Sager NP9873 / Clevo P870DM3 Quick Review by HTWingNut

SAGER NP9873 / CLEVO P870DM3 QUICK PREVIEW

It has been a long and highly anticipated wait for Pascal GPU's and the time has finally come, as Nvidia has finally started to release their lineup of desktop and mobile Pascal GPU's. Nvidia went big up front offering 1060, 1070, and 1080 mobile versions of their desktop variants. This time around though Pascal is supposed to close the gap between desktop and laptop gaming performance. Gone is the "m" moniker for mobile, although I don't know why, because it's not like even if specs are identical that you'd be slapping a desktop PCI-express GPU in any laptop. But in any case it is great to see the mobile market finally get a substantial upgrade in the 3D graphics department.

Sager has gone above and beyond, however, by offering their NP9873 which is designed off the Clevo P870DM3 chassis. What makes this machine so special, is not only does it support the top end 1080 Pascal GPU, it supports dual GPU's in SLI! Not to mention that there is no Optimus to hinder performance, and it houses a *desktop* i7-6700k 14nm Skylake Socket 1151 CPU. So this is a fully configurable system with interchangeable components.

LPC-Digital has graciously supplied me with a Sager NP9873 well equipped so we can share the performance with your for your entertainment and possibly help with your purchasing decicision. This is a quick overview of the laptop at this time, but a full fledged review will be forthcoming with detailed temperatures, power, and overall gaming performance this machine has to offer.

The laptop being reviewed is spec'ed with the following:

Sager NP9873 / Clevo P870DM3
17.3" Full HD (1920 x 1080 ... ie 1080p) 120Hz AUO LCD
Intel Core i7-6700K Unlocked with 8MB cache, and up to 4.2GHz Desktop CPU
DUAL Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 mobile GPU's with 8GB GDDR5X on each GPU
32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 2400MHz (PC4 19200) system RAM (supporing up to 64GB with 4 total slots)
OCZ RD400 M.2 512GB NVMe SSD (supports two M.2 80mm SSD's and two 2.5" 9.5mm height drives)
Intel dual band Ultra - 802.11AC 8260 + Bluetooth 4.2 M.2 Combo Card
Dual 330W AC adapters with a power converter box for a total of 660W power output

Other items that come with the system: thermal paste, owner's manual, two hard drive adapter brackets to convert from 7mm to 9.5mm, two drive brackets to install into system, drivers DVD, Windows 10 install USB drive (that's a purchased add-on)

The laptop is about 17" wide by 12" deep, and about 2" at its thickest point including the feet. It weighs in at a hefty 12 lbs 6 oz, that's about 5.6kg! Each of the two 330W nuclear fusion power bricks that fuel this beast weigh in at 2lbs 12oz each, and are 8" x 4" x 1.75" in dimension connected through a dual converter box into the single 4 pin connector to the back of the laptop.

You can see my video preview of the system here:

OVERVIEW

First, a general overview of the system. This sucker is big and heavy, but what do you expect from a portable to end gaming desktop? It has a plastic matte black lid with faceted accents that light up and configurable with the keyboard backlighting software. Opening the laptop lid feels smooth as the single wide center mounted hinge feels robust and steady through the swing of the lid that goes to about 20-30 degrees past vertical to its furthest point. Black metal speaker grilles of irregular quadrilateral shape sit on the outboard side of the laptop hinge. The entire laptop is comprised of facets at irregular angles except the hinge which is rounded in shape, but overall it has a very stealth combat plane look to it.

A large round chrome trimmed power button that lights up white when powered on, sits above the keyboard, with white status lights adorned on either side of it.

In traditional Clevo fashion, a backlit keyboard is offered that has medium travel keys and contains a separate numberpad. It looks like it is the same keyboard used on their 15" notebooks, which really isn't a bad thing since they are reasonably comfortable and responsive keyboards, just it would be nice to see the 17" width utilized more fully especially on their flagship laptop. The three zones of keyboard backlighting can of course be adjusted through the Clevo keyboard backlighting app.

The surface surrounding the keyboard is a black painted metal and feels sturdy and does not flex. A generously sized Synaptics touchpad sits just below the surface of the palm rest surface. It is also black and very solid with two physical mouse buttons that offer a slight movement for activation and do not make much noise at all when depressed. Clevo did away with the fat fingerprint reader that was nestled between the touchpad mouse keys, as it is now integrated in the upper left portion of the touchpad.

LCD

A 120Hz IPS Matte panel is available for this machine and is what was included with this device. There is also a 4K panel coming soon as well, should you desire such a resolution. In any case, the LCD at first look is crystal clear, but with a matte finish. First impressions are the its brightness levels are a bit low, but overall from my brief time with the machine, the colors look great and 120Hz definitely helps make the display feel responsive. Note that this is NOT a G-Sync display.

HWInfo64 indicates that it is an AUO B173HAN01.2. Panelook has details for the B173HAN01.0 which shows it as a 60Hz panel, but I can only imagine that the 1.2 version is the 120Hz version of this same panel, and Nvidia Control Panel definitely lets you set this LCD to 120Hz and is running at that from the start. You can find details for the 1.0 version at Panelook here: http://ift.tt/2b75tot

PORTS

Attaching peripherals and storage devices to a computer is a common requisite even in a world of wireless everything, and thankfully the Sager NP9873 offers a plethora of ports.

Around the laptop starting with the right side are a single USB 3.0 Type A connector, dual Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.1 Type C ports, dual mini DisplayPorts 1.3 and a Kensington lock type port. I'm not real thrilled with all those peripheral ports coming off the right side in the path of a mouse, it would have been better to include a couple of those out the rear in my opinion. In any case, at the rear there is a single HDMI port, a USB 3.0 Type A port, and the four pin power connector. Moving over to the left there are three more USB 3.0 Type A ports, dual Killer Gigabit ethernet ports, and four 1/8" or 3.5mm audio jacks.

Specs for the USB ports on the system are confusing since they indicate the USB 3.0 ports are acutally USB 3.1 Gen1, so I'm not sure what to make of that.

INTERNAL COMPONENTS

Cooling two massive GPU's and a desktop CPU requires significant airflow. The bottom panel has a large number of open air grilles to feed the three main system fans. Removing the bottom panel requires removing about 8-9 philips head screws, and pulling up firmly on the front center edge of the case to remove it. Some effort is required, but after removing it a few times it's pretty straight-forward. Removing this bottom panel reveals the guts of the laptop.

Honestly, there's not really a lot ot see except a lot of black painted surface. A majority of that black painted surface is a huge solid chunk of metal, assuming copper, that is used to cool the GPU's and CPU since they are all tied together with a multitude of heatpipes snaking around the system to the three system cooling fans. It appears this entire massive heatsink needs to be removed when servicing or repasting the CPU and GPU's which involves removal of about 18 screws. At this time I have not removed this heatsink but will be sure to do so when giving the laptop its thorough shakedown. It will be interesting to take a peek at the desktop Intel i7-6700K CPU and of course the GTX 1080 mobile GPU's.

Other components that are accessible here are two hard drive bays that are loaded from the front of the laptop sandwidched underneath the two GPU's and the keyboard and palm rest. Two of the four RAM slots are accessible here, as are the battery and subwoofer. The remainder of the components are seated underneath the keyboard. Removing the keyboard requires removing one screw clearly labeled "K/B" and after removig the screw, opening the lid of the laptop and pushing through that screw hole with a blunt philips head screwdriver, popping out the keyboard otherwise secured only by magnets. This exposes the two M.2 drive bays, the other two of the four RAM slots, the wireless card, and the connectors for the keyboard and touchpad.

SOFTWARE

Sager usually only includes bare bones applications without any spamware or trialware crap, and this machine is no exception. They offer their useful utilities like Sound Blaster X-fi for manipulating sound reproduction and loudness levels, the Clevo Control Center for managing system options including their own CPU and GPU overclocking utilities as well as adjusting fan profiles among many other options. And the Flexikey utility adjusting keyboard backlighting and macros.

Clevo's Overclocking Tools:

AUDIO

It appears that Clevo has kept the Realtek audio despite Texas Instruments Burr-Brown Audio and Sabre HiFi stickers showing on the system. I will have to look into this further, because there must be some audio features that aren't readily apparent in the software provided. There is no indication of what brand of speakers are being used, either. Clevo laptops have been notorious for using Onkyo speakers. They have never been particularly good, but not horrible either on the high end machines like this one. Initial impressions are that they are decent. Not very full or rich but average sound and volume. It will work fine with movies and video games, but likely will not satisfy a modest audiophile.

SSD

Sager included an OCZ RD400 M.2 NVMe SSD with this configuration. RD apparently stands for Revo Drive, and shows up as a Toshiba drive and not OCZ, which stands to reason since Toshiba has recently acquired OCZ. According to Anandtech this SSD has a Toshiba branded controller but suspected to be a Marvell 88SS1093 8-channel 3-core controller. Running Crystal Disk Mark shows this SSD offers great performance and initial use of the system has not shown this SSD to show any signs of hitching or slowing of the system performance at all. There is a temp sensor readable by HWInfo64 and during the CrystalDiskMark benchmark temps did not exceed 75C. This seems a bit high, but many M.2 drives without active cooling runs even hotter, including the Samsung drives that typically reach 80C quickly and then throttle excessively. With idle/light use it tends to sit in low 40C territory.

PERFORMANCE

Since this is only an initial impressions review, I will only offer a few performance benchmarks up front. Detailed and a more exhaustive library of bencharks and respective metrics will be shared at a later time. But up front, you can see this machine is a beast. I have a GTX 980 Ti in my desktop with an i7-5820K hexacore CPU and this Sager NP9873 clearly outpaces it in gaming performance. Clearly with this much horsepower, the dual 1080 GPU's were destined for 4k gaming, and I'll be sure to check performance at 1080p, 2.5K/3K (2560 x 1440) and 4k (3840x2160).

GPU-z confirmed that these cards do contain GDDR5X but running at 5000MHz. The core clocks actually ran at 1885MHz despite boost being reported at max 1771 MHz. That is pretty incredible clock speeds.

Here's some details of the system:

CPU-Z info:

GPU-Z Info:

Note the clock speeds at load are 1885MHz

The desktop 980 Ti that it is benchmarked against runs at 1342MHz on the core and 7000MHz vRAM (GDDR5)

FUTUREMARK 3DMARK

A few Futuremark benchmarks were run in both SLI and single 1080 GPU mode, and compared with the desktop 980 Ti.

Results are pretty impressive and are shown here:

You can see that in SLI mode that the performance is nearly perfectly double compared with a single GPU. That is an impressive feat. However we will see how well that holds up with actual gaming and also running at various screen resultions from 1080p up to 4k.

TEMPS AND POWER

Despite these great performance results, it takes a toll on temperatures. That being said, despite the high temps of the CPU and two GPU's the surface temp of the palm rest and keyboard were barey warm to the touch. The fans did spin up pretty high during some of these benchmarks, and was noticeably loud during these times. Although when running on a single GPU the fans were not that noticeable.

We will see if these temps are a result of a poor thermal paste job at the factory after I remove the heatsink and repaste myself.

Power consumption was shockingly high as well, although well within the capability of the dual 330W PSU's, running at about 500W with SLI enabled. Although, the power bricks were barely warm to the touch at full load.

CONCLUSION

From this brief review and time spent with this laptop I would have to say that it is, first and foremost, about damn time Pascal made it's way here, adn to mobile in strong fashion. The Sager NP9873 with dual 1080 GPU's definitely can hold or at least fight for title for top laptop for a while. Even a single mobile 1080 blows away a desktop 980 Ti. The construction of the laptop overall feels solid, and has a simple yet techy look to it with all its faceted angles. Temperatures are definitely a concern considering the CPU hit 100C during benchmarking and GPU's were in the mid to high 80C range. This could be the result of a poor factory thermal paste job, and I will investigate that to find out for certain. Otherwise for pure gaming performance, the Sager NP9873 takes the crown.

Look for more detailed benchmarks and metrics on this machine as I put it through further testing over the next couple of weeks. But hopefully in the meantime this satiates initial questions or concerns about the laptop.

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Sager NP9873 / Clevo P870DM3 Quick Review by HTWingNut