Sony Vaio V505DX

This is a shameless crosspost from the Notebook General discussion forum. I worked up a major post on this notebook and I wanted people not reading that thread to be able to see the post.

I have had a V505DX for about 2 months now. My opinion of the machine? It's one little beast of a 4.5lbs machine! I can play Star Wars KOTOR on this thing at 1024x768 playable. Try that with a Intel Integrated or ATI IGP (I get pixel shaders too) !

The only complaint I have with the machine is that the viewable angle on the LCD could be wider. It's definitely not the best LCD in existence, but it's also not anywhere near bad.

The CPU power of the 1.4 P-M is very acceptable for every task I've thrown at it. Believe it or not, with the SSE2 instructions, it will utterly destroy my Athlon XP 3200+ at Divx encoding. Every game I've run is video card limited, mainly due to the 9200's paltry 64-bit bus (32MB VRAM automatically means 64-bit bus).

One thing of note, and very strange, is that during a multiplayer game of Total Annihilation, my little laptop with it's 1.4GHz CPU and 4200RPM HDD loaded the session faster than every other system, including a P4 2.66 800 bus 5400RPM Sager. There's definitely something going on with that 1MB L2 cache. Go super-tweaked P6 architecture!

The air inlets and outlets for the near-silent fan are on the sides so you can put it on your lap (try that P4 owners). The magnesium case is very nice.

I can play Divx movies with it in battery mode, the fan will never come on in this mode and it will get just lukewarm. The CPU clocks from 250MHz up to 1400Mhz in increments depending on the Power Mode (completely configurable with Sony's Powerpanel). In max battery mode, running office apps, I can get 4 hours or more of battery. I could play a 3D game in this mode and get probably 2 hours or more of life. Not absolutely stunning life, but more than I've ever had. One other interesting thing is that it hibernates like 2x faster than my desktop Athlon 3200/7200 RPM WD SE drive. Odd stuff!

I bought the V505DX because it fit what I wanted. A cool, quiet, and fast system that was as small as I could go and still not have shared crap video. Throw questions at me if you have them. This post is my attempt to solve the complete lack of good info on this laptop around the 'net.

3DMark 2003 Compare URL (9200 @ 275/265)
3DMark 2001SE Compare URL (9200 @ 275/265)
3Dmark 2001SE Compare URL (Vaio @ Defaults)
PCMark 2004 Compare URL (9200 @ 275/265)
Sandra 2004 System Report

I beat it once with a light side character. Working on it again with a dark side fellow. I have to say it's easier to be dark

More review:

The V505 is about an inch thick when closed, and is about the size of a piece of paper in area I suppose. I have to say that it really suprised me with it's near weightlessnes. It is so light.

Remember that with shared video memory not only will your video performance really suck, it will also slow down the system in general because you are losing main memory bandwidth to video operations. I will never go with a non-dedicated solution. Even a ATI IGP is questionable unless the notebook is very low cost, IMO. The IGP 9100 could be an interesting option though.

Overall, I am very impressed with my notebook. It is very quick which I partially attribute to Intel's IDE controller. This thing is quick, even with that 4200 RPM hard drive. The notebook is near silent without the fan running, the hard drive is near silent with its fluid bearings, and its seek sounds are quite muted as well. This is probably one of the quietest actively cooled systems in existence.

I only wish Sony had gone with a 64MB dedicated video RAM solution. That would have given the 9200 a 128-bit memory bus along with the extra 32MB RAM. But, with a native LCD resolution of 1024x768, the 64-bit memory bus is not that much of a handicap.

The Pentium-M is just an awesome chip. It runs so cool that it doesn't need much fan power. In a performance per watt measurement, it would probably devastate a P4. I love it. I wish I could get one for my desktop to get rid of the darned fans.

The V505DX uses PC2700 DDR for main memory which is quite nice. It is upgradeable to 2GB. The SODIMMs are easily accessed behind the keyboard with the removal of one screw.

The CPU is socketed which means potential upgrades!

The optical is a matsu****a drive which is ok. I wish it was a Toshiba because I have had the best luck over the years with their drives. But, it definitely gets the job done. I have had problems reading some scratched CDs that read ok in my desktop. But remember, notebook drives are harder to build well because they are much smaller than the 5.25" drives in desktops.

Audio quality of the V505's codec is quite impressive. It sounds better than a Sound Blaster Live from what I can tell. Very clear, wide stereo separation, very good frequency response. I wish I could test it scientifically, but I don't have the equipment. I think the quality may be a result of Sony going with a Yamaha Codec. Even the notebook's external speakers are pretty decent. Granted they are highpass filtered to get rid of all bass for the puny drivers, but it still sounds suprisingly clear and good for watching Divx or listening to music quietly.

I don't miss a floppy drive

The system has 2 USB 2.0 ports, one on each side of the notebook. Useful placement I believe. A firewire port is on the left as well.

No legacy ports. No PS2, serial, parallel. There is a VGA out behind a cover on the left side. Also there is a docking port connection.

The wireless is Intel Centrino 802.11b. It works quite well, with strong reception for quite a decent distance. I have had some interference with other wireless cards, most notably a Linksys recently. But it still worked fine other than a occasional 2 second disconnect. The system also has a 10/100 Intel LE chipset which works quite well for wired ethernet.

Ok, that's it, my brain is drained