CW series vs U30JC

From what I'm reading the CW's battery life isn't great at all, but they come with the i5 and the 1600x900 resolution.

The U30JC on the other hand has great battery life and decent power, but a bit smaller resolution. The good thing is that it's a few hundred cheaper.

How do you guys think they compare? If you had to choose, which one would you get?

 

If gaming is important to you, you can get a CW w/the nvidia 330 which is quite a bit more powerful than the 310.

the resolution advantage you already stated is another huge plus IF you have use for it. I would bet the panel is of better quality as well, Asus tends to use lower quality panels compared to Sony, although Sony has been slipping as well lately with certain models.

 

the U30JC does have Optimus, which should mean the graphics drivers should be easier to update but we have Nautis Optimus will lead to greater battery life though, since the CW doesn't have switchable graphics.

 

Great points.

How is graphics performance on the CW? Can it handle things like Photoshop and HD web video without any problems?

I do like the higher resolution, as long as text isn't super tiny on browsing. I've used a FW series with the 16.4" and 1920/1080 resolution, it was quite tiny and I found myself zooming in all the time.

I haven't seen the 14" with 1600x900 though...

 

I had a U30JC on order, but canceled because of delays & needing a new laptop soon.

Decided to get my first Sony instead a VPCCW27FX/B with those specs listed.

With the U30JC you will get a slightly lighter & smaller laptop (less then 5 lbs), but over twice the battery life. Metal on the lid & palmrests. It also offers a better warranty 2 years & 1 year accidental all for $900.

With the VPCCW27FX/B you get that higher res LCD which I really drew me to this model, a bluray drive, bluetooth, & a medium level gaming capable GPU. Downsides are a lesser warranty, a little heavier & bigger, & alot of glossy plastic. There is an extended 9 cell battery for around $230, but it'll make the laptop bigger on the bottom & probably weigh around 6 lbs. total. So you're looking at laptop $1100, battery $230, extended warranty (squaretrade quote) 3 years $159 or $300 with accidental coverage. For several hundred more you could get a Z series which was very tempting though you'd still need an extended warranty.

 

I would like to know your impressions when it arrives. Especially the display (contrast/quality/etc.)

 

the 330 can handle Photoshop and HD video without breaking a sweat, but so can the 310 in the Asus, the only place you'll really see a difference is in gaming where the 48 cores is a big jump over the 310's 16 cores or in applications that are CUDA compatible. My GF's Asus UL30VT has a 210m which is just like the 310M pretty much, it's a decent GPU for light gaming, but that's pretty much it. It can run Trine and Sim 3 which are her most GPU intensive games as long as I don't max out all graphic settings.

Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce 310M
Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M

the 330M in my Z is a very nice medium level GPU, runs the newest games Bad Company 2 & Modern Warefare abit at medium-level settings. Runs Source based games like L4D series at almost max levels. I didn't buy my Z to be a gaming rig (that's my desktop's job) but 330M was much better than i expected.

Don't be afraid of 1600x900 resolution, you can adjust the DPI and it works very well. On my Z, running 1600x900 on a 13" screen with 125% feels like my old Z's 1366x768 resolution, easy to read. I've gone back to 100% and it's still easy to read, but i don't have problem with my vision.

Bluray is another huge plus over the Asus.

I don't think you can go wrong with either really, just need to know where your prorities lie.

slightly thin and lighter w/great battery life ---> Asus

better panel, better gpu/cpu, bluray -----> Sony

the speakers on my GF's UL30VT destroy those on my Z, but i believe the ones on the CW are decent. Go get a hands on at Best Buy, the have them there.

 

U30JC is a better choice if smaller size and longer battery life are higher in your list of priorities. I bought a CW27FX because I wanted to upgrade from my Dell XPSGen2 with a smaller/lighter NB but I also wanted a decent midrange CPU and GPU and I wanted it to double as a BD player. Battery life depends on what you're doing and your power and screen brightness settings. Based on my personal experience, it could last as short as 2 1/2 hours or as long as 4 hours. I have also bought a 9-cell BPL13 for 99.95 (open box). Using custom power and brightness settings, I have gotten it to last as long as 6 1/2 hours with time to spare while web browsing. I have also upgraded the HD to SSD (128GB - ADATA S596 $299.00) which improved the PCMark score to over 10K and boot up time to less than 30 seconds (to mention a few). The default max volume for the speakers is pretty low. But there is a way to make it much louder by changing settings deep in the sound settings menus. It still wouldn't give you thumping bass but it will be as loud as an average NB (For comparison, I also have/had a Latitude C610, XPSGen2, Inspiron 6000, Latitude D810, Acer Aspire 5672, Toshiba L505, Acer Aspire One, CTL Classmate NL1 tablet.) The LED backlit screen is really bright and sharp but the optimal vertical viewing angle is very limited. The VRAM for the NVidia 330M is the faster GDDR3 type unlike many other 330Ms that use slower DDR3. Default 3DMark06 score is okay for a midrange (64XX range) GPU. With some overclocking, I have managed 76XX but I've heard that others have gotten over 8K with more aggressive settings and driver tweaks. Crysis is somewhat playable at native resolution high settings but with no AA. In my personal experience, there is no "battery drain" issue. However, I have experienced the "inaccurate battery gauge" issue but it doesn't seem to affect the actual battery life. The I5-520m "turbo boosts" to 2.66Ghz dual core mode or 2.9Ghz single core mode. HD vid transcoding is good (for an NB but still slower than my C2Q9650 desktop). Some apps (like DVDFab) use both CPU turbo boost and NVidia CUDA to accelerate transcoding. My only regret so far was color availability. I've picked a black one because I didn't want it to be flashy. However, the shiny black finish makes fingerprints stand out. I wished that it was available in silver or white (from Bestbuy) to make fingerprints less noticeable.

 

anybody know where to buy/availability of a combo usb 3.0/eSATA expresscard 34 for our Sony CW?

 

I received mine today. The viewing angle isn't great, but better then my 13" Dell m1330. The higher resolution is really nice though. Colors, brightness, contrast need some tweaking as the screen seems a bit washed out out of the box. Unfortunately mine came with one dead pixel (out of a cluster of red, green, blue the two former are blacked out) & while it's near the center it's only about 1.625" from the right. Dunno if I want to mess with trying an exchange since it's within manufacturer tolerances & there is a chance a replacement may be worse.

It feels pretty solid despite all the plastic. Can hold with one hand by any side or corner of the lower part without much hint of flex. The lid also doesn't have much flex & seems well isolated from the LCD since pressing on it didn't produce any ripple effect. Of course the glossy finish really shows the grease. Could probably skin it to negate this.

Got the extended battery too which adds about an half inch to the height in back. The laptop weighs about 2422g with it versus 2281g with the standard battery. That's less then 5 & a half pounds with the 9 cell.

 

Great info. The only things I hate with high resolutions is that even with increasing the DPI, that doesn't take care of many app UIs. Picasa and FlipShare show up very tiny on high res. 1600x900 is def a plus to me.

Bluray is nice to have but to be honest, I would never use it. I barely even use CD/DVD. I would be fine with a External DVD for installation purposes. The idea of converting it a HDD bay is interesting, but I don't think I've seen any mentions about conversions that looked really good.

Battery life is a huge plus for me, but I'd still want decent power because I'm hoping to replace a desktop with it. I got a Vaio FW series 16.4" i7 model from Newegg that was going to be my new computer but I received with 2 known Vaio issues and sent it back. I'm kind of glad too because the Battery Life was non-existent on this one: barely 1.5 hours.

That's too bad there's not much out there that has the i5 or i7 dual core with switchable graphics and looks decent. It's either one or the other. U30JC is the first I've seen that comes close.

 

That sucks about the dead pixel. I personally would get it replaced because if you don't do it now, you'll have to do it later, unless you don't care. Resale value will likely go down. I remember when I sold an Alienware I had a few years ago, many people asked "any dead pixels?"

Sounds pretty solid. The price of the extended battery almost puts the Vaio in the Macbook Pro 2.6 range. Newegg has these at $1120 + shipping. If I buy an extended battery if will the total cost closer to $1300 or so. For that much, I would probably just grab the MBP 13".

 

Got my replacement from Tigerdirect today & the screen on this one has no dead/hot pixels. Now I just hope my Bing Cashback is still valid.