Sager NP9262 Ultimate

I am looking at purchasing my first Sager computer, as I was informed of this site recently and have heard very good things about the company. Currently I am looking at the NP9262 which has 4 choices for video cards. 2 of these are:

1. A single 1024MB GeForce 9800M GTX DDR3 (user upgradeable)

2. SLI 512 MB GeForce 9800M GT (user upgradeable)

Suggestions/opinions?

 

I've heard that the SLI works better than the GTX, and that the performance increase from upgrade from the single 9800GT to the single 9800GTX is pretty small.

But I'm no expert so don't put too much faith in this.

 

i heard the EXACT opposite. that one card is always better than SLI, since you dont have to worry about SLI issues with games... plus it has double the RAM, which WILL help for a game like supreme commander, and cryssis, but not for CoD4... game depending. Plus u can always go GTX SLi in the future, its been confirmed this is doable.

 

Well for performance check my sig.Just got mine and love it!

 

+1,

If you have 1GB GDDR3 GTX to start with, you have an almost inherent advantage over dual 512MB GDDR3 GT for several reasons. First off, even with dual 512mb cards running in SLi, regardless of split screen SLi or alternating frames SLi, it's still 512MB RAM at the end of the day, meaning one of two things: either each half of the screen gets 512MB RAM to play with, or each frame gets 512MB RAM to play with. Now suppose for the sake of argument you're playing a game, and on a series of frames, there is a short burst of very complex imagery / frames that require a great deal of bandwidth, the split cards will only allow fps rates equal to the rate of the slower card (ie: if one card wants to go 40fps, the other can only do 25fps, you're stuck at 25fps). Doubling the bandwidth by having 2 cards means that the work does become easier for the cards, or more detail can be provided, but doubling the bandwidth does not equal double the fps... the only way to guarantee an increase in FPS is either more memory, or faster clockspeeds, or more shader cores.

Also, with 1GB VRAM, if you choose to put it in SLi, you have the headstart of already having one appropriate GPU put in. Only one more has to be put in whereas if a GT user wants dual GTXs, both cards have to be bought and replaced, and buying 2 cards is a more expensive proposition than to only buy one. I'd rather just get the GTX and wait to order the 2nd card, than have to completely overhaul my video card system and be left with 2 cards out and 2 cards in there that i paid for and am not using.

The frugal pay once, the cheap pay twice

 

Thanks for the detailed info on SLI. I had suspected it was something of this nature, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I have been unable to research this fully. This (and the other previous post) confirmed my decision to take the 1GB single card.

 

For the sake of comparison with the 8800GTX, what were your 3DMark06 SM 2 and SM 3 scores?

 

I haven't heard many complaints about SLI lately, and I've never had any myself. You can always run in non-SLI mode if a problem crops up you know.

 

Wobble here you go just ran it again at 1280x1024 res.(is that good enough or should I go higher)(I will run it at any res. you want)
And on a side note I went into the Nvidia control panel and put the 3D settings on balanced.

Results

3DMARK06 score- 14766(it went up,very surprised)
SM2.0 score-5918
HDR/SM 3.0-6568
CPU score- 4524


how about some rep. for all my efforts..lol

 

Thanks,

For comparison, my SM 2/SM 3 scores with the 8800M GTX are 6321 and 6653. While the two tests might not be an apples-to-apples comparison (I'm running XP and you might be running Vista, and I used "Use the Advanced 3D Image Settings" whereas you used "Balanced"), I think the numbers confirm the feeling around here that the two cards are roughly comparable.

 

Many games can not use SLI yet and it makes the laptop heavier. Useing the 9800GTX there will be more of a diffrence in the older games that can not use SLI or more than one GPU. Anywhy I dont even think Crysis supports SLI?

 

Where in the world do these ideas come from!!!!!

Here's a list of over 500 games that not only perform well in SLI, but which have a custom 3D application profile written by nVidia: http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html There are hundreds of other games not on this list (because no custom application has been written) that perform equally well in SLI just using nVidia's global (non-custom) profile.

Note that, contrary to your thoughts, Crysis is on the list, and my tests, as well as all the benchmarks I've seen here, show that SLI yields a 70% FPS gain in this game. Note also that Oblivion is not on this list. That's because it runs great just using the global profile, and, on my machine, SLI produces an 80% FPS gain.

After personally testing dozens of games, old and new, I've come to the conclusion that it is far, far more difficult to find a game that won't work in SLI than finding one that does. However, I'd be most interested in knowing what games you have discovered that actually don't work.

 

Wobble I did use Vista 64, but I have yet to upgrade my display drivers(just got my laptop friday).Hope fully after updating to the latest drivers I will get a better score.Still using 176.06(that's what it came with)
Any ways what drivers work best? I have heard that the 177.79 work very well but I also seen 177.89 I am wondering if this driver works just as well?
And CRYSIS works great on this system, and yes it uses SLI?I know for a fact when I played the game I somehow enabled the SLI graph in the Nvidia control panel and it was bouncing up and down when I played the game.

 

I'm a bit behind on drivers, and I'm using XP, so I can't give you any good advice on that score. If your system is running well, and yours appears to be, I doubt if different drivers will have much effect on your test scores. You might want to try changing the Nvidia Control Panel to the setting I mentioned. This will force the system to use the nVidia custom profiles.

There are lots of Crysis benchmark scores posted on this forum (nearly all run at a resolution of 1920X1200 and high settings) so you might want to try that to see how your system stacks up. edit... BTW, if you ran Crysis at these settings you would have immediately known if SLI wasn't working because the game would have been unplayable.

 

Will do that very soon