Newbie Bewbie.

I plan on purchasing the Sager NP8298 within the near future, but need a variety of questions answered before I feel comfortable spending that amount of money.
First off, does anyone here have any good feedback on the machine? Is it good? Pro's-Con's? It seems like a new model which makes answering this difficult, but I wanna ask anyways.
Second. My knowledge on current day technology regarding computer hardware is really bad. Surfing the web for explanations on parts helps some, but I would like anyone to give me their own definition of the words that seem important.
1. mSATA? The last thing I've heard of these were that they were super new and super expensive to buy, but every gaming laptop here seems to have the option to install one now. Can anyone here give me a good, detailed description of the thing?
2. SSD? From all the fancy letters and words on Wikipedia, it just sounds like a better version of a HDD that transfers information faster and better. Since I am wanting to use the new Sager to game, what all should I do to it regarding SSD's?
3. 8GB RAM; 1x8 vs 2x4. Is there a noticeable difference here? It's more expensive to get two 4GB then it is just one 8GB.

 

1. like a normal SSD but smaller.
2. Get the largest one you can reasonably afford from the likes of samsung.
3. Dual channel can add performance.

 

1. Your definition describes mSata virtually useless.
2. That's not exactly helpful.
3. Yay. Productive information on this one I guess.

 

1. Making anything smaller in notebooks is far from useless, machines that could before only carry one 2.5" bay now carry an mSATA slot allowing SSD + HDD setups.
2. It's exactly what you should do, any SSD is a large upgrade from a HDD to the point where if you have the cash going HDD only needs to have a very good reason.
3. I gave you the answers you asked for, if that information is useless to you then there is nothing I can do about that.

 

NP8298 has two HDD slots and two mSATA slots. Unless you need 2 HDDs of 1+TB (no room for 2.5 SSD), mSATA is definitely not worth it because the current price is nearly double of SSD of the same grade.

It's also much hotter than SSD, usually at 65-70 degree while SSD is always 40.

 

LOL, Meaker her has helped a bunch of people. Myself included. Try to re-word your questions if you don't get the answers you want.

1. I personally have an mSata (crucial m4 256gb) with my OS and a few games and programs that I want to boot fast. All other items that don't require the speed I put on a 1 TB HDD. mSata is a great thing for laptops for this very reason. You can have the speed of a SSD, and also large amounts of space without breaking the budget. You could also have a mix of mSata and regular Sata in a laptop. More drive options are never bad.

Edit - the only drawback to mSata that I remember is temperature. Some mSata drives can get hotter than the regular size counterparts. I have never had trouble with drive temperatures though.

2. A SSD will make everything boot faster. No more waiting forever for boot times or OS load times. You don't get any increased FPS in games, but when you get to parts that load the next section of the game, that will be quicker. In open world games like Skyrim, I noticed a difference between a SSD and HDD when I would walk to new areas and I would get lots of stuttering due to loading.

3. I chose 2 x 4gb instead of 1 x 8gb for this very reason. A relatively small bump in performance. If I am going to upgrade to 16 gb eventually, I will buy a kit (2 x 8 gb) anyway so there was no real reason that I saw to get 1 x 8gb. The difference in performance is probably not noticed, but what the heck, it was the same price.

Hope you end up with a laptop you are happy with. I am currently loving my W230SS which I bought because of what I learned on this forum. Great little machine.

 

In larger machines they offer the flexibility and they don't take up much weight or space when empty. Sure if you have a spare 2.5" bay then use that, it's about choice.

 

1. mSATA is a PCI Express Mini Card-like connector that is electrically SATA. They offer similar capacities and performance of 2.5" SSDs, but with a fraction of the physical footprint, which allows more flexibility with board designs and frees up additional SATA ports. They are newer and can sometimes run slightly more than SSDs, but they've come down in price and gone up in production, so the gap has closed.

2. It's an entirely different way of reading and writing information. They use the same SATA interface, but they employ flash storage over conventional mechanical drives. Without the need for an actuator arm to seek and platters to spin, information is read and written dramatically faster. They stand up to shock and heat better as well, though their longevity over HDDs is somewhat debatable still.

3. Two sticks allows the system to operate in dual channel mode. This means the CPU can address two lanes of memory simultaneously. Performance with memory gets rather convoluted when we start considering density and what not, but essentially dual channel will yield a performance boost over single channel (one or three sticks). The price for two modules is higher due to demand and production cost, but also because two modules will offer said benefits over a single module.

 

i would highly recommend getting either an msata or ssd. if you've never had a pc with one, they make a night and day difference with how quick and responsive they are.

especially considering how cheap they've become recently.

like others have said, one advantage of the msata is that it has a dedicated port. for example, my 150em has only 2 sata ports. therefore because i wanted to use one ssd and one older hdd, i had to order my laptop without a cd drive (it took up one of those ports). if i had used a msata instead of ssd i could have kept the cd drive. (i ended up deciding i didnt need a cd drive anyway though)

 

Just a word of caution: once you go SSD, you can never go back to mechanical drives ever again. Sometimes when I'm using my Toshiba I wonder if there's something wrong with it Only to realize the only thing "wrong" is it has an HDD!

 

Been using SSD for 3 years. You definitely need it and now its price is low enough, less than 1/2 than 3 years ago and double performance.

An extreme example: Microsoft SQL Server that used to take 2 hours to install on a defragged HDD (5400RPM), only need 3-5 minutes on the latest SSD (500MB/s write).

 

And just something I found interesting.. I bought a used ssd off ebay for a computer I was fixing for my sister and even though it's 4 years old, has no case, and god knows what it's been through, it's estimated life is still like 13 years lol. (Not to mention it blows a HDD out of the water still)

 

A lot of SSDs will do that, people go a bit crazy of the raw cycle counts rather than how much that gives a normal user.

 

It's not double the cost, only may a slight increase. M550 SATA 512GB is $239 vs $249 for mSATA on Amazon. They do not run much hotter either. 65-70 is too hot at all and return the dang thing if it's running that hot.

Thanks, great explanations on all three counts! But one thing about RAM is that it will still work in dual channel mode if it has 3 sticks or mismatched sizes. There is about a 5% performance penalty, and with mismatched sizes limited to maximum of the largest two sticks (i.e. 2GB + 4GB will have 2+2GB = 4GB in dual channel, 2GB + 4GB + 4GB will have 8GB in dual channel, etc)

 

Thanks! Regarding mismatched sizes: that's true. There is the scuttlebutt about synchronous (matched capacities) dual channel and asynchronous (mismatched capacities) dual channel also that I forgot to mention, though the performance between the two is negligible.

 

Of course you want to try and match sticks as close a possible, as putting a 2GB stick paired with an 8GB stick would only give 4GB of addressable dual channel storage (the other 6GB would be single channel only).

 

That's weird. We don't have 512GB mSATA here. Crucial M550 mSATA costs $193 and Crucial MX100 costs only $113.

I have a Crucial CT240M, the temperature starts at 65C and gets hotter when CPU gets hotter (the mSATA is on the upward surface of laptop mb; cpu/gpu behind it). What's the temperature it should be in normal condition??

 

M550 and mx100 are different classes of drive.