Sager NP5796 Questions for Owners

I searched for a related thread, but all I could find was Auberncoast's review.

For those that have the Sager NP5796, what do you think of the machine?

I currently have a fairly DOA Asus G50V-A2 that I have to RMA now (CPU load problems and then a bios flash, per Asus' support call demands and instructions, that killed it finally). Now I'm worried about getting another Asus G50 series, since it's pretty new and I see little nagging issues here and there.

I'm thinking of going over to the Sager, which seems to have been around a bit more and a little more battle tested.

I'm a little short on "extra" cash, so I'm considering going with the stock 2Gb RAM set up and possibly self installing a clean OEM version of XP Home. Should that set up be good enough or would I be better off going to Vista with just 2Gb of RAM?

Any one ever see a high CPU load during idle? This is starting to bother me as a new issue...

What about temperatures? My last Alienware eventually fried its own video card.

 

Also, what about the 160Gb 5400 RPM drive vs the 7200 RPM 200GB drive options most give? I'm an MMO gamer, so it seems that the 7200 makes more sense, or is there really not much difference these days?

 

The only time the hard drive's RPMs will make a difference is during load times so if you're playing a game such as WoW, you'll hardly ever see a difference as there are hardly any loading screens. Only when you first get in the game and then during an instance.

 

Many of the current crop of MMOs load on the fly from the hard drive, rather than just from "loading screen" type points. Hence the question.

Thankfully though, no, I do not play WoW.

 

Auburn coast posted a nice review- I am expecting delivery of my 5796 on friday. I have to say it has been a pleasure to work with the Sager sales team. They have treated me on a personal basis and the pricing is very fair in my opinion (especially when you compare to Alienware). I will post a detailed review after I put my rig to the test. For the moment I will be playing COD5, DDOL, and RTS games primarily- I will however put Crysis to the test- my specs as follows:
Sager NP5796
Chassis: Black/Orange Trim (a black chassis w/ silver trim would be a nice feature)
Display: 17” WUXGA 1920x1200
Processor: 45nm Intel Core 2 Extreme X9100 / 6mb L2 Cache, 3.06Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB
Graphics: NVidea GeForce 9800M GTX 1Gb DDR3
OS: Vista Business 64/bit
Memory: 4 GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM @ 1066mhz – 2x 2048MB
HD: 320GB 7200RM 16MB cache 7200.3 SATA II
2 gb turbo memory module
No dead pixel policy
3 year warranty

 

I'd say the OS is entirely up to you. some of the tests that gophn and others have run confirm that vista is somewhat more resource hungry than xp. 2gb of ram should be plenty for most games in xp. besides... you could get another 2gb stick after-market for pretty cheap in a few months anyway....

the temps are awesome... i've got a 5793 with the 8800gtx and i've had to actively try to get my temps up. the fans are more than sufficient in keeping the machine running cool.

as for the cpu... i dont know why you'd have a high idle load... that sounds like you've got some malware running.... i've never had that problem with an xp machine.