Sager Notebook Purchased from PowerNotebooks.com

Written by Dan Morin on 29 June 2004

I am not getting paid and receive nothing for writing this review of PowerNotebooks. I am sharing my personal story of purchasing of a notebook at http://www.PowerNotebooks.com, because I got an excellent service and feel it is worth my time to write about it.  The price I paid for this notebook was lower than any other brand name having the same components, and the service has been outstanding.  This is my review after 3 months of use of this new computer, so you are reading a genuine review from some using the computer every day.  By the way, the genealogy software GenoPro has been built using this notebook.  A special version of GenoPro is being distributed with every system sold at PowerNotebooks.com (InstallGenoProPowerNotebooks.exe).

To get started, I purchased the following notebook:

• Sager NP5680
• 3.00 GHz HT /w 800 MHz FSB
• 1 GB of RAM PC3200 DDR400 Dual Channel Memory
• 60 GB Ultra ATA/100 HD @ 7,200 RPM
• 15" UXGA (1600x1200) w/ATI Mobility 9600 Pro Turbo w/ 128MB DDR
• Gigabit Ethernet, firewire, 4 USB 2.0, DVD/CD-RW, floppy, etc ... 
• Price (including shipping and WinXP Pro): $2050 USD.

This model has been replaced by the NP5690 with the ATI Radeon 9700 instead of 9600.

Shopping for a new notebook

I have been shopping for a desktop-replacement notebook for a while.  My old 266 MHz Dell Inspiron 7000 purchased in 1998 was getting old.  By the way, this Dell machine has been a real work horse.  I have been completely satisfied with this machine, and accomplished far more than I could ever imagine doing with a notebook. When I purchased this notebook, it was only for business traveling, and eventually it became my primary machine for email and developments, and also to play games from time to time.  There were several reasons why I postponed the purchase of my new notebook: I wanted a notebook I like.  I am spending far more than 8 hours per day with my notebook, so I want a notebook with a good display and a standard keyboard layout.  There are many notebooks models, and many of them have non-orthodox keyboard layouts.  I will not learn a new keyboard layout each time I get a new notebook.  I was aware the NP5680 had the Ctrl and Fn key inverted, but I knew I could do a BIOS update.  What I was looking for is a keyboard with a long backspace key, a regular Enter key with the backslash (\) between the Backspace and the Enter key.  Also, I wanted a keyboard with large Shift keys and a reasonable Tab key, plus arrow keys at a convenient position.  This is pretty standard, but it is amazing how many notebooks have creative keyboard layouts.  Second, I wanted the USB 2.0 ports.  It took a while to have those high-speed USB ports available on notebooks.  I waited patiently.  I was looking for the Dell Inspiron 5150, however its keyboard layout was wrong and it only had 2 USB ports (without the PS2 port), leaving it to only one usable USB port since the first port is used by the mouse.  Later Dell produced the XPS and the 9100, but it was wide screen.  I wanted the 4:3 aspect ratio for the display.  The XPS was a brand new design, and I was not sure if it had any major flaws like its previous design, the Inspiron 8500.  The Inspiron 8500 was a flop, with more than 80% of CNET users not recommending it.  The model 8500 lasted only for 6 weeks at www.dell.com, and quickly got replaced with the 8600.  I was reading a posting at CNET.com when someone recommended the Eurocom D500P Monte Carlo instead of the XPS.  Reading the review about the Eurocom notebook, I found another posting about Sager at PowerNotebooks.com.  By the way, the D500P and the NP5680 are identical with the exception of the logo.  If you live in Canada, Eurocom may be cheaper for you depending which sales tax you have to pay (GST and PST).  Since I have to pay both taxes, I bought my notebook from PowerNotebooks.com while visiting a friend in the US.  I saved about $1,200 USD compared to the same purchase with Eurocom in Ottawa.

By the way, a good place to get information about notebooks is to visit: http://NotebookForums.com.  This website has posting about numerous notebooks, including Sager, Alienware, Dell, Toshiba, Gateway / eMachines, and more.  There is also http://www.notebookreview.com where you can get additional notebook information.

Ordering the Notebook

At first, I was a bit hesitant to purchase from PowerNotebooks.com, but after reading only positive comments from various websites, I decided to give them a try.  I have been a Dell fan for many years and recommended Dell computers to many friends and relatives, however I was really interested purchasing from PowerNotebooks.com for the savings.  Purchasing from PowerNotebooks would save me almost $1,500 compared to something equivalent from Dell.

I phoned the sales department to ask a few technical questions regarding noise, heat dissipation and hardware components.  I spoke mostly with Ron Baird.  He was very knowledgeable.  Next, I filled the online form, selected the options I wanted and paid with VISA.  It was a snap. I got confirmation the components were available.  The notebook got shipped 3 days later, and I got it by the end of the week.  When I got the notebook, I changed some configuration settings in Windows and got a disk corruption problem, so I called the technical support.  I waited about 5 minutes before talking to someone.  They had no idea what the problem was, so they asked me my phone number to call me back.  They did called me back a few hours later, but did not knew what was the source of the problem.  It turned out the problem is a software conflict.  Read the full story here.

What I like about this notebook

• Raw Power (speed).  This machine is pure power.  The combination of the 3.00 GHz processor with Hyper-Threading, the 7200 RPM hard disk with 8 MB of cache plus its 1GB of RAM DDR400 makes this machine a powerful beast.  If you play games, the video card will give you a run for your money too.  Since I compile C++ code, the video card is not very important, but the hard disk is.  Compiling GenoPro.exe does generate over 500 intermediate files, totalizing about 75 MB.  You can see why a fast hard disk is important.  A full build of GenoPro takes only 16 seconds.  Wow!
• Low noise (silent).  To my surprise, this notebook is very silent.  I thought my Dell Inspiron 7000 was silent, but this notebook is more silent.  The hard disk is so silent that it is impossible to hear it when reading or writing.  The CD-RW drive is incredibly silent, even when burning CDs at 24x.
• Bright beautiful screen.  The UXGA with a resolution of 1600x1200 is so nice. I use the regular small-size 8-points default font from Window XP without any visual effort.  I cannot work anymore with the old 1024x768 resolution. When I use my old notebook, I see a desktop full of coarse icons.  Thanks to the video card ATI Radeon 9600, I can get easily 60 fps when playing games at 1600x1200 resolution.  Wonderful.
• Floppy disk.  I was surprised to have a floppy disk at the same time of the DVD/CD-RW, because I thought the second bay was for a battery.  Well, there is a separate slot for a small battery, and the floppy drive may be replaced by a second battery, DVD/CD ROM drive, hard disk or even a Flash card reader.  I used the floppy disk to transfer GenoPro Beta 11g on my old 386 with 4 MB of RAM.  Yes, GenoPro does run on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM.
• Low heat.  I thought this machine would produce enormous amount of heat.  The 3.00 GHz processor having a 800 MHz FSB and its 3D video card would be enough to produce significant amount of heat.  Well, this is not the case.  Also, the Hitachi Travelstar 7200 RPM hard disk uses less power than the average 4200 RPM hard disk.  There are nice reviews about this superb hard disk and its new Adaptive Power Management technology.  Search Google for "Travelstar" to find reviews.
• Good keyboard, good touchpad and sound.  Well this is pretty standard, but it is worth to mention those essential components are working great.  This was not the case for the Dell 8500 where hundreds of users reported having problems with the keyboard and experiencing frequent sound pops and sound clicks (the original postings at CNet.com have been archived).  I am not complaining about Dell.  My father purchased a Dell Inspiron 1100 notebook the same month as I did.  The Inspiron 1100 is far better than my old Inspiron 7000 for everything, from speed to low noise level to cost.  My father paid 1/4 of what I paid for my Inspiron 7000 in 1998.  He had no trouble with the new notebook, however he had to buy a USB port replicator to have the mouse, keyboard and webcam connected simultaneously.
• All the drivers are available for download from PowerNotebooks.com.  Installing them is painless.  I had the opportunity to install them about 10 times because I was trying to figure out the disk corruption problem.
• Solid chassis.  I would not be surprised to see this armature lasting several years.  All is needed is to put newer processors and video cards.  I am certain this chassis can accommodate PCI Express components.
• Nice design.  This notebook is slick.

What I don't like about this notebook

• The keyboard key Ctrl and Fn should be swapped.  This is no big deal since I did a BIOS update to swap the keys.  Yes, you can do it yourself by doing the following steps found at http://www.powernotebooks.com/articles/8890-5680_kb-remap.php. GenoPro is not responsible for any problem with this procedure.
• The power transformer is big.  This is not a problem because I rarely move this notebook, but I am surprised why the power transformer is so big.
• Short battery life.  I get about 1.5 hour of battery life.  For me, this is not very important, but it is always nice to have longer battery life.
• I got two stucked (dead) pixels.  Those stucked pixels are in the middle of the screen on top of each other.  One pixel is always green and the other is always red.  I only see these stucked pixels when I play DVDs.  When working with a Visual Studio or any other application, I cannot see those stucked pixels because the background is white.  If I use a command prompt, the stucked pixels look like a tiny dust particle.  With a screen resolution of 1600x1200, you need good eyes to see them.  I have 20/20 vision.

Recommendations

• Swap the Ctrl and Fn keys to obtain a standard keyboard layout.  It would be a good idea to double the width of the Ctrl key like most notebooks manufacturers do.
• Analog audio volume.  With my old computer, I could change the volume without the use of any software.  This would be useful when booting the computer at night when everyone is sleeping.
• Better microphone.  The microphone is somewhat useless because it records only background noises. I find that the microphone on this notebook is uselessit hardly picks up any sound and if it does it also picks up background noise.

Disk Corruption Problem

I was playing with the performance settings in the Control Panel and I lost my Windows XP installation.  Read the full story here.

Picture Gallery

Those pictures have been 'stolen' from http://NotebookForums.com/showthread.php?t=7620. I am too lazy to take my own pictures :)  There are more pictures available at http://NotebookForums.com/showthread.php?t=7620.

Update 22 October 2006

About 4 months ago (summer 2006), the processor started to become very hot, resulting in serious performance degradation.  Some games were unplayable.  For instance, after 5 minutes of gameplay, I was getting from 1 to 5 fps while playing Rise of Nations or Half-Life 2, compared to a 60 fps before.  My guess was the processor over-heated and was somewhat burned.

I enjoy playing games from time to time, especially during the holiday season. Since 1995, we (my brother and brothers in-law) have a tradition of having a LAN party during the holiday.  Because my machine was unusable for games, I was looking for a new notebook with a faster video card.  I called PowerNotebooks to get more information about their fastest models.  My question was which processor is faster: AMD X2 Dual Core or Intel Pentium 4.  I was also concerned by the heat, and wanted to know which processor produced less heat (to avoid having the same problem as my current notebook).  I wanted a notebook capable to host two hard disks in RAID 1 configuration in case one hard disk crashes.

I was greeted by Mr. Donald Stratton, since Ron was absent. Mr. Stratton (the founder and owner of Power Notebooks) told me the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ was faster than the 3.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 670 HT, and the sales ratio of those two notebooks was 10 to 1.  On the other hand, the new Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0 GHz was faster than any other processor including the AMD FX-60.  This Core Duo produces less heat, however is not available in a RAID configuration.

I told Mr. Stratton that I was shopping for a new notebook because my old notebook was too slow.  He looked at my file and noticed my purchase was almost three years ago.  He asked me if I had cleaned the heat sink.  Well, I cleaned the fans many times, but never did anything for the heat sink.  He explained me how important cleaning the heat sink is, and how to do it (it is very easy by the way).  He also asked my phone number to have Sager call me to perform some diagnosis on the processor.  After our phone conversation, opened my notebook and removed the heat sink.  Well, the heat sink was so clogged that no air could get through.  The whole heat sink was completely blocked from one end to the other end.

After removing the dust, and put the heat sink back in place, I played games to see if it would make a difference.  Well, I played Half-Life 2 for about one hour, until I wanted to play another game, all without any drop in performance.  I also played Rise of Nations for about two hours.  What is more interesting is the fans responsible of cooling the processor were running at their lowest during the whole gameplay.  Before cleaning the heatsink, the fans were constantly running loud, even when the machine was idle.  I don't need Sager to call me or perform some diagnosis anymore; the machine is as good as when I purchased it.

Conclusion

Cleaning the heat sink is very important.  I wasn't aware dust could pile-up in this area, degrading the processor performance.  When a processor overheats, it runs slower to produce less heat.

I really value the integrity of Mr. Donald Stratton.  I had two quick questions before placing my order.  Instead, Mr. Stratton spent about 30 minutes explaining me the differences between the notebook models and gave me tips to save my old notebook.  My old notebook is as fast as before and I don't need a new notebook anymore.  I made my mind to buy myself a new machine for the holiday and probably will spoil myself; the new video cards are much faster than my Radeon 9600.  I have to decide if I will purchase the big notebook supporting RAID configuration or the super fast Core 2 Duo which is the fastest gaming notebook.

If you live in the United States and looking for a quality notebook, you should consider PowerNotebooks.  They have incredible competitive prices and competent customer support.  My brother got the NP9890 and one of the harddrive failed.  He got a replacement harddisk sent by mail, and the machine works as before.  Since my brother has a RAID 1 configuration, he was able to remove the defective hard disk, keep using his notebook without re-installing anything while waiting for the second hard disk to arrive by mail.

Follow Up

Since then, I have been purchasing a new notebook from PowerNotebooks almost every year.  In total, I purchased 5 notebooks from them and still get the same excellent service.  Once a while I check other websites to compare prices, and I am still amazed how much PowerNotebooks sells lower than competitors.  I am so happy I have found this specialized website (www.PowerNotebooks.com) selling notebooks computers.  I am considering purchasing a new one [again].