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some may remember this thread here when i got a my second Clevo for $400 which turned out to have hardware problems that are beyond repair. http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=187095&b=2

I gave up on the M750 thinking the GPU was broken. The laptop still works but running games or movies on it caused a BSOD. I gave up on it and now its on the display as a rare artifact. of technology (still just having it even a broken one makes me special).

The M750 laptop was the closest i ever got to my dream laptop the D900

Which is in the category of the worlds most powerful laptops ever! The D900 is so hardcore the thing takes a desktop LGA socket processors! and DUAL MXM3 GTX class graphics cards in SLI They even take QUADRO graphics cards!

But these laptops were always way too expensive and i could never afford one (well i could at one time but i got the money right after i bought the old Clevo for cheaper

So today my dream was finally realised when i saw a D900 laptop from SAGER (bought in america in 2009 for $3300) and it was sold for only $700 bucks!.... i can totally afford that!
Sure its slightly Dated by now but back in 2009 it was the most powerful laptop IN THE WORLD! and thats pretty frigging awesome!

here are the pics:






the specs!

A Desktop Xeon X3360 2.8GHx QUADCORE 12mb of cache (thats just so hardcore)

4GB DDR2 ram (not too bad i can add an extra 4 gigs to that to make that 8gb) (i am not sure about the older D900 models but the newer ones have not 2 DIMM slots like usual but 4! up to like 24 gigs of ram or something!) (i hope mine has 4 slots )

Nvidia Gforce 9800m-GTX 1Gb with the possibility of running another 9800GTX min SLI! My old Clevo laptop already has a 9800GTX 1GB.
Now i thought that the my 9800GTX from the old Clevo i got was broken as it BSOD on games. But before that it had a problem with the LCD inverter which was perfectley fine. This made me suspect that the problem is within the motherboard GPU but i didnt have another GPU to confirm the problem and i gave up anyway. But now this opened me up to a possibility that my old 9800GTX is actually fine and its the motherboard thats causing the problem! So if i get this D900 laptop i will be able to run 2x 9800GTX (2gb of vram ) in SLI!

But even if its broken a single 9800GTX is still fine

To make matters even better, Depending on the revision of this laptops motherboard, i can upgrade the graphics cards to something even better than 9800GTX

Then this laptop has a single 320 gig hard disk. BUT! you can install a second HDD and run them in RAID. And if you remove the optical drive you can hook up a THIRD HDD!

And this thing also has a BLU RAY DRIVE! i never had a blu ray drive this is my first blu ray drive ever!

Finally the chassis of the case and the cover are custom painted blue (by the previous user) i dont actually like this painjob (see the screens above) i would rather have it be original grey.

Finally it has a nice 17inch 1920x1200 matte screen (i hate glossy screens so this one is just the way i like it, but even if it was glossy i already have a 17inch matte screen i could replace it with)

I have several 17 inch replacement screens just in case, a bunch of LCD inverters (i bought a bunch of them when i was trying to repair the old clevo M570 and according to my research the inverters from M570 should work with the D900) but this laptop is in perfect working order so hopefully i dont have to worry about that.

So i immediatley called up the proson and asked to buy it. The guy said that this laptop was a gift to him but he has no need for it so he is selling it for cheap (sound like he isnt in need of money either, hi end stuff like this sold for cheap usually means that the person is just trying to get rid of it as quickly as possible or that there is something wrong with it)

Another reason why i always badly wanted a D900 and this reason might seem kinda stupid to most of you. The case design of this laptop looks outdated and oldschool kindof reminds me of laptops from late 90s/ early 2000s And i just like the design. Clevo has an updated system which also looks all old school, but there are a few elements of the case which look up to date and the whole mix of retro and new style, i just dont like it. Even tho the case seemes to be designed a lot better the old D900 (still sold BTW) has been around for so long it has a lot more upgradability and flexibility with the hardware.

Besides i cant afford it anyway
for those wondering here is the latest clevo i think its called X8000 or something. In europe its sold under Eurocomm Panther2 model




As you can see this new one has a non standard 4 pin power jack which i am not sure how it works and what do you need 4 pins for? Might be frustrating to repair. And unlike the D900 this laptop case design (in my opinion) tries too hard at looking old school and new and trendy but fails

So for the price of $700 bucks i do suspect there is a catch (just like with my old clevo) but you know what! I have been dreaming about a D900 laptop Since i was 16 (that was like 6 years ago!) back then this laptop ran dual 7890GTX cards! back in 2006 that was pretty badass! (still a really grat card today if you ask me). I have tried buying one from Ebay multiple times just to be outbidded untill i couldnt afford to place another bid.

Even if there is a catch, even if something is broken, i am up for the challenge to attempt to repair it. And even if i cant. It would still be ok because then i will be an owner of a broken but an awesome and powerful laptop (i should start a laptop museam) And if maybe some day i might find a broken D900 for $100 somewhere and i will actually have parts to repair it with. Just like the 2 clevos before this, I do not regret waisting 400 bucks on my old clevo as i now have a second working (i hope) 9800GTX. and many of my old clevo parts will be comaptable.
Also this D900 has some really great parts.

I am not saying that this D900 is broken, from what ive been told it runs perfectly fine and its in a good condition. Just saying that i will definatley not regret buying this.

SO! i am getting this laptop tomorrow! Wish me luck you guys!

Btw speaking of laptops, something else kinda great happened to me latley. My first great laptop which i got for 900bucks when i was 14- the MSI megabook M635 (as its known in europe) Basically it was one of the best laptops i ever had X700 video card could run any game at that time (my 2 year old acer can barley run many games on the lowest settings while the old MSI could run run them all on full (HL2, flatout2), thats how awesome this MSI laptop was) The design of this laptop was also very visually pleasing, in my opinion the most beautiful laptop i ever had or seen

very visually pleasing.
Also the entire laptops chassis was solid piece of titanium and acted as a heatsink. It got very hot but the thing was extremeley tough, it could handle the worst beating.
Unfourtunatley the screen and hinges were crap and broke and cracked and were beyond repair. I searched long and hard to find screen parts and hinges without sucess. Even when i moved from US to Russia i took the screenless MSI with me (brought the already fried Clevo too but unlike the clevo the MSI still worked with an external monitor)

then i realised that i left the LCD inverter from the MSI in the states and the hose where i lost it burned down and i had no hope of restoring this awesome laptop. It was now part of my rare laptop collection (still works tho 6-7 years since i got it. Outlasted any other laptop i ever had in terms of not frying the hardware, well i think it was designed to be semi-rugged which makes sence)

Then one day i am walking trough a radio market (a really awesome ghetto-looking open air market where people sell electronics new and used, parts and other awesome electronic stuff, i usually go there when i want to score some old laptop part or a rare/old piece of technology) I was hoping i could score an i7 2600K for a good price when i see this little piece of crap

It was a twin of my MSI M635 (this one was m630) a mutch uglier twin and with crap hardware (intel GMA 64mb GPU and 1.5 Ghx Pentium M, not even a dvd burner vs my X700 128mb and a 2ghx AMD turion and an actual dual layer DVD burner). It was sold for 200 bucks and it was in a great condition, working hinges, no cracks on the screen case and it was mutch uglier than my old M635. Still i thought SCREW THE PROCESSOR I AM GETTING THIS!
Thats how I restored one of my favorite (and one of the rarest notebooks) i ever had. It does look really ugly tho, black chassis, and a silver cover with inferior design. I fitted it with an additional 1gb of ram (DDR1 laptops back then could support only 2 gb at most)
sure it now looks ugly But the sucker WORKS! and thats all that matters and i am very happy! Now if i could only come across a used/broken m635 with the good looking black cover! That would be awesome!

So i have restored one of my favorite laptops, and i found my other dream laptop D900
I am getting the D900 tomorrow Wish me Luck you guys!

I hate you...

Hell, I thought my alienware laptop was epic.

Doesn't look very... portable; though that's just me being complainy
I'd dream of the razer blade

though 3 HDD slots and SLI seems mental for a laptop *need drool smiley*

Though shall bow before the mighty desktop PC

That thing's less powerful and more expensive than my PC...and is equally as portable, too.

...is this a "well" disguised plug for this product?

@ ocho geek
Its more portable than a good high end desktop and just as powerful. Thats whe whole point of these laptops you can take them to your friends house for a lan party or go to lanpartys with it or like i have a house outside of the city, it gets broken into once in a while thats why we dont keep anything valuable there (our TV has been stolen like 3 times already) it would be easier to travel to the house with a d900 than drag a desktop there whenever i wanna get out of the city. Also this class of laptops is called a desktop replacement

i find laptops more comfotable and their portability is something i really like. i only use my desktop to watch movies with because it has a 27inch screen and an awesome 5.1 system and to play high end games. But i also really like playing high end games on a laptop too.

and i really just have a thing for awesome rare high-end technology and this D900 is pretty awesome and high end and rare. also, i had a gaming clevo before and once you tried the good stuff you can never go back to the common stuff. thats why i am super exited for this D900.


9800gtx, a quadcore Xeon 12mb cache,4 gb of ram and all the upgrade possibilitues? i think this thing is worth $700. Actually its worth more than that becuse its a laptop.

All the best laptops are not very portable. I have an old Acer9800 20-inch 'laptop' this thing weighs a ton, has a full size keyboard, and if you actually tried to put it on your lap, it'd melt your kneecaps....



Yes that's a normal sized CD hanging out of it.

Go big, or go home - It's not hugely powerful, just a nVidia 7600 - but it does a fine job of Minecraft, we use it as a spare Minecraft and Trackmania PC, and media centre, plugged into a 42'' TV.

so i got the D900 and just wow! The screen is amazing! i cant even see the pixels unless i look really close. The laptop is in an almost new condition. Obviosly this laptop was taken apart at least once but unlike most laptops i dealt with whose owners were dumbasses and completley screwed up their laptops on assembly, this one obviosly took great care of this D900. The case is custom painted blue and it seemes that the paint gives the plastic extra strenght. The quality of plastic is very good. (it could be better quality but its definatley better than most crap-plastic laptops i dealt with including my previos Clevo m570) The thing is really heavy so crap-plastic wouldnt cut it here anyway.

Many laptops that are 2 years old have definate signs of wear and tear like cracked corners and very often cracks around the corners of the screens near the screen hinges from the stress of the screen constantly opened and closed. This D900 despite of being 2 years old dosent have a single crack in the case. Aside from a small dent in the aluminium screen cover, the thing looks as good as new, i didnt find a single crack anywhere.

it has 4 speakers (unlike most laptops that have 2) 2 speakers on the side of the keyboard and 2 in the front. The sound is amazing quality for a laptop.

Contrary to the cmmon belief of the battery of this laptop class barley lasting 5 minutes, I was surprised to find that it actually lasts about an hour. Sure its not much compared to the average 3 hours most laptops get, but 1 hour for this insane monster is very awesome!

And i am just so extremeley happy i finally ful filled my 6 year dream of owning a legendary D900. Sure its not top of the line now, but its good enough for me.

The person who sold it to me for 700 bucks sold it for that much because he got it for free as a gift, and wanted to get rid of it quickly because he apperentley had no need for this. Also i think the price was cheap because noone in their right mind would buy this monster (unless you are an insane maniac like me) finding parts for this laptop is very hard since barley anyone buys them since they are so expensive. Most whatever little amount of high-end gaming clevos that end up in russia arent even from europe. They all come from the USA mostly. (just like my Sager D900 dubbed Blackhawk XR5) So no parts avaliable for it. and there is a superstition that high end GPUs like the 9800m GTX fry very often. Personally the only instances of fried high end MXM cards i dealt with were either overclocking, not cleaning out the laptop regularly causing it to overheat often and over a period of time constant overheating and lack or new thermal paste caused the MXM GPU to fry. Personally i fried my old 8800mGTX from my first clevo by forgetting to take out the powercord from the laptop and when i installed it back, i accedentally shorted the GPU contacts and the GPU died after that. That was my stupidity and clumsiness.My frirst 9800mGTX if its damaged then i can blame the motherboard for damaging the card because i remember that the motherboard refused to power the LCD inverter, and then i think i damaged the motherboard a bit more and the LCD inverter started to work. I asked around some guys today and they told me that very possibly the motherboard south bridge is causing the problem with the 9800m GTX and the graphics is actually fine. A worse possibility is that the the graphics fried but i hope its not.
So i fugured that if i take good care of the laptop the videocards should last.

if my theory is correct, i will be able to run a second 9800m GTX in SLI on this beast!

Finally a question for some of the people here. I admit that i never had any experience with SLI or crossfire, I would always rather buy just 1 but a somewhat powerful GPU which was usually more than enough for me. so if my above hypothesis works, i suddenly had a thought on SLI, i am just not sure if it makes sence so you guys tell me if my thinking on SLI makes sence or not.

So suppose 1 8900mGTX is running a game and it gets pretty hot. But if i run 2x 9800mGTX in SLI with the same settings, each GPU takes a lesser share of rendering power resulting in less stress on each core resulting in less heat. So this idea of mine is supposed to get the idea across that SLI setups can be more stable than a single GPU.

So does that make any sence? i dont know because i never dealt with SLI so guys, give me some pointers here.

So this laptop is really great! i love it, I will later install some games and try the SLI thing, and wow this thing is frigging amazing! I might even take some pictures of it. and upload it here.

Heh it seems we both have passion for old hardware, I just bought three ABIT NF7 motherboards and a bunch of socket 462 processors just to have fun with them

uhh bad memories. Especially those intel heatsinks.

I just love the AMD 462 CPU's,my personal fav is the Duron 800,looking for a water cooler to have some fun with this The slot celerons are pwning too. My prized possesion I guess would be the 754 socket Sempron 3000+ mobile that works on desktop mobos.

My favorite socket is LGA 775. The CPUs are pinless and durable, and it just feels very satisfying to lock a cpu in the lga775. The new LGA sockets like 1155 have better CPUs yes but their sockets dont have the same satisfying feeling of the 775 when you push down that cpu-lock bar.

Infact, idk if its just me but locking 1155 cpu feels like you could possibly break the cpu if i push too hard. Also the 1155 CPUs always feel like they are not placed correctley in the socket (even if they are) Anyone else have that?

I had a killer 775 platform: ASUS Maximus Formula,Intel C2Q6600 G0 stepping. It was flying clocked at 3,6ghz.

@ charger bandit Thats a pretty insane overclock.

So something pretty insane happened with my whole SLI situation for the D900... i swear nVidia is trying to screw with me on purpose or something.

I deceded to give it a shot hoping that my other 9800mGTX wasnt broken (it was actually broken) I carefully took everything apart, i replaced the heatpaste on the CPU (and both GPUS later) I was really worried that despite both of them being the same model they looked different. And i started to get pretty paranoid when i remembered a rumour about the mobile 9800mGTX cards.

They say that the ones made in china are actually something like somewhat inferior 9800mGT cards which they solder some extra memory chips on, hard-overclock it and load them with a 9800mGTX VBIOS. So i started to worry that one of my cards might be a fake and they might not work in SLI!

Btw, this laptop actually has a full size LGA775 socket in it!. I knew it for a while but actually seeing one in a laptop was weird because i repaired a lot of laptops and i never seen an LGA775 on anything other than a desktop.
here is a pic where you can clearly see the 775 socket


So i carefully installed the second card inside the D900 and everything was good. When i turned it on. Well the computer recognised the second graphics card and stuff but just like in my old clevo, the card gave me an error and didnt work properly. I attempted to run some games only to have them crash for some reason (at least it didnt BSOD like before)

so i was beginning to feel a bit down. I started asking myself, is this really the legendary D900? one of the most powerful laptops in the world?

now here comes the most screwed up part of all. After an overheated shutdown, when i started it back up to my surprise the broken video card i installed all of a sudden came to life!

THE D900 HAS MAGICAL GPU HEALING POWERS!

thats the first thing that went trough my head. WHat proboly did the trick tho is the broken card heated up being next to a working 9800 so its kinda like people fixing their cards by sticking them in the oven so YES the D900 DOES have GPU healing powers.. I just never expected this to take place inside a laptop.

SLI started to work flawlessly and i became very happy. I think its really funny how some bad situations just turn around into good ones so suddenley.
Bought a laptop with a fried GPU, turned out that that GPU came in handy later on! D900 horribly overheating? That overheating ended up fixing a damaged GPU!

The reason i am telling this here because i never expected any of this to happen.

The rest of the day i spent trying to find fan speed control software as the cooling fans on this laptop seemed to be running at half speed. I didnt find anything. But what i found is this. Clevo guys really dropped the ball on this one. Turns out that the system fans are always in auto mode and they dont speed up or slow down. My CPU burned at 70 if not 80c.
any game i ran had horrible graphics errors and crashed all the time. I was loking for the solution in all the wrong places and waisted a bunch of time. It turns out that Clevo fixed the problem by installing some keyboard firmware that on Fn+1 command blasted all the system fans at full 100%.

And to my surprise i already had this firmware on my D900 and it solved all my problems! Games dont crash anymore, No more graphical errors and even at full load the laptop feels barley warm.

so to celebrate i sat down and beat the old 2010 medal of honor on full setings in 1 sitting (great underrated game BTW) So as it turns out this D900 with all of its problems fixed turned out to be pretty much as amazing as i imagined it.
The only downer that it cant run BF3 smooth enough. for some reason. It should tho the D900 meets the reccomended requirements. Still BF3 is just an interactive flashy hollywood action thriller where you get to shoot people where you arent performing scripted animation for like more than half of the game proboly. I enjoyed Medal of honor a lot more.

also as it turns out my SLI setup cannot be upgraded. the 9800GTX is the limit for SLI for my model. It does however support GPUs up to GTXm280 but only in a single GPU setup.

Anyway I did discore that i have a free mono PCI and micro PCIe slots in the D900 and i wanna put something in there. I already have a wifi card. I can get a TV tuner. Does anyone know any other cool stuff i can put in those? Dont they have some sort of turbo memory chips for miniPCI?

That lappy looks awesome but what's the battery life,like 10 minutes?

Its actually 1 hour-1.5 hours (and obviosly less if you play games on the battery). It dosent need to have a battery, i agree but its nice to have.

Back in school with my older clevo, people also made fun of my laptops battery life, Still i would sometimes bring it down to lunch with me if i wanted to get some work done or play a game. Played Crysis on all high settings (too bad it couldnt handle them on the very high settings, still it looked very nice) and i was like ... What do you think of my battery life NOW HUH?.


but now... once again nvidia likes to torment me.

What i said earlier about my broken 9800mGTX being heat-fixed my the D900, Well it lasted for about a day. The thing seemes to be so screwed up that every time i ran a game, it would either freexe, or start having gaphics glitches, like random colored pixels on your screen and artifacts.

I even tried updating the videobios for it to match the other one. (in the process i found out that the old 9800mGTX vBios max tolerance temperature was set to 110c which might explain why it died in the first place)

Normally, i dont start screwing with stuff it it works fine. Because Nvidias cards seem to hate me a lot, i jumped into stuff i never had any experience with like modigying vBios.

After the vbios update was done and the card was still broken, I modified the vbios of my other card so when you start up the computer, where the first thing it normally displays the model of the videocard. i replaced the "Nvidia corp 1982-2008 MXM 9800m GTX 1029mb all rights reserved" text with a bunch of innapropriate comments about nvidia.

Well i had to remove the broken card because everything works fine without it. (btw it just occured to me that the original owner of the laptop with a broken 9800 could have modified the bios. I could definatley tell that the laptop has been taken apart and assembled very poorly with wrong screws here and there as well as some missing screws)

but something good came out of this. As it turned out my old 8800m GTX from my very first clevo, which i thought was broken all these years, turned out to be perfectly fine!. Altho i can't use this 8800card in SLI with my 9800m, I can however put it in the laptop, and it will read both of them. At most, i can use the 8800 as a dedicated Physx processor or something.

I am beginning to think that the motherboard on my first clevo was broken not the videocard.

i guess now, i will have to search really hard for another 9800mGTX if i wanna have SLI on this laptop. Its possible to find mobile 8600, 9600, and radeons of the same class, maybe if you get lucky, youll find a 8700 or 9700. but noone in their right mind would even buy a mobile 9800 or higher. thats why they are so rare. and thats why the D900 laptop is also rare. THere was one time in 2006-2007 they sold D900 laptops in russia under a russian brand-"Roverbook" it was called "Roverbook HUMMER" (accurate name for such a laptop, had a GF 7950 in it) but even a russian company couldnt push this laptop because of how expensive it was.

So yeah, its a very nice laptop even without SLI. I already upgraded it to 3 harddrives, and i found that there are actual 4GB DDR2 chips out there (i thought 2GB was max for DDR2), so im gonna upgrade it to 8 GB. (when it comes to laptops, i have a thing for trying to upgrade them as much as i can)

i dont regret getting this

[EDIT] i just stumbled upn a really sweet Dell Xps m1730 laptop with Dual sli 9800m GTX (2 gb video) But this one costs $1500 I want that laptop Just for the videocards, Its insainley rare to even fing an MXM 9800m GTX here. But i am not prepared to spend that much. The guy is offering a tradeoff for an Ipad+ a smaller sum of money or trade it for a car or something. I have neither and latley i actually wanted to buy an Ipad just for the curiositys sake to see what all the fuss was about.

I am really tempted to ask this guy to sell me one of the 9800M GTX cards from that XPS and sell the XPS for a cheaper price as people will more likeley to purchase it. and knowing russian croud of average computer users, they are extremeley cheap when it comes to computers, Thats why high end hardware such as MXM4 based laptops pretty much dont exist in russia. But i am afraid that he will likley decline my stupid offer and wont take any of my stuff for a tradeoff. I want those cards for my D900