Official Sony SB/SA/SC/SD Series Owners' Thread

Received my CTO today, ordered 7th march.

Build and design is v.nice, was worried about screen borders but it looks fine (despite what pics look like.)

Screen is ok. Colours and viewing angles better than I thought. No full hd but as far as standard screens go its more than acceptable. No moans here. Better than my dv2000 HP its replacing. Plenty bright enough too.

Overall, loving it. No regrets.

 

congrats on the new system!

since the recent noise acclamation how is the noise on the machine?

could you check your battery life?

how is the heat on the bottom of the machine?

what are your specs?

 

Hello everyone, new to this thread.

Checked out the SB at the Market Mall Sony Style in Calgary, and it looks pretty awesome!

The screen is matte, and the brightness is above average, but nowhere near the MacBook Pros. Viewing angles are average, but the colors seem to be washed out when tilted just a little.

Build quality is good for the bottom, but the top is very flexible. I'm worried that just throwing it into a sleeve won't be enough, and I'll have to invest in a real backpack.

Pricewise the Canadian models seem to be around $100-$200 more than the US. The rep couldn't state the prices with confidence, but he did quote a $1100 to $1200 for the starting model. Interestingly, when I asked about the model with the 6630M, he said that he didn't get any info about that model, and it may be only avaliable through the CTO option. Though I believe that he might just have not recieved the entire info yet and is just playing safe.

Also, on a side note, I saw the Vaio backlit keyboard for the first time, and I loved the purple hue!

PS: The display model had a English keyboard, so hopefully we might have a dedicated English keyboard instead of the multilingual one; can anybody else clarify that?

 

Hallo Nutral,

I read that you were going to put an SSD instead of the dvd. Which type caddy is necessary? Did you succeed?

Great Badjakker

 

Really? Didn't know that. That's a plus!

 

it is a good balance actually, not glossy but not total matt, kind of a satin

 

I'm curious to know if this thing is usable outdoors in sunlight. Anyone try that?

 

Ive tried it in full sunlight. Its doable with full brightness and the reflections aren't a problem. the typical glow of a matte display is a little more defined but just as glowy as a matte display.

 

how does the SB handle intensive tasks. does it heat up to dangerous levels after long use?

can someone post temps, with and without the slice?

 

Noise: Well it does seem to like to ramp up the fan with relativly small tasks, web surfing is slow/off. Checked for the update to help the issue but its not showing on my vaio updater yet. Having said that its hardly a beast of a fan, so full fan for me is acceptable as long as its quiet when doing light work.

Will post back on battery life, been charging it this evening.

Heat on the bottom at the moment is luke warm in places, cold in others. Only web surfing and its sat on a pillow, will let you know more info after a bit more use.

core i5 2520, 6630 1GB, 4GB, 500GB 7200rpm, fingerprint with TPM, Win7 Pro, White.

 

+1

In the meantime, I changed one of the power settings (thermal control) under the VAIO Control Center to Silent Don't know how this affects overall processing, however, the fan hasn't been running hard

 

(i originally posted this on the other S series thread, but it looks like that thread got changed to just the SA model now. just wanted to post my initial impression of the SB)

i got to try out the SB at the sony style store.. imo, i'm pretty disappointed with it. the first thing i noticed was how subpar the screen was. the viewing angles were not good and the colors didn't have much pop to it. the quality was on par with the previous S model. the display lid felt a bit wobbly tho. looks-wise, it def looks much nicer on the internet than in person. oh and the bottom felt warm. i don't like how the air vents were pushing out a lot of warm air on the bottom corners. i don't see myself having this on my lap for long periods of time.

 

Haven't tried that one. Is that a Brazilian site? Seems more updated based on the release date. In that case will probably wait for 11.3 at least. Thanks for the link though. Video performance with HD movies is good enough for me with the HD3000. Plus I save power at the same time. Note that Sony Style won't let you go to youtube, etc. in store.(firewall) At least the one at Brand won't. Now I know why.

Still no regrets on my purchase. The laptop is lighter and lasts longer than I expected and for my purposes I believe will serve me well. Screen is acceptable. I've installed the bios update and fan noise isn't much of an issue anymore. So long as it doesn't break down on me I'm a happy camper.

 

I was able to find the bios update at Sony eSupport - Electronics and manually inputting the model no. Works fine so far.

 

its not a brazilian site, its the official site for amd, but since I live in brazil it gets an automatic redirect, sorry should have said that.

what you can do is to google amd support, and go to the support page>graphics drivers and then in the drop down boxes choose the correct things

My drive is a 11.2 catalyst and the driver version is 8.821.0.0, if yours is higher than there is no need to update.


the 11.3 are out now

confusing?

11. 3

11 is the year

3 is the month of the driver

so the march drivers get released in april

PS: what is the wattage hour of the battery? it should say so on it.

 

@Mr MM thanks for making sense of the file numbers. I tried downloading again and it said "incompatible with hardware". Clicked on release notes and the Sony Vaio and switchable graphics falls under the incompatible devices. It all rests on Sony unless someone hacks the AMD drivers.

As for the battery, it's sold with the battery sealed inside by two screws. Can't see the battery not like the old lappys with the removable batteries.

 

the switch on other laptops was made with a different type of install... Basically it was install the intel drivers, then boot only with intel install the amd drivers and there you are new drivers. apparently the 11.4 as I said brings a lot of performance, I just hope that the terrible job that sony usually does with drivers wont extend to that drivers.

thanks, I knew that the battery was inside the laptop, and that it is user replaceable its actually demonstrated in the manual itself, so I guessed that you would open it, thanks for all the trouble!

 

Anyone who has this laptop, could you check where the graphics switch software is located on the harddrive ? I did a reinstall with a clean disc and i was able to install all the drivers, but the keyboard buttons don't all work and the graphics switch doesn't work. It seems sony doesn't include that in their driver page :$. And i don't like to switch the graphics by going to device manager and enabling/disabling the AMD 6630

 

So for the guys who own the laptop,
How is the quality of the keyboard and the backlight on the keyboard? is it based on the ambient light (like in the older sonys and the macbook pros)?

and how does the chassis feel? (no flex, lots of flex?)

Is the heat being exhausted out the back? (i only noticed vents on the bottom)

 

did you installed all the firmware available? this is more likely a firmware than a driver thing

 

There is only one firmware on the website and i installed that, still i am missing the little software that changes the graphics according to the switch. Seems i m still missing something.

 

cool, I will download and install this tonight

 

Plan to do a HD swap so I opened it up. 4,400mAh/49WH.

Battery life is as claimed by Sony and even a bit more. On stamina, power saver mode and screen brightness at lowest setting with nothing attached, my system showed 7hr 27min at 98%. After a little more than an hour surfing, it's down to 6hr 10min at 91%. I don't think I'll be needing the sheet battery.

 

the sheet battery is around 50Wh so it should be 100wh together.

I get estimates of around 17 hours sometimes, probably the ssd shaving shaving off 2,5w in idle (uses 2,5w normal and 0,06w idle)

 

I find the keyboard responsive so far. Backlight is a nice touch and looks a cool bluish white. The light is just right. Not too bright. There's a sensor beside the performance switch that monitors for ambient lighting.

No flex noted on mine so far at least on the chassis. Sturdy stuff. The LCD flexes a bit but I think that's expected.

Yes exhaust goes out back-center. You can see the exhaust better with the LCD bezel closed. Air seems to get drawn from the vents below near the harddisk and ports.

 

No flex on the chassis here as well, even the sheet battery made out of plastic is pretty solid, altough its a little flexible. The screen is more flexible but still not that much for such a thin sheet, you can also open the laptop without holding down the chassis wich is a nice touch.
Keyboard is easy to use for me, i don't have problems with most keyboards so that might not mean that much for you.

 

what are the temps under load? both from the chassis and the hardware/

pretty please might I add

 

hardware gets up to 100 degrees, i think the chassis around 40. The screen blocks the vent making the system cooling unsufficient when your stress testing the system. But i haven't had any problems with games or applications.

 

My actual use seems to indicate no issues with cooling even if the exhaust position is less than ideal. Eversince the bios update, I find the fan not as noisy anymore. Haven't tried gaming yet though.

Nice numbers with the sheet battery. 17hrs is a lot of time!

Gotta find a good case for this. I'm not sure if the Incase for the 13" MBP will fit this though. Maybe a 14" is a better fit.

 

since stress test isnt my priority with this pc, but running vms and building programs, I think it unlikely that I will reach that temps! glad to hear, and too bad that the cooling is indeed poor.

thanks for the info!

I think that any mpb case is going to fit, since its actually a hair smaller, not taking into account the protruding hinge, dunno if it is actually taken into account when they have done the measurement.

 

That's what's kinda turning me off from this thing. I haven't really seen any size comparisons but from what I hear, it's darn close to a 14" Chassis size. I'm coming from a ul80vt (14") and want something noticeably smaller.

 

any macbook pro 13inch case will fit, except if its a hard case that is perfectly fitted, becouse of the rounding and stuff.

 

the asus U36 is a pretty small and thin laptop, here are its measurements:
Size: 322 x 232 x 190 mm
Weight: 1.6kg with battery

here are the measurements of the S series:

Size: 33.1216 X 22.4536 X 2.41300 cm
weight: 1.75kg

you could also go for the new Z

 

Got it. Will check out cases for the MBP13. I don't see fitment issue with the rear hinge unless it's a hard case. What could be a problem is that if the laptop falls and hits the floor with the rear hinge. Not a good scenario.

I was also planning to swap out the stock 500gb 5400rpm with my Hitachi 500gb 7200rpm but when I ran the WPI, the stock hd rated a high 5.9. My old SR with the 5400rpm hd only rated a 5.4 and when the 7200rpm was in, it rated just as high as the current sb stock. Is it worth the trouble swapping the drive out with the 7200rpm one considering they will probably rate the same in WPI? Will I notice a speed difference? Only positive side I see is a clean install. Possible negative is decreased battery life and more heat/noise.

 

I would only swap the drive if you are installing a seagate momentus xt 500g, which is a 7200rpm drive that uses 4g of slc nand to speed things up, or go all the way to the SSD side of things.

since nutral didnt found the firmware for the switch (speed/stamina), I would wait before he posts the results so you dont find yourself without the use of the switch (he now alternates between the cards using the device manager)

 

Maybe you're right. Couldn't believe the new 5400rpm drives are this good! Gonna use the 7200rpm as backup instead of the other way around.

I hope Nutral finds the fix. The good thing about 2 drives though. You can go back if things go wrong.

 

the other thing you can do is buy the drives and install the recovery dvds on it, keeping all the things in the same way

 

I would get an SSD now and wait for Samsung's 1TB standard height 9.5mm 2.5" drives to come out, get one of those. Boot from the SSD, storage on the 1TB. Those two in this thing would be incredible. But of course, all of these grand plans will have to wait until we have confirmation that a drive caddy will work here.

 

You can make recovery discs or make a recovery usb stick if you want to. I would do that right after you get the laptop. its just 3 dvd's and you can reinstall onany drive, i installed the recovery on my ssd. I just hate it that you keep getting a recovery partition, there is a frikkin reason i made recovery discs.
I might make a nice guide with the firmware stuff to make the graphics switch and other buttons work.

I have taken out the dvd drive to check what size it is, appearently its 9,5mm and has an indentation. The dvd drive is the same size as the macbook pro 13inch i think, looking at MCE OptiBay Hard Drive and SSD Drive for MacBook Pro, MacBook, PowerBook G4, and Mac mini The screwholes are the same as well. I ordered one from ebay for 9 euro's and ill see if that fits, and if it doesn't ill take out my dremel and make it fit.

 

CTO available again in DE and NL. For UK the site shows blank parts so i think they are adding it now.

... I think it is a little bit more expensive now on the German site.
... also some standard configured models have the Exmor camera while for the CTO you can't change anything about the camera

 

So that's a tad bit smaller but not too much, I guess i'll just have to wait for more size comparisons.

As for the u36jc: I kinda want something with a dvd drive and more power than the 310m graphics wise (the built in sandy bridge IGP can probably compete with that). I'm looking for something to satisfy me for years.

I'm not sure I can justify paying what I'm sure the new z will cost, it also may(will?) not have a ODD. I really wan't the current Z, more than anything else out or that is to come in the foreseeable future , I just need a deal. $1600-1800 is out of my range, especially considering the processor is now "last gen".

 

My SB is 1,66kg so its not that much difference.

btw i ran 3dmark 06 and vantage,
3dmark06: 6889 3dmarks
3dmark Vantage: P3697
Vantage graphics: 3053
Vantage CPU: 9754

Ill post up picture of them with min/max temps and pcmark later.

 

Thanks nutral, I've been waiting for this! The 3dmark06 score beats the average AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650's score of 6724.2. If you're willing to try overclocking and running 3dmark again that would be amazing. The 5650's overclock extremely well, and I'd love to see how far we can get with the 6630M.

The weird thing is that 6889 beats the Vaio CB's 6446 by quite a bit, and that's a larger laptop.

 

i have a 2520 cpu in it, that is probably where the extra power comes from. Looking at the vantage graphics scores, the 6630M has 3053 and the 5650 has 2711. Vantage is more accurate than 3dmark06.
You have to use graphics scores, 6889 score of the 6630m is with the cpu score in it.

 

You want size comparisons? I know a very smart guy, he seeks the answers for you, incredible how he can find things and fast! his name is google

 

CTO back also in Italy!

 

Guys I have a question:

Has anyone tested the monitor?? I mean.. Delta color level, gamut color vs sRGB/RGB, nits and contrast.. And can anyone tell me if it's near a macbook pro 13" (as display)?

 

Has anyone who's ordered the VPCSB1AGX/B (i.e. the mid range preconfigured model) received it yet? When did you order it? I ordered mine March 24 and it's still on backorder. Though I did manage to squeeze a 5% discount out of them because CTO wasn't available yet

 

Yes, I just received it yesterday.I had placed the order on 14th march. It does not have fingerprint reader (specs dont mention now, but it did when I placed the order).
BTW I got 10% discount

 

Far from macbook pro
The screen is average.
But, it's matte
BTW, mine is B2 stepping. going to return !