New viao owner few questions sz420n

Hey all,

I just bought my first Vaio, I do like it howerver, I'm having some burning questions in my head.

First it has a 7400 GO with 256 MB vid mem however it seems to be much slower then my dell XPS1210 in bench marks. Dell has the same specs except it has a core 2 duo with a 7400 as well and only 1 gig of ram. The XPS scores arpox 13000 marks in 3dmark 2001 while the vaio is aprox 9800 marks.

I don't get it because the Vaio has a T7200 2GHZ while the dell has a core 2 duo @ 1.66 GHZ.

Now the only diffrence I can attribute to the loss is the fact that mobile processor must be slower then the non mobile one. Also I 'm thinking that the fact the the XPS is on XP helps it a bit but how much I dont know. (vaio on vista) I also noticed that the ram was clocked lower in riva tuner 700MHZ on the 7400go vs 900 on the Dell.

Now after looking it up i saw that they both have DDR3 and I figured that sony underclocked the drive however, it doesn't look like it's the case as when I tried to set the vaio to 900 it crashed and burned horribly.

Last question is when I have it in max battery mode I seem to hear the CPU fan on all the time, albit slower then max speed it's always on while the dell only comes on when the CPU hits a specific temp which I think is a better way of doing it. Can I change this at all to act more like the dell?


Thanks,

 

u can ditch sz and use your dell

 

Vista is 99% the blame for it, well more like nVidia as well cause their driver isn't very good with Vista at the moment. Mine is very slow as well, at some point my on-board Intel GMA945 graphics chip is faster than my 7400GO such as playing 720p HD QuickTime trailers. It sucks. Still waiting for better driver then it should be fast again.

 

i just installed xp as a dual boot

 

well yes it is vista scored 14000 on base settings no overclock...

 

No question is why can't i get the DDR ram on the video card to 900 mhz like the dell.... did they use shiat ram on the Vaio's 7400?

 

Also, from what I recall, unfortunately we're a little cheated by Sony when it comes to the SZ series and the 7400 - it has only 64MB dedicated memory while the rest is shared with the RAM. Most other laptops using this chipset (most likely your Dell included) have way more dedicated memory. The dedicated memory probably has an impact on the benchmarking, especially when we only have 64MB!