Sony Vaio TX670P Review

You know who must have the worst, toughest bosses in business? Sony Electronics engineers. Picture it: It's late summer, and they're congratulating one another on the pioneering, 3.1-pound Vaio T350P notebook with Cingular wireless wide-area as well as WiFi local-area networking. Then the boss bursts in: "Shame! HardwareCentral gave us only a four-star review! Make the computer even lighter! And give it a bigger screen!"

The two requests sound contradictory, but the engineers have pulled it off: The carbon-fiber-cased Vaio TX series tops Sony's model T with an 11.1- rather than 10.6-inch-diagonal widescreen display, while tipping the scales at just 2.8 pounds -- yes, including a DVD±RW drive as well as a 60GB hard disk. If you resisted the combination of ultraportable convenience and no-hotspot-required Web and e-mail access before, the TX makes resistance even harder -- if, that is, you don't balk at the premium price.

Flying First Class

That price starts at $2,000 for a model with 512MB of DDR-2/400 and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive and climbs to $2,600 for our TX670P test unit with 1GB of memory and the DVD±RW burner. The latter is a Matsushita slimline drive with double-layer DVD+R support and the world's smallest eject button: So tiny you press it with just the tip of a fingernail, it takes some groping and poking along the right edge of the laptop whenever you want to load or remove a disc.

The 11.1-inch screen reflects equally strenuous slimming; Sony claims it's no thicker than a stack of four credit cards, yet more than twice as sturdy or crack-resistant than its predecessor. With an overall system size of 7.7 by 10.7 by 1.1 inches, the Vaio will easily fit an airline tray table, even with the screen tilted back, even with the clod in front of you reclined to a dentist's-chair angle.

Featuring Sony's XBrite glossy black rather than gray finish, the LCD is bright and sharp enough for everyday text, splashy color images, and crisp DVD movies alike, though its 1,366 by 768 resolution leaves text and icons a bit on the small side. (As with the T350P, there's a function-key combination to toggle a slightly pixelated but easier-to-read magnified resolution of 1,064 by 600.) We found no bad pixels in our Vaio's display.

The TX670P wears one of Intel's Centrino stickers, testifying to its combination of the chipmaker's Pentium M 753 processor, 915GMS integrated-graphics chipset, and Pro/Wireless 2200BG 802.11b/g wireless network adapter. The Pentium M 753 is an ultra-low-voltage 1.2GHz CPU with 400MHz front-side bus and 2MB of Level 2 cache.

Along with the gigabyte of DDR-2/400 memory (expandable to 1.5GB) and 60MB, 4,200-rpm Toshiba hard drive, the Intel components power the Vaio to respectable business-but-not-game-worthy performance, including a BAPCo SysMark 2004 Office Productivity score of 93 and Futuremark PCMark05 rating of 1,370 (CPU 1,900; memory 1,846; hard disk 2,286; graphics 583).

When we call the 915GMS' Graphics Media Accelerator 900 video not game-worthy, we mean 15 frames per second in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and 5 fps with a graphics score of 558 in AquaMark3. The Sony's 3DMark05 score was 203.