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

Then why there are no people who received their systems from them with tests and benches all over the place?? You know it would really help the sales... Which brings me to conclusion - nothing is smooth yet. We need to see some screenies to boost our faith!

 

Good backups = peace of mind Weekly full, daily incrimentals. And really, its not THAT huge a risk to be honest.....the failure rate of those drives is pretty minimal

TBH what I use for backups is windows home server, works great. I have 2 systems myself, wife has her laptop and son has his desktop. All are wifi. The WHS sits in its little corner doin a weekly full backup of all systems, then a nightly incrimental backup. It has a generic system recovery DVD running WinPE with almost every nic and HD controller on it avaliable, only drawback is that when doing a bare metal restore, you need to be wired.

The WHS then gets backed up to amazon.com's cloud (s3) service weekly. Anal about backups, yea, you could say so. Wife just completed her PHD and would KEEL me hard core if I lost her thesis and well, even though my work is backuped via VPN to my company, I still backup it at home.

It also servs as my central repository for MP3's, photos and other goodies.

OK...sorry for the WHS commercial, and no I dont work for Microsoft

 

You just saw a screen shot of CF 6970m's branded by Clevo in the vbios. And the fact that they are at x16 and not x8 pretty much means it is in an x7200 as anything else would be x8 x8 (love that X58 )

 

All true and exciting but I still need to see the load and idle temps, smooth up&downclocking of the cards and of course the actual CF performance

 

I want those same things. But people have to get them first and it looks like we are at (or almost at) that point now

 

True, let's hope Tirenz sheds some light on the matter that has been a subject of fierce speculations for the past few months, hehe.

 

I´ll try my best .

Maybe you could tell me what is the best to do to clarify things? What do you want/ need to see?

 

You still have not told us where you got the machine from

I have simply been speculating that it was EuroCom

 

Hello,

HawkForce -> and yes, in this case he imported it from Eurocom...

 

Learned that about 5 months ago, but in a different manner. RAID5 <> BACKUP; RAID5 <> BACKUP; RAID5 <> BACKUP

Especially when it's the dumb FAKE/BIOS RAID5, and they don't make that MB anymore. Didn't know if those RAID5'd drives would work in another branded controller.

 

Hehe, yea, my wife THOUGHT her Phd thesis was corrupted, just thought and was not a good scene....backups = lifesaver now for me.

 

Does Catalyst 11.1a work in your system? (that's different from Catalyst 11.1 and is supposed to be a bit faster). Link is here if you want it:

AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix x32 x64 download from Guru3D.com

 

Hi, congrats on your new machine if is not asking to much all i want to see is Vantage and Crysis numbers if you don't mind

 

^^ Along with the temp sensors screen, please

 

There wouldent be a CD I can DL with all the latest drivers for my system somwhere on sagers site would there ?

 

It is confirmed that the drivers on the CD that comes with new orders are the same as the ones on the website.

Software Upgrade
_

 

Yes, Tirenz if you can,( before you actually post the review ) could you just post that 3dmark vantage result with Xfire? and maybe a 1920x1080 very high no AA benchmark using the crysis bench tool? If you want to wait until you do the whole review that's cool, we can't buy the cards here in the States yet anyway. I am just really excited to see benchmarks from an actual OWNER not a review site.

 

Oh I have to complain about a few things, and compliment someone else. XoticPc is great, they're fast with emails and actually answer their phone. PcTorque on the other hand is testing my patience, I emailed them 2 days ago, and I have called 3 times from 10am to 5pm today and got no answer. So I'll be glad to give XoticPc my money this time around.

 

Ok, here we go...

Run 3DMark Vantage... I think I scored better yesterday, but I will do again.
This is all on stock, nothing changed/ OC.

The GPU temps are a little confusing; one card (the second) seems about 10° higher than the first at idle... will post this too. In the HW Monitor you´ll get the min/ max of both cards together, it seems. On GPU-Z it will show you the single temp of each card.

I think it´s clear that GTX 485m is the winner in this case, but I can play Crysis/ Metro 2033 maxed out, too. So right now, for much less money I´ll get superior performance .

Will try a Crysis Benchmark, too. Just a few minutes.

 

Woah, so many things have happened.. I am too busy messing with the computer that I don't even check the boards now lol

So about the 6970M, sorry that I am not particularly familiar with Ati's naming scheme, are they supposed to be the top in the 6xxx series?

 

What do you mean by maxed out? Full AA/AF plus DX11 settings? Or just the highest default settings?
Also, which hard drives are you using?

 

so i thought i was done with my research a month ago, and i come back and things have changed! I guess i have more questions now my first one being what is the difference between the np7280 and the np7280-s1?

It seems the np7280 has more options to make it cheaper but the np7280-s1 does not and i am not sure why that is.

 

Crysis don´t have DX11 settings, I played it with 8xAA with no problems so far. Benchmark will follow. (DX 10)
Metro: Yes, everything I could I max out and could play that so far (just the beginning), I don´t know where I can find the Benchmark, though, and I usually don´t play it so I have no experience if the performance is getting worse. I used "Fraps" right now and it was playable with nothing under 24 FPS.

 

The S1 models represent cosniderable savings for the configurations that they default at

I have made a few builds between the regular and S1 and found it was like $40 cheaper with the regular with all things the way I wanted but that was less ram and 1 smaller hard drive. Pretty much....get the S1 lol

And if that is stock 6970s then WOW. Awesome performance

 

Yeah, that´s stock. OC I will try later, right now I have experience in OC nVidia cards and have to take a look in OC ATI cards

 

Those will probably be able to catch my stock 5870s in my desktop.....they get 29k GPU score in Vantage

Laptop performance really went up a notch with the latest generation stuff. They are finally getting efficient enough to shove full featured and not cut down gpus into notebook power envelopes. Awesome

 

Crysis all "very high" 4x AA.

 

I will assume that average is 40.71 and not 40k lol

Still a good score.

 

And now with everything "very high" and "AA16xQ"...

 

I would think that too.... an error in the Benchmark? Strange. Never noticed before...

 

Maybe an error of some sort with that run. It may be very soon that us SLI 485M's owners will have to kick it up some so as to stay ahead of the CF6970's...

 

Come on now...got to include GPU-z and CPU-z in bench screenshots!

 

It´s interesting, Babyhemi, I noticed that in some benchmarks before: The CF 6970m doesn´t reach the MAX FPS of GTX 485 by far, but is doing well keeping it OVER the MIN FPS of the GTX 485m.

 

This was an old one I did a month ago. Next time I will...

 

BTW, I ordered the GTX 485 SLI -> Hawkforce called me then and said they were not available before end of February. BUT he could get the 6970m CF if I wanted. So I did that, did have some mixed feelings about it, because I knew no one else had any experience with it... but I thought I give it a try, and this is it now.

 

Well I would not be disappointed if I were you. Hope you got a partial refund though since the 6970m's are much cheaper

 

Yes, I could have saved my money, but instead I ordered some things extra, as a third HDD, Blu-ray and so on.

 

Blu Ray is a must for me, I use my laptop as a mobile blu ray player where ever I go. Good choice

 

I first thought of saving it and build the blu-ray drive from my M571TU in the X7200, but that was the easier way.

 

Nice Vantage and Crysis scores Tirenz. You'll probably get higher Vantage scores with 11.1a as well as in certain other games). Can you run it with NoAA to better compare with the GTX 485M SLi scores posted?

But seeing how they perform with 4xAA, that's very impressive, especially the fact that the min Framerate at those settings is at 30fps.

 

Very true. I bet we'll still see a huge improvement with better drivers. 31FPS min with 16xAA is insane.

 

Tirenz could u pls get a shot in the bios first page?
see what ver the bios is and the vga appears correctly or not...

 

Ok, here is Crysis with no AA... and the latest Catalyst Controller...

 

You need to scroll down in the bench to see the average frames

 

Hi, but where? I think I can´t scroll down much more

 

see where it says 4884 FPS that is not right

EDIT: never mind is 48.84 frames lol. nice !

 

Yeah that have to be a bug, but I can´t scroll down any further...?

It should mean "48.84" FPS?

 

yes must be a bug

the scores are really impressive congrats i think the 485m sli scores 55 average and this is real close, maybe with better drivers?

 

BIOS Revision: 1.01.05aEU
KBC/EC Firmware Revision: 1.00.05

1st VGA Card: ATI VGA Card
2nd VGA Card: ATI VGA Card

I recognized that first boot already; seems it is a Eurocom BIOS. Reminds me of the MXM-Upgrade BIOS´es. Nevertheless the cards are well regonized by the ATI Drivers without problems so far.

 

I think it will be interesting when Clevo/ Sager bring out their BIOS/ drivers. Maybe we will have some improvement then...
Until then I really "love" my new laptop. Nothing it can´t handle so far...