Review: A Tweakers Look at the S460 (very detailed)

I just bought my S460 a few days ago and, unlike most, I must say I am very fond of It.

Let me say this before I go any further, I buy systems on potential. What seems not so greatest, maybe just a Diamond in the ruff, and it takes someone who has owned a few machines and seen his share of blue screen of deaths to make it hum, the S460 is the perfect example.

Build Quality:
Starting here, The first part of a good unit is how well it is made, you can have the fastest parts in the world placed inside a unit that is made from the cheapest materials (and a poor design), all that means is that the OEM, cut where it counts to ensure that the unit has the big numbers. Units like that don’t last long, and do not give the same pleasure of use that comes from a unit that is designed well.
Apple makes many a sale on this mentality.

Here the S460 shines. Built sturdy, slim and sleek, its light 4.2lbs does not make it feel like it will crack under the pressure of use, quiet the opposite, The magnesium S feels like it would outlast even the legendary Thinkpad (and yes I own a Thinkpad). The small covers over the ports are made of neoprene (or at least I am told they are) which is a durable material, that should stand the test of time.

I really don’t have much to say about how it looks, well not much more then, “its amazing,” better looking then any other unit I have ever seen or used, the S is streamlined and uncluttered, it makes me want to use it. If you have not seen one in real life, (in a environment outside of a store, or pictures) you are missing its shear elegance.

Screen:
Nothing but good thing to say here as well, my screen is evenly lit, bright, vibrant, and very easy to look at, even at the lowest setting. Colors don’t look at all faded out, or washed, blacks are rich and deep.

NOTE: This is my second unit, the first one I had to return because of the “color bleeding” at the edges, the guy at CompUSA, just exchanged the unit, not problems.

Sound:
One of the biggest differences that sets the S460 in a totally different league then any of its predecessors (pre Sonoma ) is the Intel HD sound, having at a minimum of 24bit/192KHz and EAX 2.0 support, it brings something that laptop audio is not used to, decent (dare I say good) sound quality.

The sounds quality in noticeably much better then the AC ‘97 in most the other laptops I have owned. (using the latest Realtek Drivers). It has a deep strong base, and very good fidelity, for a laptop anyway.

I must worn all readers that the speaker on the S are horrendous, and I really recommend a set of headphones for enjoyment .

Video:
This is a touchy subject. with the new S laptops, by default the S demonstrates very weak marks when it comes to 3Dmark, but it is not the Geforce 6 6200 fault, which has seen much hatred because of it seemingly poor showing,.

Sony has done anything and everything to beat all the performance out of the poor card. Clocked in at 100/333Mhz. The card is horribly underclocked. Also, to add insult to injury, the Sony drivers default Powermizer to “max power savings” even when plugged in, and rest the setting on every reboot. Furhermore the drivers are generally very poorly configured, causing problems in many games and benchmarks. With the latest Forceware, at 395/666Mhz, I am proud to say that my S scored a 3013 on 3dmark03, with not errors.

CPU/Heat/Fan/Power Management
The Sonoma brings about a 10% performance boast , and about a 30% increase in power consumption, needless to say the S, which was designed for the much cooler Dothan, gets hot, but only down the right side, and the default Sony settings do nothing to help the situation. Lowering the fan speed setting in the control panel only worsens the situation by turning on a poorly implemented, ODCM (On Demand Clock Modulation) Governor, which does nothing more then lower throttling response times, and drops the CPU down as low as 218Mhz, making the S a hot, slow, Laptop with a loud fan.

But all is not hopeless, with RM Clock, some undervolting (The Sonoma has lots of room), properly configured FID/VID management, and a sane ODCM Governor, the heat in the S is noticeably less (5 C), and the fan is on far less, and when it is on, is much quieter.

Furthermore, RMClock allows the user to put the S into deeper states of sleep, lengthening the battery life when in standby/sleep.

Also it should be noted that the right wrist area of the S gets warm, but no more then the left wrist area on the Apple iBook 12’

Drives:
The S460 come with the very latest in hard drive technology, a 5400rpm 80GB SATA drive, its snappy and quite, I can’t hear, but do notice the performance boost over the 4200rpm drives that I have in my other laptops. The only drawback I see is that the drive gets very hot hovering between 49-56C, often hotter them my CPU.

Continuing the trend in brand new drive technology, the S460 comes with a 4x multi format dual layer DVD burner, which allows for up to 8.4GB a DL DVD.

The unit includes a Memory Stick Pro Reader, which is nice. I Only use SD, but I now have a reason to switch..

Battery Life:
The standard Sony battery is a bit wobbly and does not fit as snug as I would like, but it is nothing to worry about as far as I am concerned.

I test the total battery up time to be 3:45.

Testing condition:
fully drain new battery, then spend 6hr charging it.

all preventative mechanisms were off, so the system turned off when the battery dies.

On Demand Clock Modulation was off, SpeedStep was on, the CPU was locked at [email protected].

The DVD-/+RW Drive was turned off.

The screen was at its dimmest setting.

the wireless was on the entire time.

Workload:
Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Gaim, Firefox, and IE, as well as all the stuff that Sony has running in the background.

idling temp: 49-52 C
100% load @ 800MHz temp: 54 C



Final thoughts/Notes: The S460 is am amazing laptop packages, its just hard to notice because the way Sony has it setup. It offers almost all the latest technology (Xbrite, DX9c, HD sound, SATA, DDR2, DL DVD, Sonoma) in the smallest possible packages, and despite a few things, does it with style, I could not be happier.

I must urge everyone who is considering purchasing the S460 to take the time to reload the OS and Drivers as the setup that Sony leave a very bad tastes in the mouth, and stifles an otherwise amazing package.

On last Note, the S does not come with a paper manual or Recovery Discs, it has a recovery partition, which you can make recovery media from, as well as a 200 PDF Manual, I found this a little cheep on Sony’s part, considering the retail price of the S series of laptops.

 

Well put! that was a good read

 

Thanks for the great inputs! I do have a few questions...

I can't get the nVidia Forceware drivers to install. I get a message saying something like the drivers cannot find the correct hardware in my system. I did disable antivirus and uninstalled the nVidia drivers I had been using. How did you do it? Does Forceware show your current video clock speeds and let you change it, or did you use something else (and what is "Powermizer")?

I've been experimenting with Centrino Hardware Control and see you used RMClock. Do you like it better? Are you setting the fan speed using RMClock (fan speed control does not work with CHC)? Please let me know the values you are using for RMClock, and which boxes need to be checked. One thing I like about CHC is that it shows the CPU and drive temperatures. RMClock doesn't seem to do that. Which program are you using?

Also, one thing I don't like is the vertical scrolling using the right side of the touch pad is jumpy. Do you see a setting to fix that, or should I try another driver?

Thanks for any inputs...

 

When I try to use the latest Geforce drivers from Nividias website I get the same error. I am stuck using only the Sony Nvidia Drivers from their website that is like 3 months old already!

All help is appreciated!

Thanks,
Hayden

 

There are three ways around the forceware problem, when you that error message, just say okay, and then going into properties for the card update the drivers, go into the new created nvidia folder, and pick the 6200 tc drivers

YoU call also go to www.laptopvideo2go.com, they modify the inf for laptops.

Or you can try a tweaked driver like the omegas or xtreme G drivers.

 

Did they fix the noise on the fan from the S series of earlier days? The performance, from what I have exp, has degraded greatly over a couple of months. I'm on my third sony, just can't seem to let go. They all crashed out on me, tech support sucks for sony as well.

 

OK, thanks for posting here. I'm not a novice, but still I'm having trouble following what you suggest. I tried updating from the nvidia folder. Didn't work for me. The link to laptopvideo2go wasn't working most of the day, but now it works, but I still don't see what to do. I can find omega and xtreme G, but can you be more specific?

And I'm not even asking again about RMclock and fan speed adjustment yet (you didn't respond to my post). If you are here to help, please give some details. Your response was very short and vague. I'd appreciate if you can help out. Why else did you post here?

 

Let me start off by saying that i did not *fix* the fan noise problem, I just made it less of a problem, by being more agressive with my rmclock settings.

As for the old sony S laptops, you can do what I am about to list, but I am unaware, f the older S laptops support ODCM.

For rmclock a set my lower (6x) to a voltage of .716v (.700v on battery) and the upper end (13x iin my case) to a voltage of 1.068V, but that does not mean the number I used will work for you, every cpu is different.

Also I set my RMClock ODCM to 35-100% (I turn this off in battery mode)

For bettery sleep, in the last tab of RMClock the are alot of setting that allow you to do things like enter S4 when a call to S3 is made.


In any of the following cases make sure to uninstall the current drivers, and use a driver cleaner.

To use the standard forceware drivers, just install them, let the error happen, then go into my computer, properties, your videocard, click update drivers, navagate to the C:/nvidia folder, select the INF file and pick the 6200 TC

The other two methods just modify the drivers that nivdia puts out, for laptopvideo2go, just grab the latest forceware they have on their site and install it as your were anything else.

Same with the tweaked drivers, Xtreme G offers beta drivers (which I am running) and the lastest forcewares in a stable version

 

Thanks! That's basically what I had been trying to do, but it didn't work quite that way. I kept getting a message that I already had the latest drivers and it would let me install anything else. Then, I tried it another way and finally got the Forceware drivers installed. Do you know what performance settings I will get with the Forceware drivers instead of the standard Sony nVidia drivers?

For those of you who want more detailed instructions to install nVidia Forceware drivers, here it is:

Download version 77.72 nVidia drivers from here. Then run it. It will run part way through, and then you'll get an error message about it not being able to find the correct hardware for the driver. At least the software got installed on your hard drive.

Next, go to the Device Manager; Start, Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager. Double click on Display adapters, then NVIDIA GeForce 6200. Then click on Driver, and Update Driver.

You'll get the hardware update wizard. On the first screen, select "No, not this time". On the next screen, select "Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)". Next, select "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install".

Next, click on "Have Disk". Click on "Browse...", then go to (directions may vary here) My Computer, Local Disk (C: ), NVIDIA, Win2KXP, 77.72. Under "File name:" you should see "nv4_disp". Click "Open", then "OK". You'll then get a list of drivers to select from. Choose "NVIDIA GeForce 6200 TurboCache(TM)". Then click "Next" and "Yes" at the error warning.

That should do it. You do get a new icon in the tool bar for NVIDIA settings, and there are additional settings from what Sony offered. But like I said, I'm not sure how much faster this runs vs. Sony. Hopefully, BlinkSilver could elaborate.

 

I ran 3dMark03 with different conditions and drivers. With the updated Sony supplied nVidia driver (ver. 7.0.8.7, 4/11/05) I got a score of 2391 (I didn't try the original driver that came with the notebook). With the nVidia Forceware driver (ver. 7.7.7.2, 6/15/05) and image settings at high performance, I got 2657 (2593 image setting at high quality), so that's a pretty good improvement and it seems worth the update.

I then downloaded RivaTuner and overclocked from the standard 300/600MHz (3dmark03 will report your video clock settings) to 371/655MHz and got the score up to 3043.

Next, I plan to upgrade the 512MB PC3200 RAM that came with the notebook to 1GB PC4200. I'll then retest to see if memory and 3D video performance improves.

 

Any idea why Crucial specs out
512MB—CT459546 $ 78.99
DDR2 PC2-4200
CL=4
NON-ECC

For the S460, and
512MB—CT435170 $ 83.73
DDR2 PC2-4200
CL=4
NON-ECC
for the S 380?

 

Makes no sense to me. The motherboards should be identical.

 

Great review! I just bought the S430 and the heat is a bit alarming. I downloaded rmclock and found the options a bit overwhelming. Would it possible for you to post the parameters you use? In particular, where the parameters are located that you changed. (I'm a novice on rmclock.)

Thanks!

 

Okay guys I tried to run the RM Clock on my S380 with the same settings yesterday as Blinksilver mentioned and yeah he was right , the S380 could not deal with the voltage tweaking techniques and it used to restart everytime I used to run RM Clock . So please be careful while trying it .

I overclocked the Nvidia Go Geforce 6200 after the installing the latest forceware drivers(thanks renoguy) and I am happy to say that it worked out pretty well for me . I overclocked it at 411/705 and it ran fine believe me and I also ran 3D Mark 03 and I got a score of 3184 with AC power and 684 on battery. I still have to remove all the crappy pre-installed applications and stop a few services , I am sure that will do some good too.

GameXP is a nice thing , really love it . I am gonna try out that as well.

I know RIVA TUNER rules but you can also manually overclock it by using the original clock frequency settings . Thats how I did it .

Try it , I am sure its gonna work for most of you out there.

Good luck.

 

How did you manully overclock without RivaTuner?

One thing I noticed with RivaTuner was if I set the first clock above about 372MHz a yellow shield with an explanation point would appear. I didn't look up what the means, but guessed it ment something about exceeding the thermal limit of the chip. So I didn't go above 372. Just letting you know.

Also, I might have found a problem with the new nVidia drivers, but not certain yet. While watching a DVD with batteries and no overclocking or low voltage, I noticed the video got choppy, then big pixels appeared, then it locked up. With AC power, it seemed OK. I rebooted and tried another DVD viewer, but it still locked up. After rebooting again, I got one of those Microsoft boxes asking if I want to send an error report. I did, and it came back that there was a problem with the nVidia driver. I rolled back to the Sony updated driver, and now everything is again fine. Eventually, I'll reinstall the nVidia driver and see if the problem returns.

 

Dude Dude the whole world knows about Coolbits 2.0 . By manually overclocking it I meant by modifying the actual clock frequency settings which are shown under the Nvidia Geforce G0 6200 tab in the Control panel(Display settings) . And I was able to take the core clock frequency a bit further to 414/705 and everything is running smoothly. You might want to have a look at these pictures :--

Picture 1

Picture 2

If the problem still persists do let me know , I can post some more pics of how I actually got it to work.

Cheers

Anmol

 

The software is installed on my system, however dispite your suggestions for installing the latest driver, I am unable to. I haven't a clue what you're talking about when you say ""File name:" you should see "nv4_disp"". The only way I can locate that driver is by opening up the "77.72" file. Once I find it... then what?? I mean, I have two to choose from and selecting either doesn't place it in the 'browse' box for install. Get what I mean?

 

F.Y.I., everyone... you can get the latest nVidia Go driver, the 77.70, here...
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1115

 

Go to www.4allmemory.com

 

Alright, no matter what I do in either Rivatuner or in the nVidia driver, 3DMark03 and 3DMark05 lock up on me after about 30-45 minutes. I see the same thing in the games I am playing.

What is the best way to get this thing back to the default (non-overclocked) settings???

This is also happening when I turn off overclocking in the Forceware driver. Is there a registry entry where these things are kept. Can't seem to get it out of 300 core and 600 memory.

Thanks

 

The first thing you should do is roll back the newly installed driver. Right click on the desktop, select Properties, the Settings tab, Advanced, then the Monitor tab. Highlight your monitor in the box, then select the Properties button. Another window will pop up with information on your GPU. Select the Driver tab, then Roll Back Driver.

Once that is complete, install the latest driver, but without any overclocking software, firmware or whatever mentioned in the posts above. Lastly, reboot. I hope this helps.

 

Seems to be a bad 1 gig RAM module from OCZ.

Thanks

Any RAM recommendations???

 

To everyone here trying to get better 3dmark scores, i got something planned, if it pans out, you guys will see x600 power in your little S laptops, if not, sorry to lead you guys on.

And yeah sometimes the rmclock setting can be now do you say, tempermental. I have had alot of crashs getting those settings, (the unit i returned before ran at full speed at .988 volts to bad about its screen). Anyway just keep gunning it up and down, eventually you will get the right numbers, it would be very shocking to me is your sonoma did not do 6x at V.7XX .

 

I am not sure I feel comfortable with Rmclock. I had it going a couple of days ago and it worked beautifully--peace and quiet and with no perceived performance hits.

Problem is, the laptop ran really hot in the memory area and on the right side. Any one experience this?

The only problem blaming it completely on Rmclock is that I had just installed two gigs of memory (only $300) by infineon technologies (a German outfit-anybody know of them?). Its likely not the memory as the laptop cooled way down once I turned off Rmclock. But what is the impact, especially in such a small foot print case as the S460, on memory, video and other chips cooling if you decrease the cooling on the cpu?

In other news, I think this is such a great laptop that I have decided not to share and make my wife buy one of her own.

 

it actually is not the ram, it is your hard drive check any HD temp monitor, mines run sometimes up to 56 C, I have no idea why, I have tried contacting sony, they acted like morons.

and if you would like, try centrino hardware control, it does alot fo whar RMclock does

 

Yeah, I like Centrino Hardware Control better. Mainly because it's simplier. RMClock has a lot of options I'm not clear about. Plus, they are supposed to add nVidia overclocking support to CHC soon.

 

Thanks alot--what that means though is that I should forget about adding a 7200 RPM drive, thought with 2 gigs of ram this baby screams. I will try CHC.

 

BlinKSilver and renoguy no dice. With CHC I am getting temperatures of 50 and 49 for the CPU and hard disk, respectively. Yet the bottom of the 460 seems hotter, not cooler. It would make sense though if there is only one fan for the entire machine, that the the heat from other components might predominate if the fan is not running as hard or at all.

Will be keeping an eye on this.

 

49 and 50, i dream of temps like that, I came home from college to fresno, and it is like 105 here, the best i get plugged in is like 52 CPU 51 HD,

 

I know what you mean...here in the D.C. area it hardly ever gets this hot, but the humidity ughh. But staying on topic, I will have to put up with the fan sounds, which is not so bad when web surfing, etc. (I run in Vaio Optimized mode), but the temperatures I am feeling when RMClock or CDC are running bother me.

 

One final question. CAN the hard drive be upgraded to 7200 RPM. I have looked everywhere but cannot confirm whether it is a 1.8 ro 2.5 drive. Even the Specs on the Seagate site do not indicate the size of the drive (unless I am looking in the wrong place). Have to admit its plenty fast now, but I cannot resist that last little tweak.

 

Hi there, I have SONY VGN-S460 laptop. I will tell you what has happened already for 2 years, since I have it.

1. Fan is extremely LOUD for 1.5 years.
2. Black spot on the screen for 1 year already.
When I was choosing from the many Laptops in 2005, I bought this SONY, since I thought "that is a good quality, it's a sony, made in Japan"

Guess what, This sony was x2-3, the price of any other laptop, since it was sony. However it did not have any extra features, than the other laptops.

In reality, I would recommend buying any other laptop....why
1. Less price X2-3
2. Better service
3. The fan is not on and LOUD all the time
4. Nobody will come to and ask you:"Is this your Harley so LOUD, or your very expensive SONY laptop
5. You would not disturb anybody with your EXTREMELY LOUD Sony

If you want to repair it they ask for half of the original price...which is actually the price of any other laptop!!!!!!!

SONY means dead end!