Sony AR/AW Series, still king of the hill?

I have been using my Sony VGN-AR790U since it was first released. I really enjoy the big screen, large HD and fast CPU. And what appears to be a Sony exclusive, a R/W Blu-Ray drive. I watched eagerly at the AW series, thinking that I might pull the trigger on the 'next' laptop in this series.

But as you know, it never came...

So I took a look at the F series at some of the local computer shops (e.g. Fry's and Micro Center). After playing around with the Windows Experience Index, it looks like the 5.1 I get still tops the F series line.

Does anyone have a newer laptop that beats this score?

Anyway looks like I better take good care of this laptop since there doesn't seem to be anything like it out there.

 

My Z gets 6.4.

Keep in mind the scale in windows 7 goes higher than vista (win 7 goes up to 7.9 at least and vista topped out at 5.9).

That said WEI isn't a very good benchmark.

 

And looking at the AR790 specs, while it's a nice machine, most if not all of the F configs absolutely shred it.

You like a big screen...probably best to wait for the EC series?

 

dunno what was wrong with the F you played with but 5.1 is pretty horrible. then again WEI is by no means accurate.

I have an F11 and i get a rating of 6.5

 

WEI has very little to do with real performance. I would suggest to ignore it.

Most current Sony laptops will outperform the AR790U. The main bottleneck of the AR is the 5400rpm hard drive. The T8100 processor is no speed demon either.

 

I won't argue one way or another, but it was available in the short span of time I could play with a demo machine at the store.

Not sure where you got your specs, but my AR-790U shows a T9300 Intel Core2 Duo @ 2.5GHz.

I don't do anything requiring high end graphics, but the adapter shows as:
NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 8600M GT graphics card with 512MB dedicated video RAM.

More information here:
VGN-AR790U/B | VAIO® AR Series Notebook - Premium Model | Sony | SonyStyle USA

Thanks everyone for your input. Glad to hear that F series isn't as bad as I thought and there is hope for a larger screen machine on the horizon...

 

AR is a very nice machine, but probably not too many were sold and thats why sony did not release any new model (after AW).

or maybe they will in a few months?

 

I got the specs from Google. T9300 is better yes. If you buy an F now you can get Core i7-820QM. It's twice as fast as T9300.

In Passmark performance:
Intel Core2 Duo T9300 @ 2.50GHz 1663
Intel Core i7 820QM @ 1.73GHz 3535

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

For the video you can take GT 330M GPU. Twice as fast as 8600, according to Notebookjournal.

In 3dmark06:
8600M 3269
330m 7251

http://www.notebookjournal.de/tests/inspection/notebook-review-sony-vaio-vpc-f11z1e-nkst-1103

 

I heard the AR's screen is very nice.

I think bigger screen with FHD may fit ur need better than F series?

Owning Z690 + intel g2 160gb + P9600
and Z114 + 192gb + i520m
assures me that the cpu difference is not noticeable under what I do with these laptops. However, the graphic card from 9300m gs to 330m is a big jump. However, 8600gt still is a decent graphic card if you r not playing graphic intensive games.

If I were you, since u have a large screen laptop, I wouldn't get another laptop with a large screen.