WOOT! Finally received my 8130.

Ordered it on June 15th and received it today (purchased UPS 2 day shipping but the damn holiday screwed me ) Just the basic config except that I went for the 95% gamut display, Intel 120GB 510 SSD in main bay, 320GB in optical bay, and an external optical drive. Took a little longer than what I wanted but the free memory upgrade caused this. I knew it would take longer but I am just a tad impatient.

Just wanted to tell Brett S. at Xoticpc thank you for answering all my questions and helping me out.

 

congrats...any initial thoughts?

 

Thank you.

Well let's see. For starters I love the non finger print magnet finish. I am coming from an Asus G60VX that I really like the looks of but damn those finger prints. Second of all, the camera does kind of suck. But in all honestly I don't think I ever used it in my Asus. Thirdly, having the SSD as my System/application drive was the best move I could have made. Boot times are around 20 sec, applications and games load almost immediately. Also I find the screen just amazing coming from my G60. I really had no idea how much better it would be. As far as the sound and THX goes, I had no problems loading it and it made a very noticable difference. Lastly I have read people had problems with the finger print reader but it seems to be working great for me.

 

Congrats!! Welcome to Sager family. Will you do some open-box review?

 

Thank you Illegear!

I don't really think I need to since Mr.Mysterious really did a great review on here and I found a couple open box reviews on Youtube. And to be honest, I am not a very good journalist.

 

Your entrance into the KGB (Klevo Gaming Brigade) has been noted. Thou must vow to uphold the values and goals of the KGB: to <s>destroy Dell, Alienware and HP and take over all of NBR</s> spread love and happiness and frag noobs online from our sweet laptops.

 

Congrats! How are you liking the keyboard ? Also howmuch is the battery life (on both idle and load)?

 

Glad to be of service! That screen is a huge difference from the stock versions out there so I'm glad you like it. Enjoy the new machine!

 

I was kind of worried about the keyboard since my Asus also has a chicklet style and never was to happy with it. But to tell you the truth this keyboard feels better. Not sure why but it's really not to bad. As far as battery life, not really sure yet since it's been plugged in most the time so far.

 

Would you recommend the SSD drive since it so expensive to upgrade?

SSD increase window boot up and game loading time, anything else? Is it worth it?

 

is 64gb enough for an os and a few games like 4 or 5?

 

No the SSD greatly decreases boot and application load time. It takes less than 20 seconds from the time I hit the power button until windows is up fully. I think this is the best upgrade anyone can make imo.

 

i think about the whole ssd vs hdd issue a lot...i cant help but think that the benefits of an ssd (faster boot times) isnt worth it. ssd prices and capacity just dont convince me to switch. ill take the much cheaper price, significantly larger capacity, and wait the extra 20-30 seconds for windows and games to load. after all, how often do i boot my computer? 30 seconds isnt a big deal.

 

That may be a little tight on space. All I have loaded onto my SSD so far is the OS, World of Warcraft, Office 2007 (only Word,Excel,Outlook, and Powerpoint so not the full suite). and a few smaller apps and I am using 62Gb. But to be honest WoW takes up around 16Gb.

 

yeah but games like bfbc2 only take about 4 or 5 gb, so what size should i get, it needs to be under $200 and sata III

 

You can just describe it simply as 100% a want, nobody needs an SSD. If you don't mind spending the money go for it, you won't lose anything staying with a normal HDD and you can always upgrade down the road when prices drop/get more bang for your buck.

 

Well maybe you should go for the Crucial you were looking at. I just went with the best bang for the buck that Xotic offered while configuring. I had thought about waiting and installing one later but to be honest, I hate spending money so I may have never did it if I didn't configure it into the system.

 

Agreed Yanni, I really didn't need to replace my Asus G60 but I just wanted to.

 

for the record i was talking about later on down the road. i think the crucial would be good, because they're reliable and have a fast read speed, which is all that really matters for booting and playing games.

 

Yes but it not the most important gaming feature. Also would you rather have a 500gb hard drive or a 80 gb SSD drive? As you can see it expensive and doesn't store as much hd space as you wanted.

 

Or you could have both (SSD in primary bay, HDD in optical bay caddy, external optical drive). I personally find the 64GB SSD the minimum useful size, even with another hard drive (Windows 7 takes up ~20GB on it's own).

 

Wait...WHAT???... there is an external optical drive? Does that mean there is also an external blu-ray drive as well?

 

Well, it doesn't have an external optical drive on it's own. You either need to buy it separately- or if you got yours with an installed optical drive- buy a caddy and make your internal drive and external one.

I personally use optical drives once in..well, forever. So turning my optical bay into an HDD bay was a great compromise due to the smaller SSD I've got in the primary bay.

But yes, you can buy an external Blu-Ray drive or make your internal blu-ray external with a caddy

 

What exactly is a caddy? I haven't done much research since I build my gaming desktop a few years back so I'm really behind in new technology. In fact I still can't believe they finally made a laptop that can be upgradable.

 

try use sleep and hibernate more if you don't have an SSD.

reboot windows is slow with magnetic HDD because it loads files that are scattered here and there from the disk and magnetic disk is slow in access random files. but hibernating is different. all the data is stored in continuous space on HDD and the HDD isn't substantially slow compared to SSD in such kind of read.

Of course if one got the extra budge, an SSD definitely helps. but for me, I'd rather put the money to a better graphics card because that sometimes (more in the future) means can play or cannot play certain games. Whereas an SSD over an HDD simply means load things faster or slower, but it won't help you once the program is loaded. just my 2 cents

 

It's a replacement for the built in optical drive that replaces the optical drive with a box to house a HDD. You take out your blu-ray/DVD drive and install the the hard drive into the caddy and slide it in so you can have two HDDs in the system. In today's day and age, who needs optical media on a daily basis anyway? External USB optical drives cost like $30 and are super portable. I have a 128GB SATA III SSD in my HDD bay and the 750GB mechanical drive that came with the laptop in the optical bay. The old DVD drive is in drawer somewhere. It's worthless.

 

IMHO, an SSD completely changes the computing experience much more than anything else and that includes faster CPU, more ram, faster GPU, etc.

An SSD will change your experience with using computers entirely. If I was forced to choose, I'd rather live with a 128GB SSD (any smaller is too small) than a 700GB HDD and forgo the extra space. The extra storage is not worth having to wait for my laptop to turn on or my programs to not load practically instantly. Everything just happens when you run them. Everything is just fully functional at one click of the mouse. Everything is so snappy. I will never go back to conventional mechanical HDD again.

Finally with an SSD, you can actually take advantage of SATAIII and USB 3.0. Mechanical harddrives will never even get close to saturating the bandwidth of SATAII or USB 2.0 with how slow they are.

 

You don't keep too many files on your hard drive do ya... I couldn't live without at least 750GB of space. I can fill 1TB easily and end up having to delete things often. My perfect setup? 750GB HDD for OS/raw files, 300GB SSD for games/intensive-loading-times-programs.

 

Well, that's basically what I have as my 750GB is in the optical bay but I could live without it it as I did in the month before my caddy arrived.

I keep all my stuff on cloud or other servers. My media streams from my other computers. I don't see any need to have them actually physically stored on the laptop. If I'm somewhere without internet, I could easily keep myself entertained for hours with a game that only takes up 8GB or some e-books that take up very little space.

 

... I want to have such nice tech available at my fingertips. I really do. But oh well. Such a sad country this be.

Also, at one point I had 400GB of games alone. =D.

 

Thanks for the answer, but I am very slow at understanding so I need to read this post many times