Gaming Laptop Roundup

Sager NP9262 - Thoughts and Summary

While we are running a slightly older version of the current NP9262, we can still get it good idea of what the platform offers and what areas might cause potential problems. Besides the size, weight, and heat output - the back of this laptop gets very hot during a gaming session and is definitely not something you would want sitting on your lap - one of our biggest concerns continues to be the state of NVIDIA's SLI drivers for notebooks. Things have certainly improved since we first looked at an SLI notebook, and we even see improvements relative to Dell's XPS M1730 in terms of game compatibility. Considering we are running updated drivers, that makes sense. In fact, when you look at the performance results you will see that SLI improved every gaming benchmark that we ran - and we ran other benchmarks that aren't shown and also saw good scaling with SLI. The problem isn't that SLI notebooks don't offer better performance; the real concern is that getting updated drivers is extremely hit or miss.

If you purchase any laptop that runs a single graphics card, finding up-to-date drivers from the manufacturer can be difficult. We have seen "gaming" notebooks that never updated the drivers after the initial launch. Needless to say, after a year there are certainly a lot of games that don't function properly with the original drivers, but thankfully we have websites like LaptopVideo2Go.com that give users the option to run "hacked" drivers. Sometimes the hacked drivers don't work properly, or performance will be slower in some games. When the official drivers simply fail outright, however, unoptimized performance is better than nothing. And that's where we run into difficulties with SLI notebooks: the hacked drivers almost never work properly with SLI, so you are stuck waiting on the manufacturer/NVIDIA to release new drivers.

We just stated that we didn't notice any problems with SLI performance scaling during our testing, but perhaps part of the reason for that is that we are testing during the slow season of the year. The number of major titles that have been launched in the past six months is relatively small compared to what we expect to see during the fall season, and it remains to be seen whether NVIDIA and their partners can stay on top of mobile driver updates. That's also not to say that we didn't experience a few anomalies, the biggest being that every time the system switches between 2D and 3D graphics (i.e. when you start a game) the LCD flickers on and off for about five seconds. Whether that's because of the changing clock speeds or some other aspect of SLI we don't know; all we know is that we find the delay annoying and it's not something we see on non-SLI notebooks - or SLI desktops for that matter.

Honestly, what we really need is the ability to run reference drivers on SLI laptops - even more so than regular laptops, although that would also be great. We've been told that there are BIOS hooks and other features that notebook manufacturers use that get broken without vendor specific drivers; that may be true, but if so we have to ask why there's any need to use such programming. As far as we're concerned, a top-end gaming notebook needs to be as seamless as a desktop when it comes to updating drivers and running games. Until that happens, we would think very carefully before spending a lot of money on SLI notebook.

The thing is, if you want maximum gaming performance in a notebook, single GPU solutions simply aren't fast enough to run many titles at high resolutions and detail settings. Look at the performance difference between the Alienware m15x and the Sager NP9262 and it's clear that when SLI works properly it can make a world of difference. Moreover, keep in mind that even the fastest notebook graphics chips are still a solid generation behind desktop offerings. The 9800M GTX isn't even the performance equivalent of a desktop 8800 GT 512MB - a card that's almost a year old - never mind the 9800M GTX/GTX+, GTX 260, or GTX 280. If you want to be able to run most upcoming games at 1920x1200 on a notebook without having to turn down detail settings, SLI is currently necessary.

Looking to the future, the NP9262 is about due for an overhaul. Sure, it can run dual-core and quad-core desktop Penryn processors, but Intel is now shipping quad-core chips that are specifically designed for the mobile sector. The current Q9100 and QX9300 might be a bit slower than the desktop parts, and they cost more as well, but they have lower power and thermal requirements. That could allow for smaller designs that still offer lots of performance. Then again, if you like the idea of running three hard drives and SLI in a notebook, smaller notebooks aren't really an option.

As it stands, the NP9262 is the fastest notebook solution you can purchase right now. Sager is one of several companies offering this sort of notebook, with prices that match or beat many of their competitors. For the price, you can get almost twice the performance of the Alienware m15x - and less than half the battery life if you use the m15x's IGP mode. If you want a mobile workstation or a notebook that will turn others green with envy at LAN parties, the NP9262 has what it takes. Just don't be surprised if you get frustrated on occasion with the frequency of graphics driver updates. Even if you don't want to pay $2500 or more for a top-end gaming laptop, Sager is still worth a look, as they have several other laptops catering to the less extreme markets.