An engineering marvel
When Nvidia told us that it managed to shrink its desktop GTX 980 GPU to fit inside notebooks, we went through two stages of denial. The first stage was disbelief. “The 980 is a huge and powerful card,” we thought to ourselves. The second stage was dismissiveness. “It’s got to throttle tremendously.” To prove us wrong and to fan the flames of hardware absurdity, Sager armed its sexily named NP8675 gaming notebook (seriously, who names these things?) with both a desktop 980 and a high-end 6700K Skylake desktop CPU. On paper, it’s an abomination of a laptop, but crazily enough, it actually friggin’ works!
Of course, if you’re going to squeeze desktop components into a laptop chassis, you shouldn’t expect an ultra-portable package. The Sager here is of the big, bulky 17-inch variety, and it has a hefty 14-pound carry weight to match its size. If there’s one criticism we could levy against Sager in the past, is that its gaming notebooks were very bland looking. There are a few aesthetic bells and whistles this time around. In addition to the nice silver Sager logo on the back, there are some pulsating LEDs, which add a little bling to the look (if you’re into that). The chassis also has some sharp lines and edges, which give it a slightly futuristic look.
Surprisingly, 980 GPU performance wasnt throttled.
More exciting is the 1080p display. While we would have preferred a 1440p screen, the monitor here uses a 75Hz IPS panel that supports G-Sync. That’s a lot of cool display tech in one sentence. The rest of the design is good. The speakers by Sound Blaster are competent, the LED-backlit keyboard offers some nice travel, and the trackpad is solid and has two discrete click buttons and a fingerprint reader. The notebook also sports enough ports to warrant its desktop-replacement label, which include: two Ethernet, five USB 3.0, one USB type C, two DisplayPort, an SD card reader, and an HDMI port.
But you probably aren’t reading this review to hear about the laptop’s ports. “How well does it perform?!,” you’re probably screaming. Cool your jets, we’re getting there. The 980 outfitted here has the same 256-bit memory interface width and 224GB/sec memory bandwidth as its desktop sibling. One advantage that this 980 has over Nvidia’s discrete card is double the VRAM. Your reference 980 has 4GB VRAM, whereas this card rocks 8GB. Considering that the notebook is relegated to a 1080p panel, you’d be hard pressed to actually use up all that VRAM (or anything near it), but it’s still nice to have. Compared to our Alienware 14 ZP laptop, which is getting long in the tooth with its GTX 765M GPU, we saw a 106–234 percent performance delta in our graphics benchmarks. It’s really not a fair comparison at this point, so we decided to see how it stacks up against the 3D Mark 11 Extreme numbers we ran on CyberPower’s Syber Vapor system we reviewed last year. If you’ll recall, the Vapor rocked a 4790K and GTX 980 desktop card in a small Mini ITX chassis, which makes it a fair comparison point for the Sager.
The results? The Sager not only performed on par with the desktop PC, but actually ran three percent better! Older drivers on the Vapor could explain some of this delta, but still, getting anywhere near close to the desktop card in this form factor is insane. Consider us believers in this Nvidia voodoo. CPU performance was also great. We saw up to an 11 percent increase in single-threaded CPU tests compared to our ZP laptop’s Core i7-4700MQ laptop proc. In multithreaded tests, we saw a huge 43 percent difference. Yes, it did get a little loud under load, but it’s running top-tier desktop parts in a laptop chassis, so what do you expect?
One performance hurdle that we ran into pertained to boot times. It took roughly 25 seconds to reach Windows, despite the notebook using a premium Samsung 850 Evo SSD. Sager tells us that this is because the gaming notebook has so many built-in peripherals for the drive to check, so it takes a little longer. That seems fair.
At $2,850, you’ll be paying a high price for this kind of performance, but at the same time, it’s kind of an engineering marvel. To fit this much power out of a chassis of this size boggles the mind. You can max out pretty much any game at 75fps here. Whether you’re looking for a high-end gaming system, editing rig, or VR machine on the go, the Sager NP8675-S has you covered. It might not be cheap, but it’s still pretty Kick-Ass.
BENCHMARKS
| Zero-point | Sager NP8675-S | Percent difference | |
| Stitch.Efx 2.0 (sec) | 962 | 970 | -0.8% |
| Proshow Producer 5 (sec) | 1,629 | 1,459 | 11.7% |
| x264 HD 5.0 | 13.5 | 19.4 | 43.7% |
| Bioshock Infinite (fps) | 36.1 | 74.6 | 106.6% |
| Metro Last Light (fps) | 30.4 | 74.6 | 145.4% |
| 3DMark 11 Perf | 4,170 | 13926 | 234% |
| Battery Life (min) | 234 | 124 | -47% |
Our zero-point notebook is an Alienware 14 with a 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ, 16GB DDR3/1600, 256GB mSATA SSD, 750GB 5,400rpm HDD, a GeForce GTX 765M, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. BioShock Infinite tested at 1920x1080 at Ultra DX11 settings; Metro: Last Light tested at 1920x1080 at DX11 medium quality settings with PhysX disabled.
SPECIFICATIONS
| CPU | Intel 4GHz Core i7-6700K |
| RAM | 16GB of DDR4/2133MHz |
| Chipset | Intel Z170 |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 w/8GB VRAM |
| Display | 17.3 inch, 1920x1080 display (matte) |
| Storage | 250GB SSD, 1TB HDD |
| Connectivity | 5x USB 3.0, headset and mic port, SD card reader, 2x Mini DisplayPort, HDMI port, 2x Ethernet port, fingerprint reader, USB type C |
| Lap/Carry | 10 lbs, 1.6 oz /14 lbs, 14.4 oz |
$2,850, www.sager.com
From maximumpc
