Sager Notebooks - Gaming Laptops for the Gamer on the Go

When someone looks incredulous when you say you can play high end games like Doom 3 and Oblivion on your laptop, show them this computer to wipe all doubts away. Sager Notebooks have been one of the better manufacturers when it comes to the niche market of gaming laptops, and the NP 9750-V is yet another fine example of their products. I'll go over the pros and cons of this particular laptop.

The NP 9750-V comes stock with a NVIDIA Geforce Go 79xx series video card with 512 MB DDR3 video RAM, and as of right now this is the best mobile video card you can get on the market. It is not Direct X 10 capable, but it still blows away the majority of DX10 cards that are in notebook computers currently. This sounds great, but to make it easier to understand in non-technical language I will put it this way: You will have no trouble running graphic intensive games like F.E.A.R., Oblivion, or any game released within the last 6 months. Compare this to your run-of-the-mill Dell or Apple, which struggle with any game that requires more than 128MB of video RAM. The NP9750-V also comes with 1GB of DDR RAM standard, which is upgradeable up to 2GB. The hard drive that comes with it is only 80GB, but since the computer accepts both PATA and SATA drives, you can use any 2.5" form factor laptop drive. The standard CPU is an AMD Athlon X2 dual core processor, which runs at 2.2 GHz and is 64 bit capable. If this sounds slow, it's actually not. As I've mentioned before, I have had no trouble running programs like Half Life 2, Photoshop, or several programs at once. The physical aspects of this laptop are excellent. There is a multimedia card reader on one side with 4 USB ports and two mini 1394 (FireWire) ports, along with four audio output jacks. There is an array of legacy ports on the back along with various display outputs, such as DVI and S-Video. The screen is 17 inches wide with resolution capability up to 1920x1200. As a last note, there is even a clock on the front display where the media control buttons are! The great features this laptop has outweigh its downfalls, which I'll cover next.

There are some drawbacks to this notebook computer, and the most noticeable two are weight and battery life. When you pick this computer up, it's not like picking up a pad of paper but rather several reams of paper. It tips the scale at close to 12 lbs., which is heavy for a laptop. I don't keep it on my lap very much, because of how heavy it is and due to the heat output, since this laptop uses FIVE fans to keep cool. This is for keeping components like the video card and CPU running cool enough to function properly. As you can guess, the battery life is affected by this. The running time is about 2 hours, and this is when watching a DVD. For much more intensive work, the battery will probably last an hour. To address some problems covered in another review, yes this computer is noisy, but only when all fans are running at full speed (which only happens when playing games). The keyboard stops functioning after sleeping, but this only has happened twice, both times after leaving the computer sleeping/hibernating for a few days. The price can be an obstacle, considering this computer can only take DDR (not DDR2) RAM and has an AMD processor, not one of the newer and better Intel processors.

Overall, this notebook computer is one of the best laptops I have seen, and beat only in my eyes by Apple's line of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. An interesting feature I have found out about Sager is that Alienware and other gaming PC makers use most of the components Sager also uses. A Sager notebook with the same specs as an Alien ware often is cheaper than the Alien ware! I don't have any complaints about appearance and performance, and neither should you after using this notebook PC.