis, CoD4 and so on) when you are not playing WoW that can utilize its hardware.

 

I have 2 7200 HDs in RAID 0 on my 9262 with Quad and got a 10259 out of the box from 3dMark06 (the old version because I am running XP). I mainly play GuildWars and it is fine for that game. I have played WoW with my sisters kids and it does not seem as demanding as GuildWars so you should be just fine.

While a 9262 may be overkill for these games now I suspect as more patches are released they will also become more demanding too. IMHO you cant go wrong getting a more powerful box because I am sure as time goes by the software will catch up to it.

 

sabregen....

Thanks for all the great info on your new 9262. I'm considering getting one of these machines, so this thread has been very helpful.

I'm surprised at (and pleased about) the capability of the 8800M GTX card! I had a Dell XPS 1730 with dual 8700M GT cards for a couple of weeks and it wouldn't play "The Witcher" at full screen resolution (1920X1200) and high settings at all! For smooth performance I had to use 1280X800 with high setting, and had to turn the settings down to medium in Act V.

If you manage to configure your machine in RAID-0 I hope you'll post your impressions of that configuration's impact on gaming, especially the loooong load times in Witcher.

 

I am working on getting a different image host (today) for the reaminder of the requested images. I have just installed and patch ES: Oblivion. ET:QW is in the works too, and I apologize for the delays. I do not have the capability to test WoW, as I do not own the game (not any other MMORPG...not really my kind of game), but as others have said, WoW should run just fine on this system.

To the person that had the 8700 and was trying to play the Witcher, I could certainly see that causing problems for you. The 8800m GTX is a whole nother story, ande with the ability to add a second down the road...this is a truly a great machine. As far as the loads time are concerned, I hate to say it, but the 9262 even in RAID-1 seemed to load the levels faster than my desktop machine at home, which is running off of a Maxtor 80GB SATA-150 drive, FWIW.

I'd love to test RAID-0, but I think I will have to likely get a third HDD for the business partition, and then run the 2x5400 RPM drives in RAID-0. If I see a drive on sale, I may pull the trigger on it, but for now, I think it reamins as it is. Those with RAID-0 and 7200 RPM drives are getting over 10k in 3dMark06, and I'm getting 9700 or something, I forget. Still pretty good for a laptop, but I've never been a fan of anything but RIAD-0.

Hopefully, the rest of the pictures will be up by the end of the day. Thanks for the patience, and all of the comments and interest. Anyone else have requests for games? Hopefully, ones that I can fill!

 

For those of you waiting on the data, good news! For those waiting on pictures, you'll have to wait a bit more. The FRAPS data is collected in the most recently patched version of ES:Oblivion. All of the options are set to high/on at 1920x1200.

Here's the FRAPS DATA:

2008-01-18 10:52:27 - Oblivion
Frames: 22398 - Time: 409522ms - Avg: 54.693 - Min: 6 - Max: 64

Screens coming. I registered with ImageShack