New NP5760 first impressions

Got it this morning and I already very nearly skipped a class so I could play around with it. It looks like an impressive machine from any and all points of view. Impressions...

* Awesome screen. WUXGA may not be for all, but it sure is for me. Fifteen-ish apps installed and I've barely used one horizontal line of icons on the desktop. Can have Opera and a spreadsheet open at the same time. Movie-watching is deliriously good... and of course gaming should be a blast. We'll see, haven't had time to try yet. NO DEAD PIXELS!

* Decent keyboard. I really don't care for key placement: what's the need for two Alt keys? Would have preferred a longer spacebar. Also it makes no sense to not have dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys. Love the numpad, though. No flex anywhere, silent keys, a joy to type on.

* Sleekest design and excellent built. The brushed aluminium lid is breath-taking, sure, but I'm even happier with the high-quality plastic and the shiny finish of the chassis. This notebook looks cool even on the underside, with the curvy line and the discreet fans--and that's saying something.

* Impressive performance, especially thanks to the Windows XP hotfix. I've read Gophn's guide and Kilim's review and found all tips very helpful. Thanks guys! This machine starts up in 22 seconds from BIOS to XP and it can run a full-system virus scan, burn a DVD, and let me watch a movie without any process slowing down. It'll be interesting to see what it can do with Merom and Vista some 12 months from now. My full benchmarks will appear in my review...

* ...which will be somewhat unique as I have the 7900GTX with 512Mb. Probably little difference in terms of performance over the 256Mb version, though it does get some 150-ish additional 3DMarks points. We'll see how it does in real-world applications.

* Really positively impressed at the cooling solution and the quietness of this system. It is also relatively light given what's under the hood: no problem whatsoever carrying it (and a few books) to and from the study room in my dorm hall.

* Not satisfied with the integrated camera so far, but I couldn't really play with it too much. We'll see how it goes when I have more time to dedicate to it.

That's it for now. Expect a full-blown review in a couple of weeks, when all tests have been run, a few games played, and when I'll have gotten a more thorough feeling for this monster.

C.

 

dude your academics are gonna go down the drain now that you got this monster.

 

Your 3dMark scores should be very similar to mine. Probably a few points higher due to your extra 512M ram over me. I have not overclocked my vid card... yet

 

My 3DMarks are actually a little lower than yours, but I haven't installed the latest drivers yet. There'll be time for more thorough benchmarking in the coming days... while my academics go down the drain...

C.

 

Congratulations on getting your NP5760! I'm sure you will love playing around with it.

 

Very nice, and congratulations. I've used that keyboard before (it is the same one used in the Clevo D900), and enjoyed the feedback and sound of it. I did however find the lack of dedicated Home/PgUp/PgDn/End keys to be annoying but eventually got used to it, and I am sure you will.

 

Thanks Chaz and chrisyano. Yep I'm indeed loving it. Experimenting with games as we speak, and collecting benchmarks.

C.

 

I tweak my system for performance: i kill off a lot of unneeded processes, set services to manual instead of auto, use Bootvis, that sort of thing.
I'm using the drivers that came with my 5760.