Gaming laptop! Sager 5792

[S.SubZero]

Yesterday I received my new $2400 gaming laptop courtesy of UPS:

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The specs are awesome:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5Ghz "Penryn" 45nm processor
4GB PC2-667 RAM (2x2GB)
GeForce 8800M GTX 512MB video card
17" 1920x1200 glossy LCD
100GB 7200RPM SATA hard disk (swapped with my 200GB 7200 Seagate)
No OS pre-installed (I went with XP64)

Pros:

Very, very fast. 3DMark2006 clocks in at 9273. 3DMark2001 comes in at 42598. I have yet to throw any real games on it but I don't have anything really new so I'm sure it will all run obscenely fast.

Zero bad pixels, apparently. Solid black background shows no spots, different colors seem fine also. Some people don't like the glossy thing, but I am used to it and I find non-glossy screens to be kinda muted now, personally.

It has alot of frills. I did not opt for the TV Tuner, but the fingerprint reader, bluetooth, a/b/g/n wireless, and camera were standard.

The keyboard is very solid and feels comfortable. It will take a little getting used to, this is my first 17" laptop with a numeric keypad, and some of the keys are in unusual places, for me anyway. The feel is much better than my Dell Inspiron E1705, which even when new felt very flimsy and like there was a hole under the keys. Not so here.

Cons (so far after a day):

LOUD. It has several fans, and the 8800M GTX is responsible for a lot of the exhaust. It fires up fans constantly, and it has several vents which means more noise escaping. It's not really meant for bringing to the library. I'm used to noisy laptops so this isn't so bad for me, but yeah it's got some decibels to it.

No dedicated volume control buttons - Gah! It has Fn+F5/F6 but the lack of real dedicated buttons for volume kind of annoys me.

Limited BIOS options - Compared to my Dell, the BIOS for this thing is sparse. It kinda worried me cuz for my virtualization stuff I need VT-x which on my Dell there's a BIOS option for, but this has none. Turns out it's defaulted ON so that's good. There's also no way to disable Bluetooth or wireless in BIOS, only through Fn+keys.

Odd port placements - for me personally the ports are exactly where they are the most inconvenient. LAN is on the side (where I have little room), the USB ports are there too, and in the back near the power. There's also a serial port for some reason (give it up, serial is dead) blocking useful real estate.

Lacking XP64 support, kind of. XP64 is not supported officially, though the driver disk it comes with has XP64 drivers for some things. I still need to find working drivers for the flash card slot.

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It's a very nice laptop, but will take some getting used to. It's my first non-Dell laptop since 1998! I think my old Dell I9100 was louder, but only barely. However, this thing annihilates even my desktop in speed, which depresses me. The fact that I can carry this beast around makes it more scary. Now if I could only get OS X to run.. hehe.

[ctal]

Nice! Thanks for the good summary. I've got a 5 year old Sager NP8886V (12+ pounds, 15.6" 4x3 display) that I've been very happy with. It's been powered up about 15 hours a day for the 5 years, and the only problem I've had is that both of its original hard drives failed (I replaced them myself with faster 7200 rpm drives that were also much larger than the original 40gB). Re the TV tuner that you (wisely) didn't opt for, mine has one, and it is complete junk.

Regards,
-- Al