Sony 2012 VAIO S13.3 Review

Hi there everyone! I am finally done with my video review of my vaio S13.3

You can see it here:

VAIO S 13.3 2012 review - YouTube

I hope it gives you a good idea how it looks and feels because I know the other video reviews were not made with a good camera and with good video quality...


here are my specs:

i7-3520M 2.9Ghz ivy bridge dual core
nVidia GT640M LE
2xRaid 0 Sony SSD
2x4gb RAM 1333mhz
1600x900 LCD


Written Review

Design

Looks:

I must say that I love the design of the vaio s 2012 line. It is clean, simple, well constructed and very professional. The slot load drive is not necessary for me but it is nice to have it sometimes. The big plus is that it does not take that much space and its only a thin line on the left side of the laptop.

The GunMetal Finish is what makes me love the design though, it is really cool and the brush is what makes it feel solid and polished.




Size:

I had thin laptop last year (acer 3820tg), and i thought it would be hard to beat... But I was wrong, the desing is MUCH better, it is lighter and even more thin and powerful...

0.9 inch is really a great height, as much as 3.5 pounds is superb for traveling with a laptop to school everyday


Ergonomics

Here is where this laptop stands out the most for me. The keyboard feels very solid and is really responsive. It does not bend at all when y type and the keys feel good. The backlight is a welcom addition and it is well used by the vaio software to save battery.

The Touchpad is excellent! it reacts really well to any two finger swipes, three finger swipes, side scrolling, zooming, etc...

It is well made so you can click anywhere easily with two fingers for right click, or three...

It is definitely a mac quality level touchpad! but for windows



For the speakers... yeah its loud enough for a room full of noise, but it's not very good in term of sound quality... Get speakers.

Screen and performance

Now the screen,

Here I must say it is one of the weak point of this laptop.
I love the contrast, the color accuracy and the resolution of the screen, but, it is definitely "grainy". I think it is the matte finish that does this to screens, but where it lacks in uniformity of colors because of grainyness, it catches up in the ability to watch videos and read things outside under direct sunlight!

in Brief:

+ Great resolution
+ Great color accuracy
+ Nice viewing angles for TN panel

- pixel jumping on right side of screen... but only when you move things... like the top of an explorer window (you cant see it otherwise when playing video, or watching photos, or scrolling website)

- graininess




Performance

Seriously, the performance is top notch. The i7-3520M is a screamer, plenty fast for video encoding and other things like that with the help of CUDA.

GT640M LE, not even overclocked is fast enough for me. It is a lot faster than my older hd6550m, and even more efficient.

The raid 0 ssd's are epic. 900mb reads and writes is just stupid.
Love it

8gb ram is very good also


Conclusion

Alright, so all in all, it IS the very best ultraportable gaming machine ever made. Very good battery life, superb design and top performance.

VERY RECOMMENDED for travelers and students!




thank you for reading my review

 

Thank you for the review! The gun metal looks nice on the video. Looking forward to seeing photos of it.

 

thank you

as you can see, the images are now uploaded for your pleasure

 

I am curious about how the raid 0 ssd's are mounted. Is it like with the Z, two 2.5" ssd's without their casing?

 

I never opened my S13 and dont want to, but I know it is only one 2.5" "box" with two 1.25" proprietary sony SSD's on a raid controller.

 

Fair enough. Thanks. Enjoy the laptop. 900mb/s sounds crazy.
What size SSD did you get?

 

IMO, Gunmetal looks awesome.
Premium lines have golden VAIO logo on lid and palm rest.
Here is more photos for you.

 

i got 256gb

 

what about heat and fan noise ??

 

How about the screen quality ? Does it suck like the previous model ?

 

I would say heat is REALLY well controlled by the laptop. While watching movies on youtube on "stamina" the laptop does not get hot at all.

But if you play a game, the fan really kicks in and it is kinda noisy. Not a deal breaker though.

The resolution is really good if you need to multitask and to watch videos. I really like the colors of the display. But there is some pixel jump on the right side and the anti-glare coating does make the screen kind of "grainy" to look at. (i prefer glossy glass screens)

 

How is the battery life for general use?

 

going by the maple tree in the background and your accent, i'm gonna guess you're quebecois and bought this in canada. Where did you get it and what did it go for?

 

The battery Life is really excellent. I would say 5h30 or 6h00 with low brightness on stamina...

on speed i would say 3hours



and yes I am Quebecois. I bought it customized on the sony.ca store

and it cost me 2000$ with 100$ coupon

 

2 grand is a lot, still you do have sata 3 speeds and of course you went for the i7.

I don't agree 100% with the touchpad, while great and massive in size, it does not always respond to my touch and is sometimes jerky in the movements. Still better than my FW touchpad. I did not know about the 2/3 finger touch as right click btw, nice.

The screen is also something where at this price point could be improved but I've come to terms with it since the rest of the laptop outweighs the screen issue for me.

I installed my SSD myself, was a hassle but eventually I got the sucker in and reinstalled windows, first from dvd but then went for the recovery discs since I apparently burned the wrong iso of win 7. I love the fast boot time and ultra fast rapid wake that win 7 has, coming from vista, win 7 is a whole other level. checking out your video of your boot, the speed is much faster than mine for sure, hopefully someone will be able to hack the bios for sata 3 speeds. Still I have under 20 seconds to desktop which is insane.

The size and weight I agree, this is a big plus here, thin, well relatively speaking, it is no ultrabook but when closed and sitting on my table, it feels and looks paper thin. Speakers are ok actually I was expecting horror but they are fine, I really like the position of the audio jack, since I can attach speakers and the cable will be away from the front in the back.

Ss for fan noise, the software does control the fan quite nicely, in gaming it of course turns into a screamer but this because I set it to priority to ventilation. I usually set it to stamina when browsing and I while I can hear the fan now when it is uber quite, normally during the day I can't. Heat wise it gets warm when I play games but normally it remains cool enough. Mind you it was 35 C today and around the same in the past few days so I am well pleased with the heat performance.

One aspect which I thought would have bugged me would be the bezel but in fact it does not and it is fine since when I adjust the screen I don't touch the screen as much as I do on my FW. Also the issue of fingerprints, my black model attracts them like crazy, so I constantly cleaning them off

Great review btw.

 

Thanks for the review, the video was really good quality.

I have a question to current S owners:
How is the fingerprint sensor? My current laptop now is the SR series and the fingerprint sensor is horrible.
It barely reads my fingerprint properly and I noticed a few people have mentioned about the fingerprint feature for the S series.
So I was wondering if they improved it or if it is still hard to use?

Thanks!

 

fingerprint sensor is working great on mine. i use it for windows log in and web pages log-in...so yes its great! and for those who are thinking of sticking first to the stock hdd...im using stock with most of the bloatwares installed and i'm having an average boot time of 40 sec (fastest was 30sec).... though opening programs is another thing

 

Gigabyte U2442 would like to have a word with you ;D

 

There's enough leeway that if you're concentrating it will always work first time, and if you just swipe idly at it, within 2-4 tries.

 

Thank you, I hope that the video can help you guys choose your laptop.

The fingerprint sensor is definitely very good. When you get how you should swipe your finger, it works everytime!

And the Raid0 SSD with 10 seconds bootup is also incredible. Much faster than my M4...

 

Oh I see, thanks everyone for the answers!
I am set on this laptop now and will probably buy it sometime this month.

 

Can you run dual external monitors in an extended desktop configuration using the VGA and HDMI ports?

 

Do not buy it until we can get the right side flickering horror issue with graininess and pixelated screen cleared up. We dunno if this is just a bad batch or it's a perfectly accepted defect.

 

What flickering on the right side I don't have this on mine and there is no graininess either.

 

Really... you won't see any difference between SATA-2 or 3 during normal usage. This was already tested by someone in the dedicated SATA3 thread. He did a clean install (not a recovery !!!) on its own SSD (Samsung 830). That guy is a software developer and is also using VMware images. He didn't feel noticeable difference between those two SATA-settings.
Of course.. if you run a benchmark you will notice

With respect to boot-time:
If you do a clean install (so no recovery) with SSD you easy get boot-time around 10 seconds. This also applies to me.

 

I have 12 second boot time at this moment and with a fresh start from sony, I don't have any chunk software loading so it is fast enough. I have see the video posted in this thread and the boot is faster than mine for sure, noticeable at least in my opinion.

I'm not complaining but I just wish sony would allow sata 3 speeds and not force you to buy their overpriced ssd to have it.