Official 2012 Sony S Series Owners Thread

The series 7 has a 640m not 650m. The 640LE is just under clocked so I'm assuming you can overclock it to the 640m.

I'm currently waiting for the dell xps, lenovo thinkpad S430 and certain confirmations for the sony vaio s15.

Could someone help answer the following about the
1. If you purchase a configuration with a standard HDD is the sata connection locked at sata 2? If so is there anyway to bypass this?
2. Is there anyway to remove the ODD and replace it with a caddy to support a second hard drive?
3. What kind of battery life should you expect without the slice battery

Thanks in advance

 

Is anybody selecting the 12GB of RAM option when buying a CTO S13 Premium or getting ony 4GB and dropping in a single 8GB stick? Or maybe having a total of 8GB is enough RAM anyways? I never used a notebook that had more RAM than 8GB and to this point never felt the need. This notebook will be for my wife and she won't be doing Photoshop or intense video editing anyways. Any thoughts? Thank you.

 

Typo, meant to say 640M. That or I am still suffering from MBP Retina media overload. :0

It seems to be locked at SATA II, which is a bummer. But in my case with a Crucial M4 (cloned, no less) performance is still stellar, 7.7 disk score in WEI for instance (vs 5.9 with the stock HDD).

Right now there is no caddy for the ODD, but I suspect there will be one before long. Problem is that this is an all new-chassis, even though it looks much like the old SE15.

I ran mine on battery yesterday after I finished my SSD install. Played Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion for a solid two hours, watched three episodes of Futurama on Netflix while I surfed on my desktop computer, did some frame rate testing of Diablo, Saints Row III, and Skyrim, and also streamed a 1080P BD rip of Avatar from my desktop to see how it looked, ended up watching an hour, and in between I did things like surf this forum and twiddle with my desktop, optimize things for the SSD, etc. Oh, and I worked in Excel for about 20 minutes.

Long story short, giving it a bit of a workout in the Speed setting with screen and KB backlight set to automatic, I got over 4.5 hours usage on battery in a 7 hour actual time period and still had 5% remaining when I plugged it back in.

Without the gaming or in Stamina mode I suspect I could see much closer to 6 hours usage, but keep in mind this is with an SSD.

 

The Sony RAM prices are exorbitant. It's better to leave that RAM slot empty, and put your own stick in. Personally, I put 4gb [so total of 8gb] and that's more than enough for me.

 

I agree with you. Too pricey. The CTO is in the cart with 4GB configured and the other slot empty. I am trying to get my finger to click the Place Order spot. $1406.99 is a lot of money, considering the fact a Samsung SSD 830 Series still has to go in it.

 

at your advice, I don't do any movie or picture edition, is the i7 worth the price (Quad core or not).
I just do some gaming (trine, wow, D3, SC 2 etc...), word watching movie and very light picture editing.
I think that the i5 can handle it, no?

 

Cheers for the quick reply. What i don't get is why Sony would sell the laptop with SSD hard drives but lock it to sata 2 speeds, it doesn't make sense.

The battery seems really good, assuming it was at full brightness. Would you be able to making any videos or taking any pics?

 

For those who have received a S13P, how is the CF black? Is it the same black that comes with the SA model? Or does the black seem more "matte" as compared with a Z?

I have been unable to find a S13P (or A in my case) in Toronto in stock or display...so I want to make sure it isn't like the SA (I found it a bit too cheap feeling and in my case get a black S13 instead) before I make the purchase (as you can't refund CTOs).

Cheers!

 

Hey everyone. I ordered my S13 a couple days ago and have a couple questions:

1. Will I notice a difference between 4GB and 8GB of RAM? The most intensive things I'll be doing is playing Starcraft 2/Diablo 3 and Photoshop.
2. Which SSD do you recommend? I need around 120GB - 256GB space.
3. Does this external enclosure work? I want to use the hard drive that comes with the laptop as an external hard drive.

 

1) yes. more ram is always better. we're past the you dont need more than 4 gig.

2) Samsung m830 is being praised highly. would go with that.

 

If it's possible, would that be an easy fix to make? I've never messed with clock speeds before, but if it's the same hardware, I'd probably take the battery hit for the performance. Probably try to plug it in when using the discrete GPU anyway.


I bought all 12GB of ram for my S13 Premium... figured I was already throwing down a big chunk of cash, might as well go all out so I don't have to spend more in the near future. I'll take the lousy price to have the notebook come exactly how I want it from the factory rather than having to further mess with it once it comes. My desktop only has 8GB right now, so I'm curious to see how much snappier the S13 feels.

 

I just ordered a VAIO 13.3" S Series Premium with the following configuration:

- Carbon Fiber Gunmetal
- 13.3" LED backlit display (1600 x 900)
- Intel Core i7-3520M
- 4GB DDR3-1333Mhz
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M LE (2GB)
- 640GB (7200rpm) hard drive
- Blu-ray Disc player / burner
- Internal lithium polymer battery (4400mAh)
- Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Accessories:
- Extended Sheet Battery
- Laptop Sleeve
- Keyboard Skin

For those who may be interested in the combination of the Extended Sheet Battery and Laptop Sleeve - I asked a Sony rep, and he told me that the laptop WILL fit in the laptop sleeve with the extended sheet battery attached.

I plan to upgrade the memory and hard drive myself upon receipt of the laptop. I will be upgrading the memory to 12GB and swapping out the hard drive for an SSD - either a Crucial M4 or a Samsung 830.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have about the laptop and I will do my best to answer them when I receive it later this month/early next month.

 

For those of you wondering whether to get an i5 or an i7, go with the i5 unless you seriously need the power. The base third gen i5 that comes with all the models outperforms all/most of the second gen i7s according to notebookcheck. An i7 will just make a lot of extra heat and noise with little noticeable benefit (unless you are doing serious CAD rendering on a laptop etc).

 

Could someone try to install the stock Nvidia drivers from the Verde site on their S13/S15 and see if they work?
http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_drivers.html

Well, I don't really want to get an HP Pavilion laptop. Those things have really bad reputations. There's a reason why they are so cheap, even compared with HP's own Envy line. I tend to keep my laptops for 3-4 years, if I was someone who buys a new laptop every year after the 1 year warranty expires, then the disposable consumer-grade laptops would be an option for me.

 

Question for fellow S15 owners. I purchased a Seagate Momentus XT, installed a clean copy of Win7 on it, and installed Sony's drivers. I did not install any of the Sony supplied extra software.

I downloaded and played a few games, and thought I was getting performance that was below what some of you had described. Playing Day of Defeat: Source @ 1920x1080 with AA and AF off only yielded an average of about 40 fps (60 max, 30 or less during fire fights).

I ran the WEI, and found the following data. Are other S15 owners seeing the same data I am? WEI reports the GPU as the HD4000 even in its graphic tests.

Thanks.

 

I'm getting lower CPU/RAM numbers (7.2/7.5) since I only have the dual-core i7, but your graphics and disk results are identical to what I had (disk is now 7.7 with the addition of an SSD, overall score 6.8).

 

is the button on the laptop said to stamina or speed?

 

So I bought a S15 and a 256gb samsung ssd 830 to put in it a few days ago. I'm just now reading about the SATA II issues. This is pretty lame.

Would the upgrade to the ssd limited to SATA II speeds be worth it over a 500gb 5400rpm hard drive?

 

yes. SATA II is still very fast compared to a 5400rpm HDD.

 

From what I remmber, Sata 2 has a max speed of 3gigabits per second of bandwidth, so ~375 megabytes per second up/down. So if your read/write is higher than that, you will be bottlenecked. Still, that's much faster than the ~70 megabytes per second you get with a magnetic hdd

 

Access times and random transfers will be similar between SATA II and III, which is what really makes SSD so much faster than HDDs.

Where SATA III wins for SSDs is sequential transfer rate. Fortunately there aren't too many situations where you need 400-500MB/s sequential transfer rate and ~260MB/s (the fastest SATA II can handle in the real world usage) is simply not adequate. HD video editing and production is one of the few applications I can think of where you would need it. Even just encoding video without non-linear editing, you would be bottlenecked by how fast the CPU could perform the encoding, the sequential transfer rate wouldn't even be a concern.

I'm having a problem now. Since I became aware of Orangegate, I've been checking the screens on other devices in my house to see if they can display red or not. My calibrated HDTV can (obviously). The screen on my ancient Dell Inspiron 700m can. My Galaxy Nexus can on the 720p Super AMOLED HD screen. However, my HP Touchpad cannot, red is displayed very blatantly as orange on it. My T400 comes very close, there's an orange cast when compared to my HDTV's reference red but not nearly as orange as my Touchpad. It will be interesting to see where my S15 will fall on the Red-O-Meter compared to my other devices.

 

No surprise the HP Touchpad can't. The HP guys admitted in a post-mortem that Apple bought out all the displays and parts they wanted to use and they had to use lower-quality items (having to keep the price down by cooperate mandate didn't help matters).

The S15 has the excuse that there is only one 1920x1080-IPS-display. The LG one. It has less of an excuse not to use the current revision.

 

Both i5 and i7 are 17w ULV parts. They are made from the same wafer during production, but are binned differently depending on defects such as leakage properties or defective logic blocks.

In this case, both processors should have similar power draw values, with the i5 having 1/4 of the L3 cashe disabled (either from a defect or intentionally disabled for product price point segregation). The cashe alone is a major power saving feature, as any instruction stored there, saves the processor from firing up the power hungry/slower memory bus.

ULV processors are already heavily handicapped compared to their full voltage counterparts, and so the 200-400mhz (base-boost) difference will be noticeable, even for basic things such as web page rendering or playing skyrim/starcraft 2.

 

The processors in the S series are not ULV, they're full 35 W models.

 

A lot of you are suggesting going for the Samsung 830 SSD to install in the new S series (13 or 15), however the 830 is a 7mm height drive as I understand it. I've also read on here the new S series has a 9.5mm bay.

If this is correct, does anyone on here have first hand experience installing the 7mm drive in the 9.5mm bay? Do you know for a fact that the Samsung comes with a spacer kit and, if so, does it work/align with the Sony bay?

Many thanks,
Petrov.

 

Samsung sells the 830 series as just the drive itself and a laptop install kit with spacer. You want to buy the kit, not the bare drive.

Bare drive
Laptop install kit

 

Many thanks. I've ordered the notebook kit version from amazon.co.uk (we dont have NewEgg this side of the pond). Appreciate you responding so quickly.

When doing a clean install, are there any Sony sites up that have all the required Sony S Premium-specific drivers available (they're not on Sony's UK website as yet...?). Otherwise, how do you get all the drivers, etc, for installing after you've done a clean Win 7 installation on the new SSD?

Thanks again,

Petrov.

 

Hi,

I've ordered a custom build S15.

For guys in the UK who have ordered one, how long did it take from the "its built" email to getting it in your hands?

Thanks

 

I ordererd my S13 Premium on the 7th June. Received email that it had entered production on 9 June, and received email that it had shipped on 16 June. I don't have an ETA on arrival yet (you only get a tracking number when it hits the European logistics centre and gets into the hands of a courier), but presumably toward the end of this week.

Petrov.

 

Snap! Just swap S13 for S15 Arrgh the wait is painful!

 

right you are but my point on the difference between the i5/i7 still stands.

 

You could try the msi afterburner to overclock the gpu, but I'd read around first (especially the hp envy thread) to see what sort of performance you will ger

 

To over clock the LE, you can also use the Nvidia program or EVGA precision

Don't forget to keep an eye on temperatures

 

Does anyone know the real performance difference between the two graphics cards available? Is the 1GB extra memory worth it? (+50€ in vaio's spanish site)

 

Hi all!,

I'm about to order my Vaio S15 in Spain, with the following specifications:

Processor: Intel®Core(TM)i7-3612QM,2.1GHz
Operating system: Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium
Hard drive: 640 GB Serial ATA (7200 rpm)
Memory: 12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3-SDRAM
Optical Drive: DVD disc drive
Display: 39.5cm LCD, 1920x1080+webcam
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 640M 2GB
Battery: No Long-Life Battery
Connectivity: No Wireless WAN

I'm struggling with the color decision though. Black or silver? I've read that with the black is a little messy because of the fingerprints on the case. However the silver one will be messy in the keyboard (I'm not going to clean the keyboard very often) because its light color.

Anybody has tried out both colors?

 

For people who have upgraded the HDD on S13: Could you please, pretty please, take a few photographs and write a short guide? I opened up the back plate, and I don't find it to be an easy upgrade.

I am not a total newbie, I have replaced and upgraded hard drives on laptops before, but this one doesn't look "standard". There's a cable running on top of the hard disk to somewhere else.. It's just weird!

BTW, if I buy the Crucial m4 ( Amazon.com: Crucial 256 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT256M4SSD2: Electronics, is it the standard drive height (9.5mm) or will I need a spacer kit? The Amazon specs are not too clear on that. [Answering my own question: Newegg says that the height is standard 9.5mm]

 

This is a bit of a concern - any chance you could post a pic of the current HDD enclosure/cords, so a few of the experienced modders can see what you're referring to specifically?

Thanks,
Petrov.

 

Something like this?

It looks like just 3 screws to loosen the hard drive and then slide it out, which at that point you can just unplug the hard drive and plug that new SSD in. Is that about right?

@rohandhruva: The Crucial SSD comes in both 7mm without a spacer and a 9.5mm size. The S13 should take the standard 9.5mm size SSD.

 

I thought the setup was the same as in the old S series? Open the cover, remove battery, then unhook the connecter to the motherboard, unscrew drive and remove.

rohandhruva could post some photos of the back part removed? hi res if possible.

 

I pulled the trigger and pretty soon my wife will have a buddy for her SR590.

Model Number: US-SVS13A190X-LBOM
VAIO 13.3" S Series Premium Custom Laptop
1
$1,339.99

Customization Details

■4GB (4GB fixed onboard + 1 open slot) DDR3-1333Mhz ■Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit ■NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 640M LE (2GB) hybrid graphics with Intel® Wireless Display technology ■13.3" LED backlit display (1600 x 900) ■Microsoft® Office 2010 Starter ■640GB (7200rpm) hard drive ■Internal lithium polymer battery (4400mAh) ■Gold ■No engraving ■Kaspersky® Internet Security (30-day trial) ■No Fresh Start ■Blu-ray Disc™ player ■3rd gen Intel® Core™ i5-3320M processor (2.60GHz / 3.30GHz with Turbo Boost)

Looks like a great notebook.

 

Yes, my setup looks exactly like that Is the brown cable actually carrying data from the hard disk to the motherboard? Or is it an irrelevant cable?

Also, after unscrewing (I am not sure which screws to take off), how exactly do you "pull out" the hard disk? It looks like it's blocked by the left side of the panel. Also, how do you remove the cable?

EDIT: I can definitely take pictures of my own laptop after 7pm EST today; that's when I get back home. But it looks exactly like the picture.

 

Look at the bottom left and right edge. There is a screw to loosen on each end. Then the screw on the top right. Those screws hold the hard drive bracket. Once those are removed, carefully slide the hard drive to the right to remove it from those tabs on the left. There are a couple screws on the side of the hard drive that have to be removed to separate the hard drive from the bracket as well. You will now be able to just unplug that ribbon cable and then plug in your SSD and put the screws back in. It's a 5 minute job.

 

ehosey2 - where did you find the Sony drivers, etc, for the new S series? If you had a chance to post the link it'd be much appreciated, as I can't find them on their US or UK sites.

Petrov.

 

At post 390 I stated that I just pulled the trigger for the S13 Premium. It's a gift for my wife and it has not arrived yet. I got that picture of the hard drive location from Mobile01.com. As for the drivers, I have not got that far to check for them yet but I will look around. Sorry.

 

Here you go: Sony eSupport - SVS13A190X - Support
This is for the S13A premium series, though.

 

At the risk of sounding like a noob, let me reiterate:
1. I remove the 3 screws you told (which doesn't detach the hard disk from the bracket)
2. I remove the bracket-hdd attachment screws
3. After that, I should be able to unplug the brown ribbon-cable
4. Slide the hard disk to the right (looks like there's hardly any space to do that.. the gap is barely 1cm)
5. Slide the new one in, attach the ribbon cable back, and put the backplate in.

Does that sound about right?

 

That's almost right, I have no experience with this particular laptop but from that photo it looks like this:

1.Remove 3 screws and place to side.
2.Once you take out the bracket unscrew the screws on the side of the bracket attaching the hard drive to it (you can see one screw in the photo at the bottom). The hard drive is now free from the bracket.
3.Lift the hard drive out (upwards, no sliding) by the black plastic part of the ribbon. You're right about it not looking like it'll be able to slide but I see no reason why it can't go straight up. The ribbons are generally very sturdy but if you don't want to lift it up by this wedge something under the hard drive and lever it out (remember this is after the screws have been taken out of the side of the bracket/drive. You can only see one in the photo but there are 4 on most drives but not all are always used)
4. Unplug ribbon and plug in new hard drive with the same ribbon.
5. Put the new hard drive in the same way the old one was and put the screw(s) back into the sides to keep it in place.
6. Replace 3 bracket screws.
7. Put on backplate.

Sorry if that sounds more complicated than it is but tbh it should end up being common sense more than anything when you come to actually doing it. Vaios are usually easy to upgrade and this one doesn't look any different.

Edit: Oh, and it's an obvious point but don't forget to remove the battery and power supply first!

 

^
Well stated. I was in a bit of a rush when I posted earlier.

 

Did some digging into the question of driver support for the GT640M that someone posted earlier.

Here's a picture of Nvidia's answer. As can be seen, we are subject to Sony's driver update schedule. So, we'll get new drivers when Sony say we will.

 

Or when you feel like editing/replacing an .inf file on your own.