Sager NP7680 User Review

by Corbs

Since the arrival of the new Intel platform, codenamed Montevina, last July, many manufacturers have been refreshing their notebooks line-up. Sager, which is known for building custom gaming notebooks, was one of the first to refresh their line-up. Today’s review is based on the Sager NP7680, aimed at low-budget gaming enthusiasts. Question is, how well does this notebook perform and does it hold true to Sager’s reputation?

Reasons for Buying

As you all know, Montevina notebooks aren’t actually cheap to come by these days, especially with a dedicated graphic card. As I endlessly browsed through the forums and several other websites, I came to the conclusion that the best low-budget gaming machine was the Sager NP7680. I hesitated at first, since Sager was not a well known company as Dell, Sony or Lenovo in the notebook world, but a quick glance at their sub-forum erased every doubt I had, as its reputation is well established amongst our fellow forum members. Now, you might debate me as to whether this is a cheap gaming notebook or not, but since it comes with a dedicated graphic card, I think this category fits it just well.

Price & Model Specifications

Depending where you order from, and at the time of this review, the Sager NP7680 was offered at a starting price of $874.94.

The notebook was configured as followed:

• Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.40GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 3MB L2 Cache, 25W)
• 15.4" WXGA Super Clear Ultra Bright Glossy Screen (1280x800)
• 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM
• 160GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
• Combo 8x8x6x4x Dual Layer DVD +/-R/RW 5x DVD-RAM 24x CD-R/RW Drive
• Intel Wireless 5300 802.11 a/g/n Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Modem, Bluetooth 2.0+ EDR
• Built-in 2.0 Megapixel Camera, Internal 7 in 1 Card Reader, Fingerprint Reader
• 6-Cell 42Whr Battery
• Dimensions : 14.13” W x 10.55” H x 1.46” H
• Weight: 5.8 lbs with Battery

With those configurations, the total came up to $1032.00 before taxes and shipping.

Where & How Purchased

The notebook in question was ordered from XoticPC, who were quick to deal with and offered excellent support, and I ordered it from Canada.

For Canadian Buyers

Also, since I ordered from Canada, I’d like to point out that you can pay the standard shipping (without brokerage coverage) and handle the customs yourself. Upon delivery, call the transport company (UPS in my case) and tell them you’ll be handling the custom’s paperwork yourself. Afterward, when the item arrives, you’ll be instructed that the papers are ready. Pick them up and bring them to your local Canadian Border Service Agency (head over to the BIS website for more information). Have it approved, pay the taxes, and return to your transport company. Doing so will save you brokerage fees, which can come up to 70$ CAD or more on a 1000$ purchase. Nevertheless, there’s always the express shipping option, which includes brokerage coverage. But hey, we’re looking at a low-budget gaming notebook, are we not?

Build & Design

My opinion here varies.

I was impressed by the screen, as it is a very solid build. I tried flexing it where it hardly moved and I pushed on it, trying to see whether or not this was a cheap quality build, but only a few ripples appeared (center of the screen, none on the sides). As for the materials used, the inside is made of a strong plastic and the cover is made of a glossy finish. Beware, finger prints run all over this. The only downfall is that there is no lock to keep the screen closed, but I honestly think one wouldn’t do much difference as it stays closed perfectly. It might become a problem later on, but I cannot say.

Now, on the contrary, I was a bit disappointed at first with the exterior chassis design. As you can see with the following picture, the keyboard came out on the left hand side corner and I tried putting it back in (by clipping it), but it wouldn’t stay clipped. With a bit of work, it finally came in, but it took a bit of hand work. For those wondering how to solve this problem, please see my post here. Apart from that minor problem, the keyboard layout and design is standard.



The touchpad seemed a bit cheap, as the right button was harder to press on the side (I’d say almost impossible). I’m also not too fond about having the fingerprint reader in between the right and left mouse button, but that’s my opinion.

The interior chassis design is well built in my opinion, except maybe for the hot graphic card, but that may be due to Nvidia’s fault. As you can see from the image below, the processor cooling system is impressive, but to be expected from Sager, for what I hear. The memory and hard drive placement can easily be reached by removing just a few screws for each component part. The third component is for a 3G card. Also, before removing completely the processor's part, you have to make sure you disconnect the fan, otherwise, you won't be able to remove it.





Screen, Sound & Processor

The screen on the Sager NP7680 is actually better than I had imagined. It’s robust, as described early, and I saw no leaking what-so-ever. I honestly do not have much to say here, as it pretty much fulfilled and even exceeded my expectations.




As for the sound, it came out pretty good when I played both Crysis and Call of Duty 4, but other than that, I didn’t test it out that much. The overall quality of the speakers seemed decent, but don’t expect too much here. Sound was clear and loud enough, for me.

The processor is blazing fast. On the other hand, I think the downfall of my build is probably the hard drive.

Heat & Noise

Noise... Apart from my keystrokes, this notebook is silent. The CD-Rom drive is probably the loudest, but, even there I was actually surprised how quiet it was. The CD-Rom does make a weird twitching sound while reading, but that’s really a minor issue to me.

The heat, on the other hand, isn’t that bad either. It does get hot under the laptop where the graphic card is located, but that’s only while performing heavy GPU-oriented tasks, such as gaming. Otherwise, the whole chassis seems to be fairly cooled. Temperatures being such a huge issue lately, especially with Nvidia's defective products, I thought I'd post the temperatures to give you an idea and let you judge them by yourself. That being said, here are the following idle temperatures:

• Processor: 56C
• Graphic: 66C
• Hard drive: 42C

Playing Crysis for around half an hour gave the following max temperatures:

• Processor: 78C
• Graphic: 88C
• Hard drive: 48C

After leaving Crysis, the GPU showed 80C and took around 5 mins to cool down (GPU back under 70C, CPU under 60C).

Input & Output Ports

The Sager NP7680 comes well equipped, including both an eSATA and a HDMI port for full 1080p HDTV.

Right side: 2 x headphone, microphone, 1 x USB 2.0, phone jack and Kensington lock.
Left: VGA, Ethernet, eSATA, HDMI, 2 x USB 2.0, 7-in-1 card reader (MS/SD/Mini-SD), Express Card 54 slot.

For more information, please see the Sager NP7680 gallery section at Sager’s official website.

Wireless

I chose Intel Wireless 5300 for this build, but I’m pretty sure the standard wireless card would have done the same. This option comes with the addition of high-speed wireless N, which is always a plus to have, but definitely not necessary as most networks are wireless G to my experience. Bluetooth 2.0 is included by default in all versions, and unfortunately, I haven’t had the pleasure to test its connectivity.

Battery

The NP7680 comes with a 6-cell battery, which should be last around 2 hours. Well, running some benchmarks (which are CPU/GPU intensive) and watching a portion of a movie made the battery last for 1h 54 mins. There’s also the option to toggle on the Silent Mode by pressing one of the hotkey buttons, located at the top left of the keyboard, which saves power. I haven’t had the chance to test the longevity of this option either, but I’m fairly sure it should last well over 2 hours.

Operating System

When I ordered this notebook, I made sure I did not order any operating system with it as I wanted the freedom of choosing which OS to install on it. At first, I installed Windows XP 32 bits, as I had an old copy lying around, but I was utterly disappointed as there was no easy way to make the hard drive run any faster. It showed reading speed of 3 mb/s under XP. Not wanting to look around for a compatible driver, I decided to go out and buy Vista 64. I installed it and the drivers, and it ran like a charm. There’s a few performance threads regarding Vista optimization in this forum and I must say they are a great read for anyone wanting to speed up their Vista. Also, please note that Sager includes both Windows XP (32) and Vista (32/64) drivers with all sold notebooks requiring no extra charges.

Benchmarks

First benchmark up is wPrime 32M which is a CPU stress test showing both XP and Vista results. As you can see below, Vista results are actually better than XP (in some cases), which may be due to better driver optimizations or the 64 bits architecture. Remember that for the PCMark05 results, the hard drive driver under XP is awfully slow which can explain the huge performance gain for Vista.

wPrime 1.63 comparison results:

Notebook / CPU	wPrime 32M Time
Lenovo T500 (Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 @ 2.80GHz)	27.471s
HP Pavillon dv5t (Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 @ 2.26GHz)	34.520s
Sager NP7680 (Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.40GHz)	XP: 32,565s Vista: 31,185s
Toshiba Tecra M9 (Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.20GHz)	37.299s
Hewlett Packard DV6000z (AMD Turion X2 TL-60 @ 2.0GHz)	38.720s
Sony VAIO FW (Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 @ 2.53GHz)	30.373s
Dell XPS M1530 (Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz)	37.485s
Asus M50VM-B1 (Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 @ 2.53GHz)	30.311s
HP Pavilion dv5z (Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80 @ 2.1GHz)	39.745s

PCMark05 comparison results:

Notebook	PCMark05 Score
Lenovo T500 (2.80GHz Intel T9600, ATI Radeon 3650 256MB GDDR3)	7,050 PCMarks
Lenovo T500 (2.80GHz Intel T9600, Intel X4500)	5,689 PCMarks
Sager NP7680 (2.40GHz Intel P8600, NVIDIA 9300M GS 256MB GDDR2)	XP: 3409 PCMarks Vista: 5168 PCMarks
Sony VAIO FW (2.53GHz Intel T9400, ATI Radeon HD 3470)	6,002 PCMarks
HP Pavilion dv5z (2.1GHz Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80, ATI Radeon HD 3200)	3,994 PCMarks
Dell XPS M1530 (2.20GHz Intel T7500, NVIDIA 8600M GT 256MB)	5,412 PCMarks
Dell Studio 15 (2.0GHz Intel T5750, Intel X3100)	3,998 PCMarks
Alienware M7700 (AMD Athlon FX-60, Nvidia Go 7800GTX)	5,597 PCMarks

3DMark06 comparison results:

Notebook	3DMark06 Score
Lenovo T500 (2.80GHz Intel T9600, ATI Radeon 3650 256MB GDDR3)	4,371 3DMarks
Lenovo T500 (2.80GHz Intel T9600, Intel X4500)	809 3DMarks
Sager NP7680 (2.40GHz Intel P8600, NVIDIA 9300M GS 256MB GDDR2)	XP: 1843 3DMarks Vista: 1832 3DMarks
Sony VAIO FW (2.53GHz Intel T9400, ATI Radeon HD 3470)	2,598 3DMarks
HP Pavilion dv5z (2.1GHz Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80, ATI Radeon HD 3200)	1,599 3DMarks
Dell XPS M1530 (2.20GHz Intel T7500, NVIDIA 8600M GT 256MB)	4,332 3DMarks
Asus M50VM-B1 (2.53GHz Intel T9400, NVIDIA 9600M GS 1GB GDDR2) @ 1280x700	4408 3DMarks
HP Pavillon dv5t (2.26GHz Intel P8400, NVIDIA 9600M GT 512MB GDDR2)	3910 3DMarks
Sager NP2096 (2.40GHz Intel P8600, NVIDIA 9600M GT 512MB GDDR2)	4065 3DMarks
Sager NP8660 (2.53GHz Intel P9500, NVIDIA 9800M GT 512MB GDDR3) @ 1280x1024	9279 3DMarks

HDTune Pro 3.10 trial version results:



As a plus, for those wondering, SuperPi results for 1M was 20 seconds and 2M was 50 seconds.

Gaming Experience

These generics benchmarks are quite nice, but how does the Sager NP7680 really perform in real world applications, such as Crysis and Call of Duty 4? Well to be honest, both game are playable but at the lowest graphics.

Crysis ran fine at a resolution of 800x600 and all low settings, which hit an average of 18-25 fps. It would sometimes go down to 15 fps, but those were rare occasions.

Call of duty 4, on the other hand, ran fine at a resolution of 1024x768 and medium settings.

I do suggest lowering the graphics to the minimum in both games, as a small gap of lag in those games means being KIA. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to test any other games, but both were playable without lag.

Conclusion

The Sager NP7680 does deliver what it was supposed to, minimal gaming experience with great horse power to do just about any other tasks. As far as living up to Sager’s reputation, I can say the overall build and cooling system of this notebook is probably superior to older notebooks I’ve had a chance to play with, but it’s far from being the best out in the market. Both CPU & GPU show high temperatures under heavy load, but nothing alarming imo. Nevertheless, the options it comes with (eSATA & HDMI) and its specs make this particular notebook a bang for the buck. Although, if you’re willing to pay a little more for a better dedicated card, imo there are far better choices for gaming such as the Sager NP2096, the HP dv5t and the Asus M50VM which can be bought for under 1500$.

Pros

• Great inputs/outputs (eSATA, HDMI, 3 x USB 2.0)
• Solid screen & interior build
• Options included (Webcam 2.0 Megapixel, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR)
• Price/performance ratio

Cons

• Below average gaming performance
• Runs warm while gaming

P.S. : Forgive me for not being able to post this any sooner, as I had this review done for more than a week ago. Hope you still enjoy this :]

 

Wow, nice User review.

Very thorough.

The videocard is a low range card, but I am surprised you were able to play Crysis with it.

I recommend to contact Chaz, this can be put onto the front page.

 

you can send this review to Chaz and ask him about putting your review on the 1st page, you get $ for that!

 

In PCmark05 Sagar 2096 with 9600 gt ddr2 score only 3890 ?

 

Not sure about that.

Might be a typo.

 

Actually, the NP2096 score are based on sphinx454's post, here.

The low PCMark05 score might be due to missing drivers, afaik. I'll remove it since, as you are right, it's very unlikely that the Sager NP2096 would score under the NP7680 with the same specs and therefore, shouldn't be compared based on that score.

 

Thanks for the review and I'd like to see more pictures.

 

Wonderful--been wondering about this laptop for some time now, but it's launch was overshadowed by its siblings.

Bravo, rep for you.

I'd love to see more pics as well.

Funny thing about the keyboards on this batch of clevos--assemblers just keep missing the latchdowns for some reason. I love the ease of clevo keyboard removals in past models, but there is less need for it since almost everything serviceable is underneath, now.

 

Great review and, not to sound like an echo but, more pictures, please!

 

I don't think your con about below average gaming performance is very fair. You're talking about an $800 range notebook with a weak entry level card. It's not intended to play Crysis and the like so it's not hardly fair to compare it to laptops costing several hundred more (in some cases nearly twice as much) that are. Just my opinion I guess.

 

True, it may seem unfair to you, but my review of the NP7680 was from a low-gaming notebook stand point. Sager is most well-known for building custom gaming laptops, as the title of their website denotes, and explains why I chose to place the NP7680 in that category. Then again, as you said, it's an opinion hence the user review

Unfortunately, the laptop is no longer in my hands, so I won't be taking any pictures anytime soon (Will update once the opportunity presents itself). Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Hey, great review. Thanks for the info. But I'm wondering if you can do me a favor and test out the video playback for me. In specific video playback on hulu.com - can you go there and play a movie in hi-res and tell me if it skips at full screen? That would be much appreciated.

In fact, they recently added Air Force One with harrison ford, and I noticed on lower end laptops that the video skips and studders during fast scenes and any horizontal panning.

I'm thinking about getting this laptop, and I do a lot of video presentations, which stream video similar to hulu. So I figure this is a good test.

Thanks!!!! It will be much appreciated.

 

Unfortunately, I don't think Corbs will be able to, no matter how much he might want to:

Ahh, the perils of dredging up stale threads!

 

D@mn! Thanks for letting me know. I'll head into the sager forum and see if anyone can offer some experience there.