Battery Power and Weight:
If there are any downsides to all the power and features of this laptop, the first is the battery power duration and the other is its weight. Using the standard 8-cell battery, we were able to get a maximum battery life of just under 2 hours at idle. Using standard office applications and web browsing reduced that time to 1 hour 39 minutes. You can conserve battery power by reducing screen brightness and turning off the WiFi and Bluetooth radios. In a time where current laptops average 4 hours or greater, a 1-to-2-hour battery life is sub par. 1 to 2 hours is barely enough time to watch a complete DVD movie before the laptop shuts down due to lack of remaining battery power. You do have to take into consideration that this system is not marketed as an ultra portable low power system, but rather as a desktop replacement offering superior power and features. Sager does make an extended cell battery available, which can be opted for in place of the subwoofer. We highly recommend this option to frequent travelers and business professionals, to help increase mobile computing time away from an AC source. All things considered, we were not too surprised by the short battery life, but we still think it should be greater than it is.
Touching again on the focus of this laptop as a desktop replacement, we find that, as with many desktop replacement models, the Sager 8790 is larger than most other laptops on the market, and weighs 10.5 lbs with the standard battery. Is this heavy? You bet it is. Add to that the AC power supply, mouse, and the laptop bag and your approaching 16lbs. This is not an ultra portable, but as we have said it wasn't meant to be. We mention it because its worth noting that you should not expect this laptop to be light. When your laptop arrives, it's likely the first thing you notice is the weight of the box and accessories. After you get over that, the screen and beauty of the laptop will keep you occupied for quite a while.
Using the 8790
The 8790 comes with a 102-key full-size keyboard and dedicated numeric keypad. In our testing, the keyboard was superb, the keys were quiet yet responsive, and it was very easy to touch type. The additional numeric keypad will be useful to professionals and consumers that utilize the keypad often. Gamers will find the keypad useful in games and the keyboard easy to use in games. The keyboard features function keys located at the top to control brightness, sound, Sleep mode, and monitor toggle. Additionally, above the keyboard are four led's that indicate Caps lock, Num Lock, HD activity, and Scroll lock statuses. Shortcut keys to the right provide additional functionality with one touch activation of three hotkeys. These are all backlit in blue, as is the power button located on the same panel.
We brought the 8790 to a LAN party to test its gaming performance, and we are pleased to say that the Mobility Radeon 9700 Turbo included in the 8790 took every game we threw at it in stride. Eventually we even used the 8790 as the server for 24 computers and countless AI in 8 hours of Joint Operations Typhoon Rising, while being played on at the same time. There was no lag, and there were no hiccups and no issues. We then enabled the onboard miniPCI 802.11G Turbo and decided to play wirelessly. The onboard Gigabyte card recognized and connected to the wLAN instantly, and gaming was smooth. We have seen full PCI wireless cards that fared worse and provided inferior performance.
As you can see this is not a small laptop, with support for even the newer Prescott CPU's.
During gameplay, the laptop CPU did get nice and warm, reaching a toasty 140° F. The heatsink fans came on several times, and the noise from the fans was very noticeable. It seems keeping this beast cool requires a good amount of airflow. Again, this is more of a result of the power consumption and performance of the laptop than the cpu alone.
Now let's see how the 8790 performs in games and Office applications.
Benchmarks
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