Sony A Series Now on Sony.com/Vaio

Not a bad looking machine.

Some issues though:
Looks like VRAM is shared since they say 32mb-128mb, but don't offer options for picking different cards. Shame on Sony.

Charging $550 to upgrade from 256mb ram to 1gb ram (2 sticks). One stick of 1gb DDR333 costs less on newegg and outpost.

No 7200rpm HD.

No 755 CPU.

Most significant gripe, seemingly shared VRAM. Alienates gamers from purchasing the notebook. Let me know if I'm wrong about this.

 

Dear Air,
I'm gonna have to disagree with some of your points.

My reading of the specs is that the 17" model is equiped with the top of the line ATI 9700 GPU, and I'm not sure why you would want to choose another GPU as this is the best GPU currently on the market for gamers. This comes in a variety of memory configs from 32-128Mb on the chip ie not shared. Thus I believe you are wrong about the integrated/shared vram issue. I expect that this notebook will be very good for gamers.

I do agree with you about the RAM being overpriced, and its a shame that no 755 CPU is offered....yet, but I suspect it will be in the future
Currently there are no 7200 80Gb HDD on the market, and sony is pitching this as a multimedia pc (ie recording tv etc etc), thus I'm guessing they went for space over speed.

I'm not a huge sony fan, but this notebook could change my mind.
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You kind of do have a choice: the ATI 9700 goes with the WUXGA and the ATI 9200 goes with the non-Wide Screen.

But yeah, the price of ram sucks.

I'm thinking about getting this myself, but I want to check out build quality before I put money down on it.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Underpantman

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Air

 

If that's the case it's still a dissapointing amount [V]

 

I think darrow hit it on the head (re lazy cut and past job at sony).
ATI sell the 9700 in a variety of RAM configs. It is up to the manurfacture to decide how much RAM they can afford to meet a price point for their product. Thus although the 9700 does come in 128Mb versions, Sony decided, as darrow pointed out, the A190 will only ship with 64Mb of RAM. Further to that point I can't seem to find anyware on the sony site or on the pdf flyer for the A190 that they say there is 32-128Mb of RAM for the GPU?
Where did you read that?

The other point to Air is that as far as I am aware the the ATI 9XXX series of GPUs are dedicated, and have never "shared" memory with the system RAM. In addition where does it say that the 64Mb is "shared" ? To quote the sony site "Video RAM=64MB" and to quote ATI on the 9700 "MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9700 series is ATI’s eight generation of mobile graphics with integrated on-chip memory delivering true flexibility for numerous mobile form factors, from full size to “thin-and-light”. "

I hope this is enough proof for you that you are wrong and that the sony will be a good if not great gaming machine.
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I hope this link works.
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start;sid=aE4JdAcsQK8JQkeHW1cDf0gg94y1rVzJPVs=?CategoryName=cpu_VAIONotebookComputers_ASeries&Dept=cpu&TemplateName=item%2fsy_item_b&ProductSKU=VGNA190
That's where it says "Video RAM 64MB (up to 128MB, 32MB minimum)". I was interested in the A190 too so just like what darrow did I called sony and they confirmed that the A190 comes with a 64MB. Hope this helps. I think 64mb on a 9700 should decent for most games. I play games on my desktop so I don't care too much.

 

Thanks rtjan for the link,
It worked! and I take my words back. Also think sony should remove it as it seems to be creating confusion out there? Although I still can't find anywhere that says that its shared with system RAM!
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