Sager NP9280 - NP9850 Purchasing Question

Hi all,
I currently own a alienware m15x and i hate it, screen cracked and is falling apart, mouse pad is crap and the touch buttons are unresponsive at the best of times.

Looking to upgrade to a sager / clevo, my main use will be 3D animation in Maya, with games as a second priority.

My questions are would the i7 processor in the 9280 be more beneficial than the dual 280M's? Are the battery life's of the two systems the same? and does any one actually have their hands on a 9850 yet or know of a good review. At the moment I don't really like the look of the casing (wasted space with the gaming keys, and crap gloss touchpad).

Also if you have any other suggestions on other machines that I could be looking at, (similar performance) that would be great.

Thanks in advance,

 

Core i7 processor for Maya, def. Or a QX9300 with the M980. SLI won't help much with Maya.
Battery life is not great with either of these machines. Expect less than an hour if you do some heavy work.

The only other portable workstation I would put in roughly the same class as a Clevo D900F (NP 9280) - is the Lenovo Thinkpad W700. That has a QX9300 processor at best, and a gpu not far from, or equal to the GTX280M's performance, gaming excepted. But it will probably cost you more than the D900F with Core i7....

 

Hands down I can say the i7 is a rendering monster compared to anything else in the market. This is from personal experience. While I type this I am watching my rendering fly by in Vegas 9.0.

Be prepared to keep it plugged in the wall, and it does a very respectable job in the gaming department.

Unbelievably stable. I have experienced nothing like it recently. Reminds me of the time when the ATI 9700 hit the market. Nothing else compares, right now.

 

Yeah I expect the battery life to be pretty minimal, I've had a Dell m1730 previously and the battery life on that dropped to about 30 minutes after a few months of use. I actually bought an alienware m15x for the better battery life and because its a little bit more portable but I'm finding I rarely use it not plugged in anyway and that I preferred the extra weight of a 17 inch to the smaller screen of a 15 inch.

How about a ASUS W90 ? I guess its just a decision of the trade of between processor and graphics card...

Is the graphics card in the NP9280 expected to be upgradeable as better cards are released?

 

the qx9300 is the "end of the line" for the core 2 line. This means, that unless by some large miracle intel decides to stick to the current pin architecture for its core-I(x)-m line... you won't be able to do much upgrading of the CPU. However it is no slouch in its own right, and combined with dual 280m's means the GPU is about as powerful as a desktop GTX 260, but on an older G92 (9xxx) series architecture. The other caveat I have with the np9850 for a maya first machine is that when you're presenting, you don't want to have pretty lights going off at random points, or the appearance that you're a gamer mid-presentation. I had an m1710 with lights about, and I had no end of grief from professors who thought I was gaming when I would actually be note-taking.

As for the np9280, it looks externally like a 1980s throwback (as most high-end sagers look like), but internally it's 98% desktop. The same i7 found in an alienware or a custom rig is found in here, you have triple channel DDR3 for up to 12GB RAM (and with complex applications, an abundance of RAM is a good thing), and internal RAID 5 means that you can stripe and parity your work, so if one drive goes down, you're still OK to limp home until you can revive the drive (The np9850 only offers raid 1 and 0). Also, nobody in your engineering class will question your work ethic with this rig... it screams "workaholic". Back onto the i7, the i7 has 4 cores, but 8 threads... it's hyper-threading gone ballistic, which means that the CPU can behave as if it has 8 actual cores.

Be prepared though, with both of these rigs to be wall-bound much of the time, as with either SLi'd GPUs, or a desktop CPU, there will be much power consumption done by the battery unless extreme power-saving and resource-saving measures are taken. I'd go i7 / 9280 though if you're going to be doing more MAYA than gaming. Even one GTX 280m alone is no slouch, and an education is more important than how much you can race or frag in the long run.

Jason

 

The Dell Precision M6400 is built for the same purposes, as well as the HP EliteBook 8730w... all of them have Quadro FX 3700M, which is great for 3D modeling and all that sort of stuff, and quad-core support; however, none of them have a Core i7 CPU crammed into it and the GTX 280 videocard will always be better for gaming.

 

quadros are better for when perfect images are needed and are great for 3-D modeling, whereas GeForces are better for FPS and gaming performance. I believe you can turn a geforce into a quadro, but going the other way around (quadro to geforce) is not as easy. One thing to be aware though is that the GeForces are NOT designed to be capable of sustaining the energy and heat requirements of the quadros, nor are they usually certified by workstation certifying agencies like ISV to do workstation level graphics. (Think high-end CAD and stuff like what's for designing space shuttles... in which case, you'd want a Quadro and a bunch of Teslas.)

I'd still say the i7 / 280m is better than a qx9300 / 2 x 280m simply b/c the program you're using is more CPU intensive.

Jason

 

the Quadro for MXM 3.0B is almost out... should be another quarter.