Overall, the best notebook I've had in my 12 years of using them. Far better than Alienware or XPS. I got the Q6700 with 4GB RAM and single 8800m plus 2x160GB HDDs RAID 0. This thing screams with over 10,000 3D Mark 06.
Only annoyances are
1. All USB ports on right side interferes with mouse usage on laptop desk that sits on my lap, not enough room for usb dongle and using the mouse.
2. Cord from power brick to laptop way too short, needs about 2 more feet. Cord from wall to brick is OK, but just barely.
3. Sager installed the two HDDs with one in the battery bay and one in the easy to access slot in the HDD cage. This meant that when I added a 3rd 250GB drive, I had to remove the pre-installed HDD from the cage and put both back in. Pretty annoying considering it would have been much simpler to just add it under the battery or even in the slot in the cage that didn't require removing the other one to get to.
4. Linux boot editors (GParted, etc) can't see the "FakeRAID array". Not sure if this will be mitigated over time as support is added by the community for the chipset or not. It was a nightmare setting up tri-boot, but I've now got it running XP 32, Vista 64, and Ubuntu 7.10. Had to add the third HDD to install Ubuntu on because the live CD couldn't see the RAID array, it just sees two 160GB HDDs with jibberish on them. Took about 15 hours + the cost of the 250GB HDD when it would have only taken about 1 hour if the FakeRAID was recognized. Maybe ask Sager to request Intel to release more info to open source developers for these high end chipsets?
Only annoyances are
1. All USB ports on right side interferes with mouse usage on laptop desk that sits on my lap, not enough room for usb dongle and using the mouse.
2. Cord from power brick to laptop way too short, needs about 2 more feet. Cord from wall to brick is OK, but just barely.
3. Sager installed the two HDDs with one in the battery bay and one in the easy to access slot in the HDD cage. This meant that when I added a 3rd 250GB drive, I had to remove the pre-installed HDD from the cage and put both back in. Pretty annoying considering it would have been much simpler to just add it under the battery or even in the slot in the cage that didn't require removing the other one to get to.
4. Linux boot editors (GParted, etc) can't see the "FakeRAID array". Not sure if this will be mitigated over time as support is added by the community for the chipset or not. It was a nightmare setting up tri-boot, but I've now got it running XP 32, Vista 64, and Ubuntu 7.10. Had to add the third HDD to install Ubuntu on because the live CD couldn't see the RAID array, it just sees two 160GB HDDs with jibberish on them. Took about 15 hours + the cost of the 250GB HDD when it would have only taken about 1 hour if the FakeRAID was recognized. Maybe ask Sager to request Intel to release more info to open source developers for these high end chipsets?
Comment