Sager Gaming Notebook NP8690 - The Chunky Supreme

The Chunky Supreme

If you haven't heard of Sager before, you won't be in the minority. Sager's mostly famous in the United States where it was founded, though resellers have helped spread the branding to other regions. In the US however, the brand is known for their high-end performance notebooks and the ability to customize the parts when you buy. CubeHub, a local Singaporean company, is currently one of the resellers for the brand and they have given us a top of the line model to review so let's check the notebook out.

Firstly, if you want a notebook just for looks, then you will be sorely disappointed. The Sager NP8690 is thick, chunky, black with silver linings and is actually based on a Clevo chassis. It's not a notebook that will make others drool in envy, nor will it get designers all hot and fired up. The true beauty of the machine however, lies inside its components, where its heavy duty specifications should kick butt in our benchmark tests. Let's take a quick look at the exterior before we move to the interior.

Matte Interior

The inside of the Sager NP8690 opens up nicely with an interior that looks surprisingly nice. You'll find a large glossy 15.6-inch that supports Full HD resolution at 1920 x 1080 pixels. While we would have hoped for a matte display, the glossy screen is fine for indoor needs. With its 3.44kg weight, we doubt you'll be bringing this notebook around to use outdoors where the sunlight may be glaring on the glossy screen. Thankfully, apart from the screen, the rest of the notebook has a matte finish.

Interestingly, the notebook sports an isolated keyboard design that also features a number pad. It does take awhile to get used to the layout if you've only been working on notebooks without number pads. Generally speaking though, the typing experience was pretty average and we have no complaints. The trackpad was also pretty decent, and while it's not indicated, the right side is a scroll zone that will make browsing webpages easier. Audio-wise, expect to hear decent sound quality from the unit.

Performance Benchmarking

We've talked about how we wanted a top of the line unit to review, and the Sager NP8690 comes packed to the hilt with goodies in the form of an Intel Core i7-720QM processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM and uses an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB GDDR5 RAM for its graphics. It's probably one of the more powerful discrete graphics solutions that we've yet to encounter on a notebook, so we'll be loading up the usual benchmarks of PCMark 05, PCMark Vantage, 3DMark06 and Far Cry 2 to see how this gaming notebook performs as a desktop replacement device.

To figure out where this notebook stands, we've also pitted the Sager notebook against some of the other Intel Core i7 notebooks that we've recently tested. These notebooks however are probably not be up to spec when considering the vastly different discrete graphics options, but it will be interesting to note how powerful the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 is on the Sager NP8690. We'll see just how much more powerful the notebook is in the following graphs:-

Futuremark PCMark05

While the Sager notebook does score well here, we do note that there's not that big of a difference in scores between the Intel Core i7-720QM and the Intel Core i7-620M in the CPU test despite one having four cores and the other having only two cores. It's quite likely the difference in clocks speeds made up for the differences. While the Sager NP8690 does score high here, this test does factor in the graphics score which does give the Sager notebook an advantage. Against the more powerful Dell Alienware M15x, you'll note that the more powerful processor of that branded gaming notebook easily outscores the Sager.

 

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Interestingly, the Intel Core i7 15-inch MacBook Pro does well here, beating the Sager notebook in the overall score but not really doing that strong against the NP8690 in the other dedicated sub-benchmarks. This is due to MacBook Pro scoring better for the Music, Communications and Productivity Test Suites (the former two sets of results aren't reflected here, but are generally represented by the Productivity set of results). If you look at the other scores, the Sager notebook easily comes up tops for the more demanding content creativity suites where the notebook flexes its raw processing performance. Despite Sager's good showing, the Alienware unit still retains the crown almost across the board. The one place Sager did get ahead of the Dell Alienware M15x is is the HDD test suite where the 7200rpm drive on the Sager notebook made its mark.

Futuremark 3DMark06

Now, here comes the interesting part. The Sager uses one of the most powerful mobile discrete graphics chips at the moment, so we were expecting extremely high performance but we were a tad disappointed. The notebook certainly raised eyebrows with its 13294 3DMark06 score and only the Dell Alienware M15x remained defiant, beating the Sager notebook by just 1000 points. One reason why the GeForce GTX 260M equipped Dell notebook still managed to get an upper hand is because 3DMark06 also factors in CPU performance and as such, the much more speedier Extreme-class Intel processor on the Alienware machine pulled ahead.

Far Cry 2

In a real world gaming performance, we loaded up the notebook with Far Cry 2 and tested the unit with the Far Cry 2 benchmark program at Very High settings. Two resolutions were used: 1920 x 1080 and the more common 1280 x 1024 and found that even at the highest settings, the notebook was able to deliver decent frame rates compared to other notebooks using less powerful discrete graphics engines. Most importantly, it also beat the M15x with much better frame rates at both our tested resolutions.

All this gaming performance does have a drawback though, as you'll find out in the next page when share with you the battery life performance of the notebook.

Battery Life and Portability Index

The Sager NP8690 is one heck of a monster notebook, and given our experience with previous desktop replacement class of notebooks, we don't expect it to last very long. Given that it's using a 3-cell battery that's only rated at 11.1V and 3800mAh, that's a very limited battery pack for a notebook using such power hungry hardware. Let's see how it holds up in our DVD battery life test, which involves looping a DVD movie at 50% screen brightness and volume with WiFi turned off. It should give us a good indication on whether this notebook is one you can carry around, or whether it will be permanently stuck at your table near a power point.

Battery Life

Lasting a jaw-dropping short time of just 39 minutes, the Sager NP8690 most likely breaks our records for a notebook with the lousiest battery life. To be sure, we even ran this test a few times just to be sure and results were similar. This also means the power consumption of the unit should be pretty high and our calculations show it to be so, with the unit consuming a whopping 64.89W. It also doesn't help that the battery capacity is so low, as other DTRs packed a much more powerful battery that let them last much longer. Perhaps the limited power battery pack was designed on purpose since most people won't be lugging a notebook around this heavy and chunky anyway.

Portabilty Index

As for our Portability Index, it's a measurement where we consider the battery uptime of the notebook and divide it by the product of the unit's weight and volume. The higher the ratio, the more portable the unit is. The Sager notebook obviously scores much much lower than most of the other notebooks in this comparison. It's so low, we don't really expect anyone to be using this without a power point and its accompanying chunky heavy power adapter too. In a way, it lives up to its DTR moniker in the strictest sense.

With Monstrous Power Comes Great Affordability

The Sager NB8690 may be a huge chunky machine, but it is hands down one of the more powerful notebooks to have entered our labs for a long while. While such powerful notebooks do exist, they are usually 'blinged' up with fancy lights that distract or cost way too much for the pocket. The Sager notebook however, is none of those things. It doesn't try to score any points for looks, nor does it try to go on a diet.

It's unabashedly big and chunky and strangely, that's how we like it as a notebook - especially when we factored in the performance of the notebook. It definitely outperforms most of the gaming class notebooks and has shown that it's nearly the equivalent of the Dell Alienware M15x in our benchmarks. That said, its battery life is definitely something that needs more work - the measly 3-cell battery that the Sager notebook uses is hardly enough to sustain the notebook when unplugged. This is one notebook you don't want to be moving around too much, especially when you factor in the backbreaking 3.44kg weight. Perhaps they figured that out and packed a minimal battery unit to keep costs down for consumers.

Despite the drawbacks of the the battery, weight and form-factor, the notebook has two advantages that's hard to beat. Firstly, its very competitive price of just S$2338. Compared to the stratospheric asking price of the Dell Alienware M15x at S$6390.99, the Sager NP8690 is a heck of a good deal. The second advantage is that Sager allows you to upgrade the internals anytime you want. If your discrete graphics isn't any good, you can easily buy a new one from the distributor and get it swapped and installed. Makes a lot of sense really, as you probably won't need to upgrade all the time, but when you do need to, you don't have to buy a new notebook but instead just get the parts changed like a desktop.

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