Sony Vaio Z Series i5 laptop reflections

This isn’t so much a full blown review with benchmarks as it is the tale of a journey that brought me to the Sony Z Series as well as reflections and thoughts on the machine which I’ve owned for a month or so.  (As always these thoughts represent my personal views and in no way reflects those of my employer; the machine was paid for by me, not Sony).  The original unboxing I did for Omnitechnews is here:

The summary is that the new Core i5 based incarnation of the Z Series from Sony totally kicks butt and is highly recommended as a tiny performance monster if you can stomach the high price.  It sets a new high point for machines I’ve used and owned (I like it, can you tell?).

The Saga

Towards the end of last year I was in the market for a new laptop for home use.  I wanted a machine predominantly for doing personal coding projects in Visual Studio, running Lightroom and Capture NX for digital photo processing as well as the usual couch surfing, email etc.  Additionally, since Fallout 3 came out I have been doing more PC gaming and thus was in the market for a machine with a decent GPU capable of running demanding DX-based games such as Batman Arkham Asylum (which occupied way too many hours over the last Holiday season as Steam will attest).

After a brief period of excitement over netbooks back in 2008 (the longer battery life, small form factor and fan-less nature of those early devices was appealing but ultimately they proved to be underpowered for my purposes) I concluded that I should shoot for a 15 inch workhorse.  And after some research I ordered a Dell Studio XPS 16 (ok a little bigger than 15”).  On paper this thing was pretty interesting.  Core i7 820QM with 4 hyperthreading-capable cores, 3.06GHz, 100% gamut 1080P RGB LED Screen, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4679, Bluray drive and faux leather. Oo err missus.  It took at least 6 weeks to arrive due to the fact that the Core i7 was newly released at the time but, unfortunately, I had a few issues with my copy.  The keyboard backlight was faulty.  The Bluray drive was completely DOA.  The battery life was not that great and the fan tended to be on more than it was off even when under light load.  On the plus side, the WEI scores under Windows 7 were decent and as follows:

Processor: 7.1
Memory: 7.4
Graphics: 6.7
Gaming: 6.7
Disk: 5.9

The screen was amazing with incredibly vibrant colors, although not ideal for photo editing as skin tones came out with a very red tint (understandable and I could have probably corrected for this).  When it came to firing up Batman, the frame-rates were not that good with the game at default settings.. I had to crank things down to make it playable at a reasonable frame-rate.  In fairness this could have been down to device drivers.  Anyhow, to cut a long story short, I ended up sending it back to Dell for a refund as the machine didn’t fit my needs.

Next up, I managed to borrow an Alienware M15x.  This had the same Core i7 processer as the Dell but infinitely better cooling and an nVidia GXT260M.  Fine, this thing was aimed at gaming and was a bunch more cash than the Dell; Batman did rock with all settings on max.  The fan was never bothersome (indeed, cooling seemed to be very well engineered).  However, battery life was even worse than the Studio XPS 16.  And portability wasn’t a strong point.

Despite these limitations, I was pretty much ready to part with the hard earned when CES 2010 came around and I became aware of the imminent launch of the Intel Arrandale processor family, now known as the Core i5 series. These were notable because they used a smaller manufacturing process (32nm) than the high-end Core i7 laptop part (45nm) and came with integrated graphics on the processor die.

As I looked at new laptop models being announced, I realized that a better fit for my needs would be something with a smaller form factor like the Sony Z series machines that were being refreshed with the new processors and that seemed to combine performance with portability in an interesting way.  So, once the CTO (Configure to Order) SKUs were available on Sony’s site I went ahead and placed an order.

Configuration

The base configuration was pretty close to what I was looking for.  In the end I went for a couple of upgrades and the config as ordered came out as:

• Intel Core i5 M540 dual core with hyperthreading
• nVidia Geforce 330M with CUDA
• 8GB RAM
• 384GB 3-way striped SSD backed by Intel Raid controller
• 13″ 1600×900 LED backlit screen
• No mobile broadband
• Premium carbon fiber
• Standard battery
• Spare Extended battery

I decided not to go for the Core i7-620M processor upgrade since it didn’t appear to offer a massive performance difference (since this is one of the Arrandale family, not the higher-end quad-cores) and based on intuition and some comments on notebookreview.com forums, both heat and power consumption are better in the M540.

There is also an option for a Full HD 1920×1080 screen upgrade which I rejected based on size.  This pixel density is simply too high for a 13″ screen IMO and both battery life and gaming performance would suffer as a result.  I’m really happy with both of these choices and would recommend them.

In terms of the case finish, although I love the look of the Premium carbon fiber, it does tend to attract quite a lot of dust.  If I were to buy the machine again I might be tempted to go for silver (even if it does make the machine look like a Powerbook….. K i d d i n g )  The standard battery is actually great and keeps the form factor compact.. I don’t tend to use the extended one other than for flights / trips or where all day portability away from mains power is a requirement.

The Good

The build quality of the Z Series is very good.  The chassis is sturdy; there is no flex on the keyboard and no dead pixels or any other defects.  Yea.. great to get a machine that works 100% as advertised.  The upper surface of the machine encompassing the keyboard is a single piece of aluminum which looks and feels great.  The wrist rest is plastic which is a shame, but in actuality doesn’t detract too much.  There is a little bit of flex on the screen but that appears to be by design and hasn’t been a problem for me.  It has 3 USB ports, HDMI, VGA and gigabit Ethernet.  Some have criticized the lack of USB 3.0 but that doesn’t bother me as I don’t have any USB3 peripherals.  There is a built in DVD drive and and ExpressCard slot (see peripherals for my preferred mobile broadband solution).  The keyboard is chicklet-style and pleasant to type on.  The fact that it is backlit has proved to be useful in a number of recent cases.

This machine is very fast.  Like blisteringly fast.  It has 3 (in some models 4) SSDs striped together in a RAID 0 configuration and once this BIOS eventually gets done (see the Ugly) startup perf is very snappy.  Apps launch performance is just amazing.  I remember when I first owned a car with electric windows.  It was like.. I’m never not going to have these in future cars; it is so much better than the old way.  That’s how I feed about this level of SSD performance.  And what is also great is that as I’ve loaded the machine up with more and more apps, performance has remained constant since SSDs don’t care about fragmentation.

The WinSat numbers come out at:

Processor: 6.8
Memory: 6.8
Graphics: 6.3
Gaming: 6.3
Disk: 7.9

Which feels pretty accurate.

The screen is also awesome.  Notable better at color reproduction than the Alienware M15x with vibrant colors and without the disadvantages of 100% RGB gamut in photo editing applications.  The vertical resolution is a little on the low side but bearable.  And the 1600 pixels of width are great as is the 16×9 aspect ratio.

The hybrid graphics are also very welcome; Although not quite as dynamic as the nVidia Optimus in some other machines, Sony’s system works well enough (and it appears to be possible to get Optimus drivers running on there which makes me wonder if it is Optimus under the covers).  When on battery, you get embedded graphics.  When on mains you get discrete.  You can manually override via a switch and the process of switching is relatively undisruptive.  Also, the Arrandale integrated graphics chipset is decent.. I was able to watch a movie on a recent flight to Vegas with no frame dropping or other quality issues and good resulting battery life.

Long battery life.  I can cook along for well over 4 hours on the standard battery doing coding-style activities (edit, compile, debug), working in Lightroom and posting to social networks etc.  I haven’t done extensive tests with gaming or video playback on battery other than playing some Left 4 Dead 2 while waiting for the Vegas return flight.  I also haven’t really done a rundown test on the extended battery but I have found that with both batteries I get all day coverage (for non-gaming usage) and I don’t need to bring the AC adapter on a day trip any more.

Lightroom 3 works really well on this system.  It launches fast and processes images virtually instantly.  I’m a complete Lightroom convert these days and a large part of that is how well it works on the Z series.

Video Editing performance was an area I was hoping to test out.  The new Mercury Playback Engine in Premier CS5 is promising in that it will exploit the RAM, cores and Cuda capabilities.  Unfortunately, it appears that I need a new graphics driver since the current one isn’t compatible.  This is something I’ll definitely get back to in the future when I have more time and when I’ve got the full version of Premier rather than the demo.

Gaming performance is pretty good although I admit that I’ve actually not had much time to really test this out particularly extensively (because gaming time has been limited in the last month or so).  But Batman runs well enough.  I had to drop detail to medium unlike on the Alienware but at that level and with PhysX hardware acceleration on, I was able to get playable framerates at the native screen resolution (1600×900).  Again, I’ll be investigating this more when things are less hectic (and likely when Fallout: New Vegas hits the shelves ).

The machine comes with some custom noise cancelling in-ear headphones which are pretty good.  They make up for the poor bass in the built in speakers and are especially useful in noisy environments.

The Mediocre

The speakers are well placed and offer clear reproduction but they are very lacking in bass.  I would take this tradeoff against form factor any day and the headphones make up for it for movies and gaming but, never-the-less certainly a little disappointing.

The DVD drive is non removable.  In an ideal world, I’d rather have a second battery than a DVD drive (can’t remember when I last used any form of shiny disk in a computer).  Lenovo machines tend to offer this; shame Sony don’t.

The Bad

No TPM.  There isn’t much excuse for this.  It is supposed to be a business machine and it can’t run bitlocker.  This would essentially make it unusable for me at work since bitlocker is mandatory.  Sony should fix this.

The Ugly

BIOS performance.  Sony should be absolutely ashamed of the boot experience on this system.  My stopwatch timed the BIOS portion of boot at 26 seconds.  I get that there is a RAID controller in the mix but still this is the year 2010.  I don’t expect to see a VGA flashing cursor ever and certainly not for a painfully long time.  I also don’t expect the graphics card to be reset so many times.  Sure it has hybrid graphics magic but still, come on.  Shocking that a system of this quality and price can’t do better.  Smack.

Price.  The configuration I ordered was reasonably high end (8GB RAM, 384GB SSD) but otherwise standard.  The amount of coin required was a way north of $2500.  Ouch.  But I would spend the money again.

Apps

You can get a better idea on my Wakoopa profile but the core list is:

• Windows 7 Ultimate x64
• Office 2010 x64 RTM
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RTM
• Lightroom 3 beta 2 x64
• Windows Live Essentials
• Windows Live Security Essentials
• Tweetdeck
• Paint.NET
• Expression Studio 3
• Silverlight 4 & SDK
• Windows Phone SDK
• Azure SDK
• Web Platform Installer
• Windows Home server client
• Zune Client x64
• Skype
• Audible Manager
• Steam
• Batman Arkham Asylum
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Games for Windows Live
• Wakoopa

Peripherals

I’m a sucker for peripherals and as such I picked up the following:

Extended battery: BPL20

Case: VGP-CCB4/B

3G Expresscard: Option Globetrotter Express 422

A compact, quad-band 3G broadband connection that fits in the ExpressCard slot. This is quite an impressive offering; Was able to get a 2.72Mb/s connection at the Las Vegas Convention Center on T-Mobile’s 3G network.  I actually did some quite extensive tests of T-Mobile 3G vs Sprint 3G vs WiMax which I’ll cover in a future post.  The short version is that the best price/performance ended up coming from T-Mobile.  But I digress.

Conclusion

The Sony Z Series is a premium laptop aimed at business users.  It is actually a great general purpose machine capable of decent all round performance, including gaming, and combining this with long battery life.  It is well made, extremely fast and extremely portable.  It has proved to me that a thin 13” widescreen form factor is the perfect compromise between netbooks and performance laptops and sets the baseline for this category.  To make it perfect, they need to fix the BIOS, add a TPM and offer a DVD-bay battery option. Oh and drop the price.

4.5 / 5

James E Clarke, Omnitechnews co-author.