The Good and the Bad (Clevo/Sager Conversation Post)

So, I think we need a thread like this. I want to hear everyone's opinions of their Clevo/Sager machines. The good and the bad.
We'll start with me and my NP9170.

The Good: This is an extremely solid machine. I don't have a fear of opening my computer screen and having it snap. (Which happened to my last HP laptop.)
I love how sleek it looks. It's not flashy or overly cosmetic. Although, I DO love the backlit keyboard.
It's an extremely fast computer. It does everything I ask it to, with flying colors. I really enjoy the Control Center. Very quick and simple way to access a lot of important features. The keyboard and trackpad work very well. It's extremely simple to access the inside of your computer.

The Bad: Locked down bios. Cooling issues which cause some people to resort to crazy methods and fixes. Could use better speakers and sound quality. Other small issues.

So I want to hear what everyone thinks of their computers. The good and the bad. Also, feel free to bring up anything you think is a good topic.
(I added a poll for anyone who wants to participate.)

 

I could vote twice because I was unhappy with both of my Clevos. One of them didn't work with any of the 5 MXM cards I had and the other one died for no reason whatsoever, outlasted by Acer and MSI motherboards.

 

That's a shame... :/ Sorry to hear that. I guess there are always exceptions with anything.

What does everyone else think of their laptops? Let's see some comments if you vote!

 

It's definitely the best laptop I'v ever owned. Far more solid than anything else I'v had, minimal driver issues, easy to work on and upgrade parts, community support is brilliant, performance is awesome.
Things I don't like are rubberised mouse pad (why?), stupid locked down bios with dumb fan control, small quality issues (heatsinks), bad headphone sound quality.

 

I thought clevo's cooling system was one of the best.
For comparison purposes what other brands are known to have good cooling system?

 

You've got to understand, most people don't open up their laptops or bother to monitor temps, or overclock, or do mods. Many people who buy these laptops do, so will see ways that they can make things better. The cooling is fairly good, but could be improved. The only comparable laptops would be ones using the same components such as AW.

 

Good:

power
screen
keyboard
cooling with my own as5 has been stellar
connectivity
feel
look
upgrade-ability

bad:

stock thermal paste
speakers
thickness
stock wireless card

Best laptop I've ever owned or used!!!!

 

I'm stoked that you're so happy with your computer, Man! I remember when you were still waiting for it! ;]

 

I love my Sager. Nearly a year and a half old, still runs cool and fast. Much cooler than my Asus, and a much better built machine than anything else I have had over the years, including several HP's, a Compaq back when they were Compaq, a couple of Dells, although my daughter still uses my old E6400 everyday.

I do clean it out about every month or two. So far I have not had any issues with it at all. I use mine primarily for work, and can see myself using it for another few years.

Without a doubt the best Lappy I have ever owned or used.

 

Good:
- It's very sturdy. I've already banged it into a few walls accidentally. The sound of it hitting the wall is one of a well-built piece of hardware. Opening/closing the lid feels solid. I can push around the laptop and nothing flexes, unlike the two HP laptops I have had where touching things would make it creak and flex.
- It's very attractive. I don't like some other laptops that have lights and flashy logos. The Sager laptop is sleek. I could take it out in public and no one would know that it is a $1500 laptop.
- The screen is beautiful, and I don't even have a 95% gamut one. I have a stock matte and it is great.
- The laptop weighs less than 7 pounds. Most comparable gaming laptops are 8 lbs or more.
- The rubber finish is very nice.
- Love the stock keyboard. I have no issues with hard keys. It is very easy to use and fun to type on. The back-lighting is amazing. I wish I could have more colors, but I can do with the options available. I may look like a tool sitting in class with my keyboard flashing, but whatever!
- Nice cooling system. Keep in mind that I probably won't overclock. My maximum temperature ever stock, with stock paste, is 83 C. With the foil mod, which was very easy to do, my maximum temperature is 77 C. Adding IC Diamond would help it even more, and I plan on doing that soon.
- Tons of various ports. I love how it has FireWire.
- Customizable/upgradeable. I can upgrade to a Haswell if I want, and probably upgrade my GPU at a later date.
- Fast

Bad:
- I'm not sure I like how they carried the rubber finish over onto the track pad. It makes it somewhat hard to use it. But then again, I can now use it perfectly fine.
- Fan profiles. I really wish you could control the fans manually.
- Speakers. They are frankly crap. But whatever, I use headphones for things I want good sound quality with anyway.
- The shiny finish on the upper part of the screen is a finger print magnet.
- The charger is massive. But that's a given considering it is a gaming laptop.

 

Thanks bro!! Same here.

 

wish the touch pad wasnt a part of the cover. two piece would be nicer. other than that,....This rocks

 

I keep hearing about this but don't understand what everyone is talking about. My mouse pad feels like the brushed metal on the outside of my computer and it works great.

 

The P150EM has the same rubberized texture as the palm rest. Personally I don't game with the touchpad and just using it for browsing the web etc, it's more than adequate. I have a wireless mouse with me all the time anyway.

 

Oh gotcha. I guess that would explain why I didn't know what everyone was talking about, since I have an NP9170. ;D

 

How in the UNIVERSE are you going to upgrade to a Haswell cpu??? It's a completely different architecture...

 

Well let's see:

The good

--Looks real nice. Clean, understated looks, no badges.
--Very solid. It feels real well built. Not flimsy or anything.
--Nice keyboard for typing. Good action and feel, and the backlight is quite nice. Would be nice if it was larger (there's room, they just wanted to use the same keyboard for both the 15 and 17) but still since.
--Plenty of ports of all kinds. I don't have any issues hooking whatever I want up to it.
--Nice screen. While it still isn't what I want (in IPS panel) it is pretty good as far as laptop screens go. Good colour, contrast and reasonable viewing angles.
--No crapware. I did reinstall my system since I had my own SSD I wanted to use for the system disk (the HDD I ordered it with is in there too but for data) however had I not done that, I would have kept the stock install, there is no need to change it.
--Reasonable speakers, for a laptop. They aren't good, but then it takes $1500 tower speakers before I am happy with speakers . For a laptop, they aren't bad. Not complete trash like you get on so many laptops. Usable, if that's all you have.
--Seems to play games well. I haven't really done much intense gaming on it, but the games I have played run fine.

The bad

--Keyboard ghosting. The damn keyboard doesn't have independent wires to the keys so you get ghosting on some combos. That is not cool on a gaming system, particularly since no-ghosting keyboards are not hard to get these days, it isn't expensive.
--FN/windows key on the wrong side. On desktop keyboards, the Windows key is on the left always, and sometimes on the right as well (on my MS keyboard it is left only). However on this one, it is on the right only. Means I hit the wrong key combos sometimes .
--AMD drivers. I mean I knew I was getting in to that buying it, but still. They have issues, including maybe performance issues on account of Enduro.
--The cooling solution. I don't know how much it matters, the thing may well cool itself plenty, but it is still poorly designed. My GPU headsink is badly misaligned with respect to the fan. This should be the case, it should be set up well, given the kind of money we are talking here.

 

I love my P150EM, everything is working nice and smoothly but the keyboard is just... I miss keystrokes all the time and I'm forced to slam on the shift to get it to work, which doesn't end well in SC2. But oh well, an external keyboard always helps, and no laptop is perfect.

And of course, (as always) AMD Drivers blow.

 

They did that for a reason. A lot of gaming laptops have moved the Windows key to the right side, because no one wants to be in the middle of their favorite game and accidentally hit it. (The screen will minimize.)
So I actually liked that feature. :]

 

I voted content and not happy just becouse of the enduro and driver issues regarding 7970m in my machine. when this machine will have propper drivers and games wil run like they should it will be 100% happines.
What I like :
I must say that the build quality is awesome- Before I owned a asus g51 and msi gx660r and this is just miles ahead . Also like the conservative design. I have the stock glare screen but it is still pretty impressive compared to other laptops.The size and weight of this laptop is great it's much smaller like the msi I had and thus better to carry around considering what kind of power does it have.I'm also okay with the battery life- when I dim the display a bit and change to power saving mode I can get over 4 hours surfing-that is ussualy enoight for me.

What I dont like:
The keybord is nice, however im getting anoyed a bit when playng a game that requires to press more than 3-4 keys at one time- it just doesant feel right but not a big deal.
the sound from the build in speakers acctualy is terrible the msi gx660 had 10 times better sound but I dont care about this eather as I'm ussualy plugged in to external speakers or headphones.
Also the headphone output is bad- I played a bit with settings in THX and also realtek- after that it was a bit better but still not the best.

All of these problems arent that dramatic and doesant make me change my opinion that its a great laptop but those drivers are bad. But when I buy a gaming laptop and I can't game propperly on it, that is a big fail. I dont have that much time now(work, school) so I dont game that much and when I do I ussually play bf3 on bigger maps and those are just unplayeble for me. This underutilization issue is also in other games.Some run fine though.
When AMD or clevo/sager will release a normal driver that will fix these issues I will considder this as the best laptop i had by miles. But untill than a wount feel as a happy custommer.

 

Yeah, well, I blind-type and use the Windows key constantly to minimize, close, run, lock and anything you might think off, and I can't remember when was the last time I accidentally hit this key during a game.

Who asked them to do that? It's a form factor. I sometimes hit the Enter or Backspace keys which cause unwanted behavior, so why not change those as well?

If they really want to help with that issue they should have added an option to switch that Windows key off and allow us to view at a glance whether it is off or on via a chassis light, but simply shuffling keys around is not acceptable.

MSI do that nonsense as well, and I hate that. My old gaming laptop switched the place of the Ctrl key with the Fn key, which was terrible, as I also use the Ctrl a lot. I can't even imagine how much of a pain this Window key issue will be for me once I'll get the laptop.

 

I am pretty happy with my laptop, though I must admit if I'd known of issues I was going to have with enduro I would have gone for either m17x or p150em with 680m.
The good:
design - nice and subtle, rubberised finish is a nice touch.
Build quality - feels very solid, not too heavy. Ideal gaming laptop size - weight IMHO.
Screen - 95% gamut matte is awesome.
Thermal performance - i'm one of the few with no heat issues, though I must admin the back cover could do with better airflow design as taking it off reduces temps by good 5-8c.



The bad:
Enduro issues with 7970m - very disappointed with current state of affairs with AMD drivers. very annoying to see my GPU being severely underutilized in some games, and not know if Sager are even aware of this issue or plan to do anything about it
Keyboard - must say that keyboard layout is pretty stupid for UK model, no idea why they moved some of standard keys around. There are occasions where i need to press the same key twice to get it to register a keypress. My keyboard backlight also seems to be very dim.
Lack of XTU support - again, originally Clevo or Sager claimed that both p150 and p170 EM models will have features to overclock the CPU. My CPU runs very cool so it would be nice if I could get the same performance out of it as Alienware users do.

 

Well I agree with you on some points. Although I don't think I would have changed anything about my order. I got more for my money than I would have gotten with an m17x, and there's no way I would have spent $300 on a 680m. Especially with how close the benchmarks are. I am more than happy with the performance of my 7970. Even with Enduro. It can max out any game out, right now. The best part is, it will get even better when better drivers come out. Saving $300 is definitely worth that.
As for the CPU, the highest I will push it is 100%. Have you tried the same? Because overclocking ivy bridge is not the same as sandy bridge. Temps are much higher and Intel has admitted to that. Not a good thing...
Either way, I can overclock my GPU just fine and I am very happy with that.

 

RE: CPU overclocking - mine runs very cool, it sits at 100% constant 3.4Ghz with all 4 cores in prime so I know it could go higher if I had access to XTU options like 170EM users do. Getting support for those extra 400 Mhz would be really nice.

RE: 7970m - i guess it depends on which games you play, so far I have found a lot of performance drops in BF3 Multiplayer, Batman Arkham City, Crysis 2 DX11, ARMA, Dirt games, and in a few maps on Max Payne 3. Yes those games are playable, but my desktop GTX 480 gets much smoother gameplay even though on paper 7970m should completely destroy it.
RE: improved future performance - I hope so, but so far AMD have said that its up to Sager / Clevo to release updated drivers and neither Sager or Clevo have yet acknowledged that there is a problem with enduro. Our cards have been out for 3 months now and have seen no new drivers to fix a pretty serious problem... I'd like at least a little notice from someone who works there that a fix is in the works, silence makes me nervous that maybe this problem cannot be fixed without changing the hardware..

 

I'm very happy with it, in fact I have fallen in love with this thing.

I love everything about it minus a few unchangeable pieces. I think the speakers are bad. However I use a headset 90% of the time, so it is not an issue. When I don't it is almost always plugged up to an external display. Secondly I feel that the design of the iGPU was a terrible one. I want to turn off that damn intel card unless I need it, which I don't. I got a laptop because I move around a lot and need to take it to different places, not because I was going to sit on a bench with it. Now I understand you want to cater to everyone, but simply put, we are buying a laptop that weighs as much as a pet. It is not exactly designed to be truly mobile, let us switch at will.

Ending my rant there. I am very happy with the laptop once I got it set up and working the way I wanted to. I would buy it again given a second chance.

 

good: power
bad: loud fans,keyboard,semi gloss body is a finger print maggnet

 

Sounds like we're on the same page. I agree with everything you just said.