*** Official Clevo x7200 and Sager NP7280 owners lounge ***

Let me know if you want to sell those 460ms, my 485m decided to blow a couple (what I think are VRMs) last month...

 

I will certainly do that. If I can find a newer card(s) for mine. Just got back from vacation so the shopping now starts...

 

i just purchased a clevo 680m gtx myself. was wondering if i need to have anything prepared for my x7200. am looking for advice from anyone about what to expect. presently tracking down a heatsink as the 2 heatsinks i have now are for 460m gtx cards. everything i read so far says i need one from a 485m gtx or 580m gtx card. Any tips or pointers would be greatly helpful. I am going to install this one now, and later spring for a second when I get more cash.

 

got the 680m gtx card. Installed it. turned it on. and bios shows it as an nvidia card, not a 680m gtx. cant get a driver installed either. has me concerned. the onenote bios screen is strangely washed, but i have seen no artifacts. so im concerned and dont know what else to try. anyone got some info to help me?


Update got the drivers working...but still says nvidia vga card in bios. when i ran 3dmark vantage, i got high marks, but said it was a generic video card, although driver was for 680m gtx. weird....anyone got any ideas? was thinking vbios...but.....someone please advise? anyone?

 

The BIOS just compares the cards ID to a list and then displays the name string, that has nothing to do with functionality.

 

Yes and since they are a little bit different the 780M will need those modified drivers.

 

hello everyone im new to the forum just a quick question i have the x7200 and was wondering what the latest bios was as i cant find it anywhere sorry if this has all ready been asked

 

here is the download from Sager.... Software Upgrade

 

hello thanks for the website i have downloaded the bios but im not 100% sure how to update it i have put the file on a cd but the laptop just dose not read it when i tell it to boot from cd any help would be great!

 

Did you put an operating system like DOS onto the CD?

 

Are you having problems or have a reason to update the BIOS. If you're not sure how to update a BIOS I wouldn't do so if you dont need to because if you do it wrong you could brick the notebook making it un-usable.

 

hello thanks for the help i have sorted the bios out. i just wanted to make sure i have the latest so i can change the gpu in the near future. i have another question can i get a back lit keyboard or a modded one? thanks.

 

No since the motherboard does not have the connector, you could in theory find a voltage point to power them using a soldering iron but it's not an easy or elegant solution.

 

Do you know if anyone makes a keyboard that fits the X7200 with backlighting? If so, it may be possible to pull power from an internal USB port is the draw is below 100MA. Not sure what the connector looks like on one of the backlight keyboards. If it's integrated with data connector, then it's probably not possible. But, if its separate, then it may be possible.

 

It's a separate connector and that sort of job has been done before but it's very fiddly, feel free though.

 

any one know where i can get a gpu heatsink for the x7200 ebay haven't got them? was gonna buy another gtx 480m and put it in.

 

sager will sell parts. However a single 680M would be a much better option.

 

would a gtx 480m heatsink fit a gtx 680m?

 

Yes, you would need to redo the thermal pads (1.5mm vrm, 1mm inductors, 0.5mm memory).

 

hello again dose anybody know if a gtx 780m would work in the x7200 thanks again.

 

No, only the sm series works with the 7 xx series.

 

I've had my NP7280 for about 2 years now and recently the screen will have white horizontal flickers across the display and when I run programs such as Microsoft word or Chrome, portions of the screen will turn blue. More recently a majority of the screen will turn blue when I try to play games. I usually have to adjust the positioning of the screen to get the blue and white lines to disappear but other times it just makes it worse.

I know that it's not the graphics card because I have plugged in an external monitor and the resolution was perfectly fine and there was no flickering lines.

I'm thinking that maybe the video cable is loose or my screen needs to be replaced. Has anyone else experienced this problem or does anyone know what I should do?

 

Yes the cable sounds like it is loose either on the lcd or at the motherboard. Try re seating it.

 

I'm not the most tech savvy person. How do I go about doing this?

 

Remove the keyboard to check the motherboard connection (consult your manual or youtube) and for the screen you remove the bezel and panel.

 

Hi guys, i met a trouble with my x7200, just after cnged thermal paste, my laptop decieded to turn in overheat shutdown, i tried many times with more or less thermal paste, no changes, even if i stay i the bios, the fans goes full after 5 minutes and the laptop shutdown... evrything is clean inside.
Please does somebody knows this trouble.
PS: sorry for my poor english, i m french, i do my best.

 

There could be an issue with the heat pipes making the heatsink not perform properly.

 

Hey guys, I just got one of these X7200 Machines with the 990x CPU, but it only came with the crummy GTX 460m..

I was looking at Cards, and what im puzzled at is will the cards with a Dell Bios work with the x7200? For example this:
0RDRGR RDRGR 216 0811030 HD6990M HD 6990M 2G MXM3 0 DDR5 VGA Video Card for Dell | eBay

Says it has a dell Vbios, and i know that the PxxHM series made a big deal about that compatibility wise, but what about the x7200? Would it still work?
Thanks.

 

You need clevo cards, the 7970M (HM bios IIRC) or 680M are ones to look for.

 

Hi, Guys im really in need of some advice here. Ive just purchased a rock extreme 795 which is a re badged clevo x7200, It already has a gtx 485m inside and all i need to do is add a CPU, RAM and HDD.
Im a bit stuck trying to find a CPU, would a Xeon x5660 work in the motherboard as it is intended for the same lga 1366 socket as the i7 960?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

It should work, any reason for going with the xeon over the consumer ones?

 

With my budget I can only afford an i7 960 but ive managed to find a Xeon x5660 for about £180 after custom charges and looking at the benchmarks its not to far behind a 980x in terms of performance?
Its mainly the price which is attracting me as the i7 960 is only £30 cheaper.

 

I wouldn't have to update the bios or anything before installing the xeon chip would I? as the laptops coming without a cpu so I wouldnt be able to update it.

 

If its cheaper then go for it, it would have the same bios requirements as the 980x most likely.

 

Ok thankyou very much for all the advice its nice to have the help, ill order the CPU on monday and will update you on how it all goes well when its been built.

 

It could still hold quite a lot of value, slightly older gen stuff but still very potent.

 

Finally bought all the ingredients

- I got a x5650 in the end as I got it for £100 so I couldn't justify paying the £90 more for the same cpu with higher clock rate. I can always give it a slight overclock anyway.
- 320gb 7200 rpm hdd to get me going and will buy a nice ssd on my next payday.
- 12gb 1333mhz ram.

Will have it all on tuesday so ill post with my progress then.

One last quick question it comes with one gtx 485m and instead of looking for another heatsink as i cant seem to find any, Would I be able to swap the gtx 485m for a 7970m? Are the heatsinks different?

Thanks

 

You will have to look but i think it's just different pad placement so you could just get pads.

 

Thats sounds promising then as it doesnt matter where I look I cant find a second fan and heatsink for sli? You have any ideas where I could find them, No luck on ebay.

 

Everything but the Ram has arrived this morning. The laptop is actually brand new with all the retail packaging. Everything in so just need to wait until tomorrow for the ram.
One thing that seems worrying is the 2 fans required to cool the cpu down. One of the fan intake vents is covered? that doesnt seem to make any sense.
#ive provided pictures below to show this.

 

Seems strange, but this is by design. My NP7280 also came the same way.

 

Hi everyone,

I just got a 680m. I install it in my x7200 and I notice the bios screen looked weird, the colors weren't filled in. Bios only recognizes the card as an Nvidia card, and windows 7 only sees it as a standard vga. I've been trying to search for the past hour and I saw that some people had to use laptopvideo2go for a modded inf, however, that was for sli not a single card. I haven't seen anything about a single card having any problems so I'm not sure what's going on. I've also read that clevos don't like using dell cards, but I'm not quite sure what the symptoms are in case I have a dell card. I'll keep searching, but I just figured I'd ask here as well.

Thank you.

 

The Ram arrived today and now all is assembled, One major problem though is its not starting.

-The lights are on to show its connected to power.
-Press the power button and the blue lights come on.
-fans start running for a 10 seconds.
-Then it shuts of and starts again on its own untill i hold the power button to turn it off?

Any idea what this might be?
System specs are Intel xeon x5650, 3x4gb ddr3 1333 pc3-10600 ram, Would any of these 2 stop the machine from running? screen doesnt come on etc.

 

Update:

I talked to previous owner of the card, who has never used the card, and he said he was told that it was a 2gb Dell 680m. While in the process trying to reflash the vbios, I found out it already has a clevo one flashed. So I decided to forego the flash and just modded an inf for my existing driver. The driver is now successfully installed, but now all I'm worried about is having a 4gb vbios on a 2gb card. I'm not sure if it's running to its full potential, but it's running right now so I'm quite happy.

 

I had my NP7280 start doing the same thing. It turned out to be a dead CMOS battery. As the NP7280 has been on the market for some time, maybe your battery is also dead.

 

Just swapped out the battery but will have to wait until a new processor is delivered before I can try it out, Without the cpu in there with the new battery it still does the same thing when trying to turn it on.

 

When you stated it would not power on before, was that with NO CPU? If so, I would not expect it to power on w/o a CPU.

My CMOS battery went low after 3+ years of use. And I can not say 100% for sure it was the battery, but it powered on fine after inserting a new battery and hasn't given me the same problem since.

Another thing you may want to be aware of is the seating of the memory. I had major problems with my NP7280 for about 3-4 months and was chasing my tail. The machine would boot fine and was able to install windows 7 or 8 fine. Then I would get strange messages on boot up acting like my HD was having errors. Sometimes it would run fine, other times it would crash in the first 5 minutes of booting into windows. I went through 3 SSDs and was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what was going on.

In the end, it turned out to be PC troubleshooting 101. The RAM was not seated correctly and it was causing strange issues on initial booting. The errors appeared to CRC errors, but when you think about it all data must be read in from disk and then stored in RAM an then compared. On the advice of one of the senior techs at SAGER, I took the RAM out and check them one by one. They all checked out fine. I did 10 boots w/o failure, where before I was crashing on about 40% of my boot attempts. I then put the RAM back in one by one until I got a stable system.

That was about 1-1/2 months ago and I have had about 60-80 boots without a single error. SO, like I said, it was PC Troubleshooting 101. Whish I would have tried this 4-5 months ago.

I was so close to ordering something to replace my NP7280 and that was going to cost me north of $3,000.

 

It was with a xeon X5650 CPU in there. I thought that maybe it was because it was a server CPU that it wasnt working so ive sent it back for a refund and have ordered a cheap i7 960 so I know if that doesnt work its definitely not the CPU to blame.
I thought it was the RAM aswell but ive tried one stick at a time and nothing still so If I have no luck on the new CPU I have no ideas what else to try.

 

The laptop itself is brand new as it still had all the protective film on it but im guessing its been sitting in its box for quite a while, for a laptop that only needed a CPU, Ram and hard drive fitted it sure is turning into a big headache. I turned down an alienware M18X for this aswell lol

 

I'm sure you will get it running. Once you do you'll be happy. Sager makes some pretty nice equipment. I was pretty much an HP guy before tying a Sager back in 2008. My two large Sagers still work well. One is 6 years old and the other is about 4 and they both have taken quite a beating (Daily use & a lot of travel) and still perform great.

Can't say anything about the Alienware as I have never owned one, but I'm sure they are nice also.