Sony Vaio VA10G Review
The Definitive All-in-One Desktop?December 23, 2005
By Eric Grevstad
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The living room's the living room and the den's the den, and never the twain shall meet ... or so you'd think from the variety of Win XP Media Center PCs these days. Conventional minitower models accentuate the computing half of the equation; stereo-equipment-styled systems are cool for TV and home theater, but aren't exactly productivity workhorses.
Sony has split the difference -- no, that sounds too tame or compromised. Let's say Sony has hit a home run up the middle, or at least tried to and hit a solid triple.
The $2,000 Vaio VA10G builds on last year's V series -- an Apple iMac-like computer affixed to the back of an LCD monitor -- with a 20-inch-diagonal widescreen TV above a compact base with front-mounted DVD±RW drive. Below and behind the display is a capable Pentium 4 630 desktop with 1GB of memory, a 250GB hard disk, and Sony's Giga Pocket TV tuner/MPEG-2 encoder to power Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005's TiVo-style time-shifting and recording of TV programs.
Realistically, a 20-inch TV isn't big enough to be at the center of a home theater setup (for which Sony would probably recommend its XL1 Digital Living System, a Media Center PC with 200-disc CD/DVD changer).
But, unlike some all-in-one PCs with 15- or 17-inch LCDs, the VA10G is viewable from far enough away to make it a first-class bedroom, dorm-room, or coffee-table accessory, with a remote control for watching TV, DVD, or home videos and a wireless keyboard and mouse for surfing or working.
Quick and Quiet
The Pentium 4 630 is a 3.0GHz, 64-bit-capable processor with 2MB of Level 2 cache and an 800MHz front-side bus -- a single- instead of dual-core CPU, though it partially emulates the latter with Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology. If that's not fast enough for you, paying $200 more for the Vaio VA11G gets a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 640, as well as replacing the VA10G's single 250MB Serial ATA hard disk with two 160GB drives.
Our test system's 3.0GHz chip and 1GB of DDR-2/533 memory, however, proved plenty fast enough for everyday applications as well as Media Center shenanigans: The Vaio delivered a FutureMark PCMark05 score of 3,012 (CPU 3,626; memory 3,328; hard disk 4,754; graphics 2,387), with a BAPCo SysMark 2004 Office Productivity rating of 138.
ATI's RC410M chipset includes a 256MB -- half dedicated, half shared with system memory -- implementation of the company's Mobility Radeon X700 graphics. While its 3D acceleration isn't fast enough to satisfy the highest-resolution, hardcore gamers, it's faster than most of the consumer-PC setups we've seen: Besides racking up 195 frames per second in good old Quake III Arena, the Sony wasn't stymied by 3DMark05 (score 1,655); AquaMark3 (33 fps with a graphics score of 4,215); or the DirectX 9 challenge of Gun Metal 2 (24 fps with 4X antialiasing at the display's native 1,366 by 768 resolution).
The Vaio also earns points for not drowning out your game or TV or DVD or MP3 audio -- it's almost silent in regular operation, with slightly audible fan noise during CPU- or graphics-intensive tasks (audible when you're seated in front of the desktop PC, we mean, not watching video from a sofa 10 feet away).
Sony boasts that the VA10G has five integrated speakers for 2.1 stereo playback; cranked up for your favorite tunes, it doesn't sound quite as solid as a real 2.1 speaker system, but is immensely better than the stereo speakers of your typical (or even a Media Center Edition) notebook. It also sounds better than your typical small TV set, though we missed having volume or channel controls on the main unit -- you have to use the remote or, for volume only, the keyboard.
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