Official Sony VAIO F Series i5/i7 owners thread *Part 3*

Hey Melody Master, I'm thinking of a VIAO for my aerospace engineering major. Is it a good idea? I want to do multimedia and gaming to so good idea bro? You can check out my post on page 209, no point in repasting it

 

In the EU they give a rubber palm. Rest. Not sure which model though

 

Here is the post that Omeroo is referring to.

 

In Europe, all standard F11Z and F12Z models have 8GB and "leather" palm rest. Its premium finish, not avaiable in S and M (silver) models.

 

ye thats the post will, but thing is just as jacol has said, there seems to be a leather palm rest and a premium finish in the F12 8gb version but not in the 6gb version, can anyone confirm this.

 

Why don't you just look it up?????????????

here is the link for the UK:

F Series : VAIO and Computing : Sony

 

i did it doesnt mention the leather palm rest or the premium finish, im going to sony store

 

When I ordered mine from the sony UK site it was very vague and the only f12 models were the custom ones. There was no clear distinction about which carried the premium screen. Perhaps we should publish our model numbers and spec to help future buyers.

Mine is as follows:

F12 customised configuration
model: VPCF12C5E
cpu: i720
mem: 8GB 1333MHz
display: 1080p matte premium (no mecury warning)
palm rest: rubber, I think

 

Standard F12S and F12M doesnt have leather finish only Z model - Im talking about only standard ones, not custom orders from retailers or websites.

 

Does the deceleration of the fan while pressing a button annoys you guys? I'm talking about the noise

 

You don't notice unless your paying attention

 

Whadda a way to measure!

I have an old FW-series that I dislike for several reasons (its build, software issues, awful touchpad, volume control - and its truly crappy speakers). Now, I'm willing to accept that laptop speakers are crappy but the FW speakers were worse than anything I had owned previously.

I'm in the market for a new laptop and despite my better judgment, I'm looking at a customized F12 - the specs are great and the price (in Canada) is very good. With your comment and omaroo's post above, I guess I'm going to have to test this out myself with a Rick Mercer rant.

----

Speakers are hardly make or break in a laptop choice. I'm reading this thread with interest. Thanks for the comments of others.

 

Thanks and if I'll have that morse code problem will it 100% go away when i turn off the mic? I don't need it because i'm gonna use it from my headset

 

Not very sure about that, mine comes and goes randomly. Anyway you won't hear it when you use a headset.

 

Well i don't use it everytime just while i was playing a game and maybe listening to music to not to disturb my roommate. But also write some essays do some work at library (which is apretty silent place as usual) and i don't wanna be disturbed by that itchy sound

 

Hi Viper,

I have the F series premium UK model.

Is yours the f11 or f12 ?

Could you please post the link for the ebay seller where you got your backlit keyboard ?

Does it blend in well with the general high spec/quality and colour of this laptop ?

Does the keyboard have a light sensor to be able to automatically turn on , or is it permanently on ?

If, for eg. you are on battery and want to save power consumption, is it possible to turn off the keyboard LED ?

Did you have to install a driver for it ?

If so, is it possible to revert to the original keyboard and its presumed respective driver ?

Sorry for all the questions. It would be great if you could post a picture of your new lappy look in the thread

Tausif.

reply:

Hy let's take it one at a time..
I have a Sony F11S1E/B which is black. This is the ebay http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/SONY-VAIO-F11-...item5ad9d0ac57 where I bought it from there is also another link if you have the silver model.

The keyboard has exactly the same colour as the laptop so it fits perfectly no problems or anything. As a quality it has the same feel maybe a slight difference as the kes are of a matte finish and I think are better than the original keyboard.

The keyboard uses the light sensos that is in the laptop for the screen so there is no differences. It also does not require any driver it will show up in Vaio care. You can switch of the backlight if you want. It only comes on when it is dark or if you cover the light sensor. You can always revert to your old keyboard so in a way it is like having a spare part.

Search after my name in the thread and you shoud find the pictures with how the keyboard looks.
If you can't find the pictures pm me and I will send them.

 

Dernfara im still confused as to what coems with the standard laptops. Jacol, so are you saying the 8gb preconfigured comes with the leather palm rest and premium finish.

 

Yes, the 8gb is the only one that comes with the leather palm rest, however what is premium finish?

 

What kind of gaming do you do? Can you list some so I can determine how well the F plays on it.

As for your career. I think the F series would do well, powerful CPU, responsive RAM, etc, but if you do alot of 3D work, etc, you should consider the Dell Precision workstation laptops with optimized GPUs for the work.

And I can't say the F is rugged, so it's not gonna take throwing around

 

YeS!!! For the one millionth time ... YES!

"Premium black" - it's on the website.

Just go to the damn store and have a look if you don't believe us. Are you just going to ask every member the same 2 or 3 questions?

 

Who, why and when was someone suggesting a 40% overclock!?!?

It is, unfortunately, very likely you have damaged the GPU.

 

I agree here. 40% overclock is really crazy especially on a notebook graphics chip. You can't run at that kind of overclock for extended periods and not expect to have and issue. It seems some people here that don't have experience overclocking are taking others advice who also don't have experience overclocking and using it. Unfortunately overclocking to extremes especially in a laptop where the graphics card is built in and can't be swapped out is likely going to turn it to toast. I overclocked many of my desktop computer's graphic cards for years, but I have no interest in doing it on my Vaio.

 

Yeah the precision is an overkill, but i read that the precision is really heavy and does get warm. The w510 has heating problems when gaming, and teh 8740w appaerntly has bad drivers, i read that it crashes. Well gaming wise maintstream like crysis, crysis 2 (coming soon), ghost recon future solider, GRAW2, FEAR 1 and 2 and 3, BF3, BFBC2, FF and u know the mainstream games. and I would do 3D modeling but i think if it needs lots of power, i'll use my desktop or a super computer grid, unless cfcourse the f11 can handle it

 

If you want to know how well a game runs on the F11 / F12 , check the NBC page on it :

Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M

I can either play Crysis at HD res, and set to medium, or 13--x768 set to high with an acceptable (20+) framerate.

Other games, such as those based on Valve's source engine, absolutely fly

 

Hi elegantscorpio, I just received my F1290s and it has pretty bad light bleed. Was your second laptop noticebly better? Did you have to argue much to get them to replace it? Did you have to pay the return shipping? I haven't talked to Sony yet (just received it today).

I'm both depressed and pissed that Sony is willing to sell this slop and put those of us who care through all this hassle. I will be using the laptop a fair amount for photo editing (will hook up to my e-IPS display when it really matters) and I don't want the distracting light bleed (its bad enough I can't spend some extra dollars and purchase the RGB LED FHD display they have in EU). Yes I know its a TN panel but so is my Toshiba Satellite A300 and it doesn't have any significant light bleed (and has way better speakers).

Thanks in advance for your input.

 

I was following these instructions (thanks Willscary):
"A page will open that will have 6 drop down boxes. The first is the product type, which should be "GeForce". Under that will be a product series. For the Vaio "F" notebooks, this should be changed to "GeForce 300M Series (Notebook)". Under that will be the product box. Here you select either "GeForce GT 330M" or GeForce GT 310M" depending on your particular Vaio F hardware."
I get a broken link if I select win7 64 bit. Win 7 32 bit works for 258.96.
UPDATE: I went forward, hacked the URL by changing to:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/Drive...international_whql.exe&lang=us&type=GeForce M
And I get the 64 bit one. Ignore the question below. If anyone is trying to upgrade they may need this.
Willscary or others you actually used this same file? "258.96_notebook_winvista_win7_64bit_international_whql.exe"
---------------
Earlier question:

Is the driver download unified or do I wait for 64 bit link to be fixed? the page I end up in refers to Windows 7 without specifying 32/64, the release notes include some 64 bit issues. Just playing safe here.

By the way the auto detect applet they have works and gives the same options.

258.96 is listed as WHQL updated 7/19, it may have changed since 7/18 post from Willscary.

 

My basic furmark score went to 1036 with the new driver which so far upgraded push button.
My baseline on that was 693 with stock drivers that came with the machine. That was 189.25.

With the 3 options XB BM FX on it goes from 275 to 433 with new driver. Thank you Nvidia for a nice graphics card upgrade for me.
Snapshots attached below.

Temperatures were not exactly apples to apples as new driver was closer to a nice cool boot, nevertheless I don't see a clear trend up in temperature for more performance, I was willing to tolerate some.

The furmark snapshots use the other Nvidia numbering scheme. 8.16.11 from February is my default, 8.17.12 is the new driver.

I noticed it upgrades Nvidia HD sound, I don't remember if I used to have any Nvidia sound drivers in device manager. Should I worry about them wasting any resources or anything?

 

The HDMI audio out is handled by part of the 330m's chipset, thus the driver

 

I've got to say that the speakers were the one aspect of the Vaio F11 that made me not want to buy it. The surround sound affect, through headphones, is fantastic though. I bought the preconfigured F11 when it went on sale for cheaper than the custom option I was considering. I then bought the logitech V20 external usb speakers and the sound is just great for my needs. They're relatively inexpensive and a good enough quality for that price range.

 

Hi all,

I don't know if any of you have yet done it but I would not advise upgrading your bios to the one posted on the support section of Sony's site at the end of June 2010 - EP0000225488.exe

This bios update was to solve the overheating issue with F11s

However, the bios also screws up the ability to run 64-bit Virtual Machines as Sony have disabled the VT in it. I now have to send my VPCF11Z1E laptop in to Sony repair centre so they can re-enable the VT setting. Really hacked off with them as it means I cannot do my job!

Cheers,
Z.

 

The new NVIDIA driver took me from 354 to 539 tested at 1440x900 resolution.

VAIO F11
NVIDIA GeForce 310m
4GB RAM
i7-720QM

 

I upgraded my F11's bios with the update that solves the heat issue and it update and reset my bios to default settings which have Virtualization disabled. I simply went back into the bios and enabled it again and the Virtual machine XP mode works again as expected. If you haven't tried this yet then you may want to. Just hit F2 of course at boot and enable it in the bios and save and exit.

 

Maxie is right, it just defaults the switch.

The lesson here, is anything that seems 'broken' after a bios update can usually be 'fixed' in the bios

On my old motherboard a bios update would re-set the multipliers, and set the chip down from 2.4Ghz to 900Mhz !

Did run cool, though

 

Guys,

I'm using a Sony Bravia W5500 TV connected through SPDIF to a Sony 5.1 home cinema. Yesterday, I connected my F11 to my TV with HDMI, it works quite fine, but there is no sound! Control Panel > Sound and switching to Optical Device Output (HDMI) doesn't work, still no sound for my home cinema.

Any ideas how to solve the problem? I've got all needed drivers already installed.

 

I'm sorry to hear that you had problems. I live in the USA and I used the Windows 7 64 bit driver dropdown and the English dropdown. I had no problems.

I did not try the international version and I did not have to modify anything. I simply did exactly as I posted...from uninstalling the original to installing the new.

My original Furmark (GT330M/1920x1080) was in the 650-680 range without overclocking. Now, with the Beta 258.96 dirvers, my score with the same settings is 1048.

 

^^ Such a jump looks like a benchmark-specific optimization, IMO.

I know ATI and nVidia both were accused of tweaking their drivers to clock higher 3Dmark scores, with no impact on actual gaming performance.

Does anyone have a gaming F-P-Second test, before and after? That would be the real indicator.

I know, even today, ATI are tweaking their drivers in respect to furmark - they are deliberately making it "run slow" on the burning test to make sure there aren't a load of user complaints about heat. Re-naming the exe to something else sees a great leap in thermal output

 

I am not a gamer, but I can believe what you are saying. I don't think that my frame rates really went up much. I think the original (at 1920x1080) was like 13 FPS and the newest BETA drivers show 15 FPS in Furmark.

What I will say that I can definitely see is that when running the test, the rotating doughnut image used to studder a bit at times and now it is quite smooth. I can still see the studder of each frame, but the pauses are small and very evenly spaced. The original drivers used to studder for a slightly longer period of time and the pauses used to be more uneven...some would be longer in duration than others...if that makes sense.

 

Well got my CTO F12.

Product: US-VPCF1290X-LBOM
Component: Standard capacity battery
Component: Intel® Core™ i7-740QM processor (1.73GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 3.06GHz
Component: 16.4" VAIO Full HD Premium Display (1920x1080) (Reg. price $100.00)
Component: NVIDIA® GeForce® 330M GPU (1GB VRAM)
Component: Fresh Start
Component: No LED Backlit Keyboard
Component: 6GB (4GBx1 + 2GBx1) DDR3-SDRAM-1333
Component: Blu-ray Disc player
Component: No Engraving
Component: No Adobe Software
Component: No additional AntiVirus Software
Component: Gray
Component: No additional Office software
Component: Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit
Component: 500GB Hard Disk Drive (7200rpm)


Played around with it for 2 days. Some real brief thoughts

Pros: Love the keyboard, good all around performance. What I would expect from the specs.


Cons: Sorry fellas, this display is not good overall. Colors are fine, I used a color profile and fooled around a bit with it but theres light bleed plain and simple. Add the terrible glossy option that the Americans are forced to use and you have a great computer with a bad display. Shame.

Overall thoughts: It eats me up so much that this computer could be seriously a 10 with the EU display(or so i heard). Its definitely a really nice computer but the screen is something you have to get used to

 

anseio, thats what is putting me off the F12 kinda of is the speakers, if you paying over £1000 you expect great speakers, just hope if i use the speakers in the laptop they still deliver good sound, instead of always using headphones

 

Richard i have heard the EU screen is the best one as there is no bleed whatsoever.

 

You're letting the speakers put you off? That's absolutely insane. It's a laptop, it's going to have tiny, horrible speakers no matter if it costs 3k, buy a nice set of headphones! There's other things I would be more concerned with before buying this laptop, like the obvious varying levels of light bleed and poor backlight technology on all US models.

 

I've tried the Final Fantasy XIV official benchmark test
low quality
windowed
Non OC'd GPU

257.15 - score 1250
257.21 - score 1248 (unstable driver, games crashing throughout - FFXIV, Crysis, Splinter Cell Etc)
258.69 - score 1248
258.96 - score 1273

Mangosango actually scored a 1382 with his benchmark and he was using the 257.15 driver. YouTube - MrChowderClam's Channel

So far 258.96 is stable and the increase in score is ..well insignificant but better than nothing. Maybe this is the plateau range for the 300M?

@xcougar
By the way, all of my driver updates have been the international version. The English versions always came up with an error window saying that the installer could not find any compatible drivers (or something like that)

Splinter Cell: Conviction and Crysis still runs the same as usual.

 

Hi, thanks for that. I found out I could go in and change it earlier on and was coming back to say false alarm

Typical support centre though - they could have told me I could do that rather than telling my I have to send the laptop back in! Muppets.

 

justme2010, i dont mind the speakers, as long as its decent then im happy, i got really good quality earphones, might get headphones. Could i also ask why the backlit technology in the backlit keyboard is poor, i was thinking of getting a spare part in the future.

 

I was referring to the display which is a single bulb CCFL. It seems like every US F series is going to have the problem with light bleed at the bottom, its simply a game of chance on how much there will be. On the positive side the resolution is fantastic and the display looks great when doing everyday internet browsing and desktop activities with the proper brightness level and screen tilt. The screen looks its best at the higher brightness levels, otherwise it looks washed out. Remember to turn off auto-brightness so you can control it yourself. Just remember at the highest brightness levels the screen luminosity will cause the backlit keyboard to not work, but it shouldn't be necessary considering at that level you should be able to see the keyboard fine.

As far as the light bleed is concerned, it's annoying when watching a movie and it will take some getting used to. I tried watching Cosmos and I just couldn't do it with all the black scenes. You're not going to notice it too much on your desktop and doing other activites. It sometimes annoys me in game when the very bottom of the screen is clearly brighter than the rest. I think it's all a matter of opinion but if you can adjust to it and have a good external monitor you can use for things such as movies you should be fine.

 

Omaroo, I was most drawn to the F11 by the keyboard and then the 1600x900 display. The speakers put me equally as far in the other direction. When I first checked it out at the Sony Style store in Seattle, the preconfigured model was $1200 USD. That was out of my price range, so I was going to customize one for about $1050. Three days later, I went back to play a movie on the display model and the price has been dropped to $999. About the same price, and a bit cheaper than the other brands I was checking out. Speakers be damned, I snatched it up and am very happy with it. I don't have the fan noises that people complain of, or a bleeding display. I do have a squeaky space bar on occasion, but it will work itself out, as my laptop is only 7 weeks old.

The external speakers work quite well and I'm not prone to use my VAIO without them.

I don't quite understand why Sony would put so much effort into making a good piece of equipment and have such awful speakers, but once it went on sale, I didn't care anymore.

Good luck in whatever you decide.

 

Phew! Yes virtual mode was disabled on mine after the update also. It indeed just had to be reenabled in BIOS.

 

For a couple of days the system had been acting up, with IE freezing, programs not opening, Google Talk showing just an outline but no messages, even a BSOD when opening Word. There were all sorts of bad events in Events Viewer. The trouble had started after a Microsoft update on the 17th, it appeared. So I restored the system to prior to that event, and all went back to working properly. However Automatic Updates was enabled, so again the "Critical Updates" of the 17th and 18th were installed, and again the system became terribly buggy. Again I used system restore but this time turned auto-update OFF. Again the system is back to normal. Anyone had trouble recently? A recent MS update seems to be the cause.

 

Yes, I had the BSOD also while attempting a Windows Update on the 16th. I mentioned it to you in G.Talk, but since it was buggy for you, you probably didn't get my messages.

 

Hi,

since today i'm a proud owner of a Vaio F12 too. I'm very impressed by this laptop and the only disadvatage i can find so far is the noise from the fan. The display (EU Vaio Premium Display) is the best i've ever seen and the keyboard is much better than the cherry keyboard on my desktop PC.
I've to install some software and do further tests, but against all the complaining i've read here and in other forums i love this machine. I had'nt expect a whisper silent machine at this powerlevel and i can live with some fan-noise under heavy load.

Best regards

--- Lars ---

PS: Thank you all for your Information. I've a lot to read in the three parts of this thread