SAGER vs. EUROCOM & THE OTHER GUYS...

I live in California and for many years have bought laptops from Sager for myself and my company. Overall I have been immensely pleased with their products and the support in general.

I have noticed for a while however that Sager is more conservative in newer product configuration that other guys. For example Sager's 9262 supposedly does not support using Solid State Drives reliably (that's at least what everyone at Sager informs me of) and their Quad-Core configuration tops at the older 2.66GHz CPU, while Eurocom's exact same model D900C works nicely with any SSD you throw at it and can already be configured with a 2.83GHz Quad-Core Perynn CPU.

Now being that the base hardware is positively the same on both vendors, what sets them apart? Is it just that they run different BIOSes? I doubt that both Sager or Eurocom write the code for any proprietary BIOSes for they machines as they come directly from Clevo so, how is Eurocom hardware supporting features that Sager does not? And if needed, could a BIOS update from Eurocom be installed on Sager machine if needed and give the same capabilities?

I run a post-production facility in San Diego and am in need of buying several rendering intensive laptop machines that will be running in dual Raided Solid State Drives from Memoryright. The Eurocom’s hardware with SSD support and the faster Quad-Core CPU is what I am looking for, but, I do not want to buy the hardware from Canada when I live 50 miles south of Sager’s Industry City offices.

Thanks for your input and advice!

John Petersen

 

EC based in Canada but their product ship from new york.

 

sager has what you call "quality control" and "quality assurance". sager knows that some of these "upgrades" will work, but these upgrades are sometimes out of the boundary of "x" hardware and they will not warrant/back it until they're sure it meets whatever standard they say it meets. but i could be wrong. that's what i get from their history and practices and some of the guys on here upgrading something sager says won't work, but it does work.

 

oh and the other guys do the same thing and find some things will work, but the consequence of that is sager won't back the warranty.

 

then why is pickup an option in EC?

 

I am not very sure about it, but I've seen they shipped from NY

 

i don't know if that is outsourcing or whatever it's called. it's basically a branch/point of manufacture/distribution. it's helps costs in many ways. to put it succinctly, think honda/toyota/"x" foreign car dealer building a plant here in the us AND distributing here. saves tariffs, shipping and whatever other costs. saves customer money possibly but almost always convenience.

 

there are many places to find the 570ru.. sager is one of the better ones do to the servicethey will provide after the fact.. ive seen the system a lot cheaper than sager though under no name brands... you still pick what you want and it ends up the exact same thing but if it breaks after the fact good luck with it imo..i hear very mixed things about eurocom. some love them some hate them. imo they are overpiced.

 

Firstly, even Sager now officially supports a Penryn quadcore - the Q9450 - so they're not quite as stick-in-the-mud as that.

Second, they all get their hardware from Clevo and, as far as I can tell, Clevo provides the base BIOS and each OEM (i.e., Sager, Eurocom, etc.; Clevo is the ODM here) can then add further customization to that BIOS before flashing it onto the systems they sell - hopefully I will be quickly but gently corrected if I'm guessing wrong here.

Third, of all the Clevo OEMs I've seen so far, Sager sticks to the Clevo script and will not deviate from that to announce support for a component that Clevo is not willing to publicly support; since Clevo appears to be a bit conservative on that score, Sager is, too. Others are, obviously, a little more sanguine about jumping ahead of Clevo.

My suspicion as to why this occurs has to do with the nature of a lot of the errata that Intel publishes from time to time regarding its processors and chipsets. Most of the errata will only manifest symptoms under certain conditions (although it's probably the case that, just because Intel has identified one set of conditions that will cause symptomatic behaviour, that doesn't mean that there aren't other as-yet undiscovered sets of conditions that would also cause an erratum to exhibit symptomatic behaviour), so the question of an ODM/OEMs comfort level with publicly supporting a particular component probably has to do with their views on the probability that any particular erratum will manifest symptoms on their systems, and their appetite for risk in terms of having to repair or take back a system that ends up malfunctioning because an erratum manifested itself. On this score, Sager and Clevo appear to be much pickier about the level of probability/risk they're willing to assume, and consequently will not publicly support a component until they've tested a much wider set of possible conditions under which the erratum might manifest symptoms. Again, other OEMs appear to have a much bigger appetite for risk than do Sager and/or Clevo.

I would also hazard a guess that some of the OEMs other than Sager are a little more sanguine about the cooling capacity of, e.g., the D901C, and are willing to push the thermal envelope more aggressively than is Sager and/or Clevo.

However, to the extent that an OEM is less risk-averse than Clevo, and thus is willing to publicly support a component that Clevo has not yet publicly supported, that OEM is not going to be able to rely on any warranties given to it by Clevo in the event that the OEM in question guesses wrong and has to take a system back. In that case, the OEM is going to have to eat the financial loss itself, and either refund the customer's money or pay for a replacement out of its own pocket (or through its own commercial insurance carrier). This, however, adds an additional risk factor into the buying equation because most OEMs are fairly small operations without the sort of financial resources available to OEMs like _Sony or _HP, or to ODMs like Clevo. As a result, it is entirely possible that a really bad guess by an OEM on one component could be catastrophic enough to cause the OEM's business to fail, at which point you, the owner of one of their systems, is SOL because you have no-one to look to for support or warranty claims.

So, those are some of the risks that need to be taken into account when you consider purchasing a system from an OEM who is offering components that are not publicly supported by Clevo; namely, a greater likelihood that one of the many errata, identified or yet-to-be-identified, in the processor, chipset, or other components, will manifest itself, thereby causing you grief and downtime while the system is sent back to the OEM, and the somewhat less likely risk that the OEM you buy from will make one risky bet too many, either on your system or on some other system, and will bankrupt itself, leaving you without a safety-net at all, even if you paid upfront for a rock-solid long-term warranty.

 

Thanks for input... everything stated here makes total sense. I have never purchased from Eurocom but have for years with Sager. I know individual experiences vary, but with some bumps here and there, for the most part I've had an extremely positive relationship with them. Also, and again this is my personal experience, many times bulky, not pretty, horrible battery life etc, etc... apart... most of ed Clevo machines I've owned have been absolutely rock solid performers and reliable for me.

From what I've read these past few days, I'd venture to say both the M860TU and updated 5793 will be delayed due to Intel's Centrino2 bugs so, though both of these will support mobile Quad-Core CPUs and have much better portability than the 9262, for now, it seems the 9262 is the only way to go to get a fast rendering machine on the go with Quad-Core processor.

I am (probably among the few) who has never bothered with XP (nor Vista of course ) and have been using 2003 Server on all my Sager machines these past few years so I can use full 4GB of RAM on them with flawless results and overall performance. Now that I think its possible to have the 9262 run 8GB, that would make it the only choice among all the laptops on the market from any manufacturer to give me such levels of configuration and power

 

VeEuzUKY you can order 5793 right now.

 

I believe that the purpose of the NY location is to facilitate deliveries to, and returns from, their US customers by, e.g., cutting down on the amount of applicable shipping charges and cross-border issues, in particular for customers who have to send their systems back to Eurocom for whatever reason. However, for tax purposes, all sales and other revenue-generating activity takes place in Canada in order to minimize the amount of US-source income subject to US income tax.