Cowboom - Samsung Series 7 17.3" Laptop 3615QM, 8GB, 1TB, GT650m $693.49+tax shipped

I am also interested to know what you used to pull / seat the hard drive. I will be adding a 480GB SSD / using the 1TB for storage. Inventory does seem to be rolling in and out on these guys so keep an eye out I just nabbed an 8 just now.

1B5H3


Thanks to the OP for bringing this to my attention, should be a great laptop for programming and a bit of light gaming (League of Legends from time to time)
 
missed that there was a 3rd page for some reason .. thanks for the link ... purchased :)
 
If you add a hard drive in the dvd drive bay, can you boot from it? Are there special instructions to do that?
 
Really wish I would have seen this earlier. Only finding grades 5-7 now. Anyone know how often they refresh? I read once a month in this thread I believe, but not sure if that refresh just happened, or might be occurring again next week.
 
gizmo said:
Really wish I would have seen this earlier. Only finding grades 5-7 now. Anyone know how often they refresh? I read once a month in this thread I believe, but not sure if that refresh just happened, or might be occurring again next week.
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I'm not sure how often it's updated, I imagine every few days or every day ? ... I know for a fact that the 8 I grabbed the other day wasn't there earlier in the day as I was looking at getting a 7. By the time I found someone in the USA to order it for me, an 8 was available (slightly after midnight EST).
 
Tcalp said:
I'm not sure how often it's updated, I imagine every few days or every day ? ... I know for a fact that the 8 I grabbed the other day wasn't there earlier in the day as I was looking at getting a 7. By the time I found someone in the USA to order it for me, an 8 was available (slightly after midnight EST).
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I've been scouring for an 8, you must have snagged it haha.
 
Well, the 5% off deal is gone and the laptop is back up to $1112.49, for those who were holding out for an 8 .. better luck next time around I suppose :)
 
Tcalp said:
Well, the 5% off deal is gone and the laptop is back up to $1112.49, for those who were holding out for an 8 .. better luck next time around I suppose :)
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Just noted...this is heartbreaking. Should have bought a 7 last night.
 
gizmo said:
Just noted...this is heartbreaking. Should have bought a 7 last night.
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Same. :( There were at least four 7's. I was going to watch a few more days and pull the trigger on a 7 if no 8's. I just saw the price checking for an 8.
 
Oof, glad I didn't hesitate on this deal! Didn't realize the price would jump back up so high! $750 for this thing is an absolute steal.
 
Crap, I almost pulled the trigger on a 7 so many times. Oh well, maybe the deals will happen again later.
 
I also have the 15.6" version of this laptop here for anyone who missed out on the deal, but wants a fine laptop. I do wish they had a similar panel in the 15.6", because I like the smaller 15.6" size better than the 17", but I'm not really complaining ;)
 
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I was wondering if anyone else noticed odd web caching behavior on their laptop? I notice quite a few times web pages would load without the css loaded and i would have to delete the cache and refresh it. This didnt happen in any other computers i have. I am using both chrome and firefox in windows 8. I dont think its my connection as it is pretty stable and im able to play games online fine without any lag. Not a deal breaker since i just have to refresh more often than normal, but its very odd. Otherwise this is an excellent laptop. I am able to play quite a few games on it and it actually rarely gets hot. I've played nba 2k13, starcraft 2, torchlight 2, crysis, and farcry 3. All except farcry 3 are on high/med settings at 1920x1080!
 
$784 today after price drop. Have not checked to see if any promo codes work


Edit***

My observations
  • Holiday promo code for 5% off is no longer valid as pointed out above.
  • celebate10 gives 10% off
  • There are several grade 5 and grade 6 units for $784 plus tax.
  • Oddity is that the latter part of page 2 and all of page three lists units of grades 5-7 at the marked up price noted a few days ago
  • In the past it seemed new units were added to the end of the list (when I was watching for an 8, the first two pages and first part of page three stayed relatively constant with the few changes possibly being attributed to purchases.
 
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Ohhh man.... for a good bit of gaming... should I got for this, or a lower speced Clevo???

Man tough choice...
 
TheDarkTao said:
Ohhh man.... for a good bit of gaming... should I got for this, or a lower speced Clevo???

Man tough choice...
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Depends on the Clevo model. This really cannot be beat for all comparable soldered discrete cards. The higher end Clevo units have MXM slots so you can opt for a 660 or something of the sort now, and throw a 580, 670/675/680 in it later.

The 650M seems to handle just about all older games on higher detail settings and 1920x1080. Some benchmarks claim it gets by on medium at 1920x1080 on Crysis, and the only game requiring lower settings is Far Cry 3, but I find some of this hard to believe.

A sound choice none the less.
 
So the real advantage to a clevo/msi type laptop is the ability to swap out the graphics cards? Are mobile graphics cards readily available?
 
TheDarkTao said:
So the real advantage to a clevo/msi type laptop is the ability to swap out the graphics cards? Are mobile graphics cards readily available?
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Not nearly as readily as desktop cards. You are better offer putting up a wanted ad or finding a classifieds section for a Notebook focused forum. Also, not all Clevo/MSI type laptops as you described them can have interchangable graphics cards. It is much like desktop AGP/PCI/PCI Express cards; recently (last 5 years) there have been two or three interfaces (primarily MXM2.0a, 2.0b, and 3.0). Some are different shapes than others, and most have different heatsinks.

Also important that due to BIOS compatibility, they are different than desktops in that Asus video cards typically are needed for an Asus laptop...i.e. no pulling something out of a Dell Alienware and putting it into a Clevo/Sager unit.

It mostly comes down to the card; I believe with the 6xx mobile units, the 660 and above are MXM3.0 cards that shoudl all be removable. Most 640 and 650m cards are going to be integrated into the motherboard somehow, typically soldered on.

You can't make a retina Macbook Pro or a Samsung laptop 1" thick and expect to have an expansion port and heatsink that is removable.
 
Anyone know if our laptop can do 3d vision at all? I think the 650m supports it in other laptops, but not sure if our drivers have it.
 
doggyworld said:
Anyone know if our laptop can do 3d vision at all? I think the 650m supports it in other laptops, but not sure if our drivers have it.
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Good question as I have yet to purchase this laptop and my primary monitor is 120hz. Anyone know?
 
Perhaps is safe to say that "7" is the new "8," and possibly "6" is the new "7."

Even the grade 7 units have seemingly sold out now, including ones without power adapters. Blame slickdeals and the other bargain sites...they seem to have been sniped.

Bummer.
 
I think I snatched the last 7 with the power adapter and non scratched LCD screen.
 
gizmo said:
Even the grade 7 units have seemingly sold out now, including ones without power adapters. Blame slickdeals and the other bargain sites...they seem to have been sniped.

Bummer.
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3 more 7's have popped up.

"included scratches on bottom / screen flashes at start up"

I think someone else mentioned the 'screen flashes at start up' is due to the quick boot feature and no OS being present and not actually something wrong with the laptop.

Oddly they seem to keep bumping up the price..
 
Tcalp said:
3 more 7's have popped up.

"included scratches on bottom / screen flashes at start up"

I think someone else mentioned the 'screen flashes at start up' is due to the quick boot feature and no OS being present and not actually something wrong with the laptop.

Oddly they seem to keep bumping up the price..
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If demand is there, might as well. It's nearing Christmas, and when something like this goes viral at less than $700, go ahead and increase the price.

Of note, the price has gone up about 7%, but the rebate went from 5% to 10%, nearly mitigating that.
 
Tcalp said:
3 more 7's have popped up.

"included scratches on bottom / screen flashes at start up"

I think someone else mentioned the 'screen flashes at start up' is due to the quick boot feature and no OS being present and not actually something wrong with the laptop.

Oddly they seem to keep bumping up the price..
Click to expand...
Yeah, the flashing screen issue is resolved by installing an OS. And the flashing they mention seems to only be a perpetual boot cycle due to no OS.

And mine said "scratches on bottom, worn keys, scratch on top and flashes at start up". It was a perfect Grade 8.
 
I was reading some complaints the cooling system and 90w power supply prevents the cpu/gpu from performing at full speeds at heavy load. Any truth to this?
 
Here is a warning to those reloading the OS.. not sure which one of these things FUBAR'd my laptop, but it's in a state that I have to send it in now because I can't get it to boot anymore.

I wanted to backup my whole drive with my own backup software which boots off of a regular boot CD (Acronis True Image). So in Bios, I disabled fastboot, and also set the OS type to "UEFI and CSM OS". I was able to boot into my CD, but it didn't recognize the hard drives.. so I just exited out of the program. This is where it got bad. It didn't restart like normal back to Windows or even go to the Samsung bios screen. Now, all it does is starts to a blank screen and tries to spin the CD that's in the drive. I can't get the CD out since the eject button is unresponsive (I've been told it will only work in Windows). And I can't get into the BIOS to change it back to UEFI so it'll go to windows because the screen just stays black. It doesn't load the normal Samsung Logo like it normally did before I FUBAR'd it. I'm at a loss for words how it wouldn't even go to BIOS.. but it just keeps trying to read the CD that's in the drive. I've never seen this happen before. I would have thought it would have to go to BIOS before anything else.

I've tried everything.. constantly pushing F2, F4, F10, any of the F keys.. I did the reset power on the bottom. I started trying to open up the laptop to see if I could just disconnect the DVD drive, but the clips seemed a lot harder than I anticipated so I decided I'm just going to try to send it to Samsung to fix.

I just want to warn anyone to be very careful when changing the BIOS settings and loading a new OS. I'm not sure what I did wrong as others have clearly been able to load Ubuntu or other OS's on it. I'm also fairly knowledgeable about computers and have been fixing my own computer/laptops, etc. for a long time.. this is the first time I've encountered essentially a bricked laptop without doing any type of firmware modification.
 
Tcalp said:
Doggy,

I read through this thread: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-cdimage/+bug/1040557 to better understand your problem. It is something people seem to be running into with Samsung (and a few other) laptops.

I think the Samsung bios is 'Pheonix' based, you can try doing a hard recovery with these : http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/870-Bios-Recovery-Procedures fairly certain most newer laptops use the FN+ESC
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Damn.. thanks for finding that for me. That sounds like that's exactly what happened. I selected "UEFI and CSM OS" thinking that it would support both for booting.. guess that was a bad idea. :( At least now I know it's bricked. :)
 
Finally bit on a grade 7 at 799, with celebrate 10 for 10% off. So it was $765 after tax for me. Have my worries on the throttling, but let's give it a shot!
 
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