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- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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2 out of 3 people found this review helpful
5.0 stars
"Great gaming laptop, perfect price and wonderful design"
Pros: GeForce 9700 GTX Video Card (Plays Crisis, Stalker, WoW, UT3, and Bioshock 60+ FPS @ high settings)
High capacity, decent response time hard drive.
ESATA (USB DUO) ports, charges my IPOD when laptop is off.
Bluetooth, Wireless, HDMI Out, HD Audio etcCons: Continued from #3. Pros:
Summary: Here is my personal opinion. I am not a critic, nor do I work for CNET or any other corporate ad companies.
Long battery life (considering the included hardware)
Decent weight and size, compared to Sager and Alienware laptops
Integrated Webcam and Microphone (with hardware noise cancellation)
Cons: The Stock Market
I am currently in IRAQ and have been here for 4 months since I purchased this laptop at Best Buy of Fayetteville North Carolina. This laptop has outperformed my Dell e1705 and XPS in the ?Dust? category (spent 3x8 month deployments in Kandahar Afghanistan with my Dells) and my Toshiba Qosmio X305 has never been dusted off (canned air or otherwise), and it still remains quiet when playing my high end games such as Crisis (+ Warhead), Stalker (+Clear Sky), UT3, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online (beta) at highest settings with impressive frame rates. The fast ram makes day to day operations a breeze and loading times almost painless. Mid ranged games such as Far Cry, WoW (140+ fps completely maxed during a 40 player raid using stock drivers), Bioshock, and HL2 can be played at highest settings totally maxed with no sluggish performance, and no loud fan noise (unlike my hot and noisy XPS).
For those of you who like to turn heads with custom mods and sheer physical appearance, you do NOT have to feel guilty about the STOCK look of this laptop. The red flames actually sparkle in the sun, and give off a DEEP red look, and the silver looks like chrome in comparison to the shiny red. Of all the ?glossy? laptop screens Ive seen in my time, this one was quite standard, although I ripped the HD screen out of my dell, and it was plug and play into this laptop. The mod usually costs around 70 bucks and offers true 1080P graphics, but watch out for clones on ebay. Post mod (3 weeks ago I installed it) all the games I usually played at 1440x900 play at the same frame rates at 1920x1080, which makes me think that with custom drivers this chipset can actually do much more (but is the heat risk worth it?).
Some people hate running laptops on their lap (go figure, I am guilty as charged) but the placement of the heatsink (rear center) and the fans (centrally located for both CPU and GPU) make lap operation a breeze (unless you?re wearing a mini skirt ;) I just keep my left knee directly under the left corner of the laptop, and my right knee directly under the right corner. I feel absolutely no heat at all. No discomfort, and no vibration from fans. The battery life was long enough for me to watch 2 movies both 2 hours in length using 50% screen brightness, and 75% volume using ear-buds. I used a modified version of I8KFan (for dells) to set the threshold for my fans at 90% to keep them from running unless the cpu and gpu were nearing alarm and even then I limited the fan speed to 30% with no problems. The fans would run for about 1 minute then turn off for about 5 or 6 minutes. This was without any underclocking software or the high performance battery.
One of my biggest problems with my Dell XPS was the DVD vibration when playing a DVD that wasn?t 100% balanced. The Qosmio comes pre-installed with a DVD toolkit (that conveniently awaits user input in the taskbar) forces the DVD player to run in ?silent? mode suffering no loss in visual quality or reading speeds (oddly enough). Now I run my DVD in Silent mode 100% of the time. Not only for battery conservation, but because the gain for running in normal mode is not noticeable, for most of my applications.
The built in webcam and microphone (with audio feedback cancellation built into the hardware) makes messaging a breeze as well. Using the latest beta of Yahoo for Vista, I can talk to my wife and son with no problems of feedback, whatsoever (even with 1000+ ms latency!) The webcam also has its own touch sensitive interface button to launch a video recorder / picture application to take snapshots or capture video at multiple resolutions. High quality pictures look quite decent, with minimal distortion, and low bandwidth video works great with the webcam?s auto detection of effective quality.
For those of you keen to the OSX86 scene, this laptop is 100% compatible with the latest release of leo4all v6 (Leo4all v5 Intel Client). Only additional downloads for compatibility was the built in microphone and webcam kexts (google is your friend). The USB Boot compatibility of the BIOS allows me to run BackTrack v2 and v3 from my thumb drive (or any other USB distro).
To sum up my review, I give this product 2 thumbs up, and a swift kick in the nose! This laptop is considerably light, in comparison to every sager laptop on the market today. No one honestly cares about the price of oil, or the weight of their behemoth LAN party killing machine. If nothing else, the sexy red LED glow all around the laptop should keep you warm through the cold winter nights ahead.
?Lead, follow, or get the hell out of my way?
Terrorism Sux
10th MTN DIV MND-C NSC G6 DAMO Senior System Engineer
Camp Victory, IRAQ
- 3 replies to this review
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i really appreciate this review, thanks.
You know I grew up in fayetteville, my dad was station in bragg for a few years.
Not to kiss your ass, but thank you for goin over seas. -
Hey man I liked your review make sure to write more! btw I have the same laptop, so i can also say you have good taste :)
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Short and sweet.... I could not have said it better. I respect CNet and their opinions, but I would have to disagree with most of their CONS. As a Marine Veteran I can appreciate TerSux review. The red LED's are not only Sexy, but very useful in situations when light is scares and every little bit helps. On a side note: TerSux.. If you have any suggestions for some good tweaks for our machine please contact me and let me know. Be safe........... Blaznx
