On Monday after an annoying wait for shipping I got up close and personal with a custom built NP8760 gaming laptop from Sager PC, as you may know I considered buying a Sager notebook but ended up choosing the Asus G73JH because of it’s lower price and more appealing design. Most of my cons section for this laptop rest on the external design so lets get that over with.
My first impression at the unboxing was “This doesn’t look like $2300 worth of computer.” I expected a more polished and appealing design considering the high price, I consider it quite a mark against it given the cost. Other than the bland design (based on the Clevo W870CU), the build quality was very high all the pieces fit together tightly and perfectly, and the non-flashy appearance can be a pro or con depending on your tastes, and thank the design God that the laptop isn’t glossy. The laptop is also smaller from front to back than the Asus G73 because of the Asus’s exhaust and battery design, unfortunately it is also thicker from bottom to top (open). It has four USB ports including a USB 3.0, two are place on the back along with the power input (which I consider an annoyance) and four audio input and outputs (line in, headphone, S/PDIF, mic), I was extremely happy to see the full sized chiclet style keyboard and several dedicated function keys near the base of the screen. I can also tell you that the fingerprint reader works very well and accurately and gives you a serious James Bond kick when you can log in or out with the swipe of a finger.
From the look of it the laptop appears to be covered in speakers and I was hoping for superior audio quality but alas while it’s better than average it still suffers from the tinny audio that plagues most laptops. The mic is also placed right near the touchpad which I would assume brings it somewhat closer to your mouth but seem like it might be covered by your hands occasionally. Video good audio
The 17.3” LED backlit screen runs at 1080p and is a pleasure to watch offering an incredible viewing experience for movies and games, probably one of the highest quality screens I have seen on a notebook. From the first boot we noticed a one dead pixel and later four more which marred the screen quality, but could just be bad luck. Still an expensive machine like this needs to be near perfect.
This laptop had been customized with an 80GB SSD drive which boosted the already blazing fast performance of the NVidia GeForce GTX 460m graphics card, coupled with 8 GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM and a an Intel Core i7 Q740 quad core running at 1.73GHz, to make this system simply FAS.T Games such as Cysis and StarCraft 2 should max out and barely cause the system to blink, as well as improving boot times on a clean install of Windows 7 Premium, by almost half, by my totally informal guess over the Asus G73JH.
This laptop might be a plain Jane when it comes to looks but for most gamers looking for performance at a reasonable price beauty is all about what’s inside, and with that 1.5 GB graphics card and 1.3GHz RAM and SSD she is one beautiful laptop. I prefer function over style in almost everything but when I shelled out $1900 Canadian (after taxes and shipping) I wanted a good looking machine and so the Sager’s took a backseat, however for $2300 Canadian (after taxes and shipping) the NP8760 is hardly a poor choice for a gamer.