Sony Vaio SR 129E/B - First Impressions/Review

My apologies for the subpar picture quality. I am not a photographer.

My SR has arrived yesterday noon! It was packaged in a rather large box, and inside that box was lots of brown paper and the SR box, in mint condition!

The SR was neatly packaged, but I felt that the SR was inadequately protected. Instead of using styrofoam blocks like Dell, Sony decides to use cardboard. The SR itself was wrapped in styrofoam paper, and the keyboard had a similar styrofoam paper. Accessories includes manual and some papers, an AC adapter, and the battery.


Build Quality
Just glancing at the SR, it's a beauty to look at. The plastic on the bottom and the sides of the SR has a rough feel, and felt pretty durable. The screen is encased in what I think is aluminum or magnesium, as it is cool to the touch.

Opening the SR, you see the full size keyboard in its entirety, and the surprisingly large touchpad. The plastic around the keyboard and the touchpad felt soft and seems durable, with some slight flex on the right side. The DVD drive was underneath the right palmrest, so that's why it flexes slightly.

The power adapter was wiggly when plugged in to the left side of the SR. The plug could get in the way of headphone ports, and that would put the plug in an awkward position, unless you route your cable behind the SR. I recall that the battery was around 17% when I booted up. It completely charged in 3 hours or so. Poking around the battery, it slightly wiggled, but was very secure as the battery rotates in rather push in. The shape of the SR worried me at first, as it looked a bit weird. But, putting it on a glass surface, the SR lay perfectly and didn't scrape the table. The DVD drive however scrapes along the surface whenever you open the drive. For frequent drive users, do be careful when you open the drive.

There are two USB ports, the dialup port and the broadband port covered by a plastic dongle, on the right hand side. On the left hand side, you have the headphone/microphone ports, VGA out, firewire port, and the Expresscard 34 slot. On the front side, concentrated on the left to middle side, you have the wireless switch, a Magicgate Sony memory card reader, and an SD card reader.

After using the SR for a while, I can see no major problems with every day use. The left palmrest however seems to creak when I lay my hand upon it. The edge is curved, but cuts down sharply. It may cut into your wrist depending on how high your laptop is.

The screen on the SR is great. It's comparable to my M1330 with the LED screen, but I think the SR's screen is better. As another reviewer said, the blacks weren't exactly black, but was better than all the other laptops' screens out there. I can't seem to find any backlight bleed, whereas on my M1330 there was minor bleed at the bottom and the top when viewed off angle. On the SR, you can see the same thing, but the effect is reduced. When the LCD is off, you see a green tint, just like the M1330's screen. No grainyness at all, colors are very colorful, and watching HD videos were beautiful.


Keyboard and Mouse
The keyboard was a bit louder than I expected, but it might be because of my typing habits. The keys felt very good, as they all have some texture, and pressing the keys feels like a joy. Pressing the keys, the surface will sit flush with the plastic. Pressing the spacebar was a bit noisy, but was responsive to the very edge. Touch typists will enjoy this keyboard. It took me a while to get used to the Fn + PgUp/PgDn, but I'm already getting used to it. The only gripes I have about it are the arrow keys. I wish they were a bit bigger and more spaced out.

One neat feature on the SR is the Switch mode. It consists of seven buttons, five being configurable buttons, one being the mode switch, and one for settings. You can have multimedia keys on any one of the modes (Play/Pause, Next/FF, Prev/RW, Stop, Mute), LCD switch, and the most interesting of all, Performance/Quiet mode. What this mode does is that it will gradually quiet the fan to the point where it will almost be silent. You can still hear the fan running under silent room conditions, but the difference is noticeable. The hard drive will make the most noise however.

One gripe about this mode is when you press a multmedia key, the icon for it pops up, shrinks, and then activates its function. That results in a one second delay. A major problem with it however is that it does not work with foobar2000 or Media Classic Player, so this feature is slightly useless to me. It works in WMP however. Foobar2000 does not recognize the key when you attempt to configure keys, but I usually use Fn + NumPad keys for my media controls. You can use it however to run whatever applications you want.

The touchpad was surprisingly big, just about the size of the Macbook's touchpad! The touchpad seems to have a grip to it, as I had difficulty sliding my finger around. But with smoothing out, I think it will improve a bit. The buttons were very noisy, and took a bit of force before they clicked. But fortunately, Synaptic's software had options enabling Tap zones, eliminating the need to use the buttons. I'm pretty satisfied with the touchpad, and the fingerprint reader was not as obtrusive as I thought. The touchpad is pretty responsive and doesn't seem to act randomly, unlike several of my other notebooks with Alps. The only problem I saw was that there is a slight delay when using Tap zone buttons.


Heat and Noise
The laptop seems to run relatively cool, as the P8400 is 37/39C just idling while I'm typing out this review. Earlier on the temperatures were cooler by 5C or so, but maybe because I was running on Battery. There are two other temperatures detected by HWMonitor that I am unsure of. They both seem to point to the same thing, maybe the chipset. The hard drive stays relatively cool. Unfortunately I can't seem to get any temperatures from the ATI card, and Rivatuner doesn't seem to work with ATI cards.

The left side of the entire SR was slightly warmer than the right side, which stayed cool. The CPU and the card is most likely on the left side. The heat should not bother you too much, but you can feel the difference when you rest your hands on the keyboard. The heat from the exhaust was quite warm, but I'll say that the fan system on the Sony is very efficient at expelling heat. Compared to my M1330, the SR is miles better.

Upon turning on the laptop for the first time, the only thing that I could hear was the hard drive spinning. The fan was off, but within three minutes or so booting up into Vista, the fan jumps in. The fan was no louder than the hard drive fortunately, but the air was already warm. I decided to sniff the air, and to my surprise the smell was very much like the new car smell. Very nice! The new laptop smell!

What bothered me the most with the M1330 was the CPU whine, the heat, and the fan noise. I'm glad to say that the SR was an improvement on all three aspects. I do not hear any CPU whine when on battery power or AC power. Montevina may not have any whine at all, or maybe the material Sony uses are high quality components. I do hear a buzzing noise on the left side, but I think it's from the fan mechanism. It is inaudible from a distance.


Audio Quality, Gaming Performance, Benchmarks
As for audio quality, I'm happy to say that there is no hiss at all on the SR. The audio stutters plaguing most Nvidia counterparts was not present in the ATI, and I'm quite pleased with that. However, accompanying Vista, I still get the occasional pops whenever I attempt to do something like installing a program or run sixty HD movies at once. The bass and treble quality was actually very good for integrated audio.

I was downloading 3DMark06 at the time I wrote this review, but I decided to install Oblivion in the meantime. The DVD drive was noisy like normal. Sometimes when I'm carrying my SR around with one hand, my hand manages to push into the DVD drive, and it opens up. It's a minor issue, but I would say be careful if you intend on using the drive frequently.

Oblivion installed a bit slower than normal, so I am not sure what's the problem there. But, as soon as I start the game manager, I upped the resolution to 1280 x 800 and turned on HDR, everything else on default (medium). So far, in the very first part of the dungeon, my FPS jumps around from 5 to 20. The FPS does get better as you go along, but what surprised me was the FPS outside. Walking around, I averaged around 20-25 FPS in sparse areas, but as soon as I walk into the Great Forest (lots of trees and grass) my FPS plummets to 5 to 15. I did notice some stutter regardless of high FPS, so I'm unsure why that happens. The effect lessens at smaller resolutions. It has happened with my M1330 too, maybe it's a result of the hypermemory/turbocache the video card uses.

What I'm surprised about is that the fan never kicked up to full speed while running Oblivion! Of course, the left side heated up a bit, but was never uncomfortable. The heat exhaust was very warm, and temperatures from HWMonitor reports 58C max on both CPU cores, my hard drive at 38C, and ACPI at 65C.

Ran 3DMark06, the basic version, nets me a score of 2042 3DMarks. Whether that's good or bad, I'm not sure, but it does beat the 8400M GS by 500 or so points. Temperatures once again never went above 58C, ACPI 65C, and hard drive 38C. I didn't get the traditional YOU GOT ____ POINTS as many reviews have, so I had to copy/paste a screenshot on their website.

Running GPU-Z, my clocks were at 337MHz/396MHz for core/memory. I am not sure if it goes up when playing games, but when on battery power, the clocks are halved.

I only went for testing the battery for one hour, and here is a time chart of my findings:

Code:

Current time - % - Remaining
9:30 100
9:40 95 2:34
9:50 89 2:27
10:00 83 2:20
10:10 78 2:14
10:20 74 2:09
10:30 67 2:01 <--1h elapsed
10:40 63 1:58
10:50 60 1:52
11:00 59 1:49
11:10 50 1:34
11:20 44 1:25
11:20 41 1:20
11:30 39 1:16 <--2h
11:40 39 1:15
11:50 35 1:08
12:00 30 57
12:10 30 59
12:20 28 57
12:30 20 39   <--3h
12:40 14 29
12:50 10 22
1:00 6 15     <-3h 30m

This is using Vaio Battery Optimized, minimum brightness, wifi on. I was mostly doing web surfing and flash video watching, and near the end I was watching some episodes. I reached 3h 30m at 6% before I plugged the AC in.

The battery life doesn't jump around a lot like many other computers does, and whether that's a good thing or not, I am not sure. 30% an hour should net you around three hours.

With the pictures I posted on the very top of the page, I have the 3DMark06 results, HDTune, and HWMonitor temps. With HWMonitor, I left the program running all day and got those values. My ambient room temp is around 79F/26C.

Overall, the SR is a very great machine, one of the best I have ever played with, and if you don't intend to play hardcore games on it, I'm sure that this machine will be perfect for you multimedia folks. Now, time to look at the FW...

 

nice report. I see you like it. And hopefully it will continue to do you some good.

 

Thanks for the extensive review.

Could you post the PC Mark Vantage scores for the harddrive? they will look like this:

 

Nice Job! I've been eying that for a while! I love the keyboard on these new Vaio's, very similar to Apple's keyboards, which I love. I love all the pictures you took. I look forward to more from you!
+rep

 

Very nice, I agree with everything you said because it's the same on my SR. I don't find the mousepad to be too grippy, but I probably use it slightly differently compared to you.

Anyways, I recorded a 3dmark06 of 2044, so it seems that the SR is benching pretty damn well for a 13 inch semi-ultraportable.

 

I'm so jealous of all you guys already having it. Newegg took two days just to process my order, so now I get it on Monday . Oh well, but as to the review, the battery life has me a little worried. I'm hoping that you can downclock everything for just word processing / internet browsing.

 

[rage]Wow my internet totally died on me AGAIN, I HATE MY LOCATION ARUGH.[/rage]

Sorry. Anyway, this is what I tried to post:

Wow, thank you for the very informative review. I'm definitely considering buying this (hopefully Newegg will still have it at the same price in three weeks. @_@)

Was your audio quality based on being plugged into a set of speakers, or was that directly from the onboard speakers of the SR?

 

Serioiusly, two days to process? Mine took a couple of hours to process, and next day shipping for free (i live in a state next to one of the newegg warehouses, so its' really close by).

 

Audio quality was done through my headphones and earphones, Denon D1000 and Denon C700. The onboard speaker quality on the SR was not very good.

 

What were you doing on your machine when you did your battery test?
So actual battery life is 3:00, even on max battery mode?

I need to find someone with an IGP equipped SR to compare results...

 

Yeah, I had suspicion. Alright, thanks for letting me know about the audio quality of the headphone port. Sounds like it will be fine for me.

If I wanted some speaker quality, I'd probably have to go with one of those IdeaPads from Lenovo. xD

 

On battery I was downloading a torrent and just general web browsing. I stopped at the first hour, since I was really sleepy and didn't want to continue the test. I don't know if I will find time to play around with battery life.

Wow PCMark Vantage is huge... O_O

 

So wi-fi was on... okay.

 

I thought you had already run Vantage. If you're doing this for my request, please don't because it's not that important to me.

PS. I think it won't give acces to the detailed results anyway.

 

Is the keyboard quality on the SR and better than the quality on the old CRs? Or are they basically the same keyboard?

 

Also, how is the speaker quality on the SR? Is it loud enough to be able to watch a movie or two with a few people?

 

It seems fine to me, it gets a tad choppy at loud volumes, but I'm sure a bunch of people grouped around the computer will be able to hear fine.

 

if you were going to buy a notebook cooler pad for your SR, what areas on the bottom of the laptop should be focused on for fan position (e.g. location of hdd, cpu, etc.) left? right? top?

if you're gonna buy a cooler, do you know which one u would get for your SR?

 

Left, easily, it's a bit warmer than the right. the heatsink and fan is there, so that's where all the heat is dissapated to.

HOWEVER, it's really not that hot, it's just warm and I could put it on my lap while running 3dmark06 (which means, running at full load) with the AC plugged in WHILE pulling my shorts up (so on bare skin) without feeling uncomfortable.

 

For battery life should I get the SR with the X4500 or the HD3470?

 

If battery life is most important then integrated graphics are the way to go.

Shiny falcon, Thanks for the review and pictures. It was really informative. I keep getting closer and closer to ordering one myself. Just a few things, could you comment on view angles for the screen? And also indoors, about how low can you turn down the brightness before it gets uncomfortable to read?

 

On the SR, the horizontal view angles are amazing (nothing short of it), seriously, it is clear until you can't even see the screen. If your looking from too far up, some of the colors will invert slightly (mostly white turning dark).same with from a viewing angle below.

As for brightness, below half brightness is a tad dark, but still very readable.

 

Thanks Ed. Good to hear especially the horizontal view angles

 

Thanks for sharing @ShinyFalcon!

 

So, as for this Newegg deal, what are your thoughts?...

I asked part of this in another thread, but...

Do you see this as a model that is going to sell out at Newegg, and be more money in a month or not?

Or, do you see this being available for some time at this type of pricing?

I was hoping to wait and actually see the Z (I saw the SR yesterday and liked it a lot) and wondered also if Newegg will have a similar deal on the Z. Of course, it would be more money with any configuration, since its price starts at $400 more.

 

ShinyFalcon, congrats on the purchase. Great pictures & a nice mini-review.

 

Ed or ShinyFalcon, another small request: could you pick up your SR with one hand at the corner (where the palm rests are) and lift it and tell me if theres any flex or if the case sags under its own weight? Thanks

 

Glad hearing you got your machine, and that your experience matched others. Waiting for mine also. My CC was also charged a few hours after ordering, so if it takes like a week, there's definitely something wrong.

With what I've seen of Newegg's pricing and how it fluctuates, I wouldn't bet on it staying this cheap, or even staying in stock, especially when SonyStyle's shipments are around the corner. It's already over $100 cheaper than the base SonyStyle one, and factoring in the HD3470 and applicable tax, The dfiference was just crazy high.

 

Nope, no flex whatsoever from my SR, it seems to be a very sturdy laptop besides the razor thin screen (which is a little flexible).

 

There is a little flex, but you should have felt the display on the TX. It was one step away from a roll up display.

 

Are you talking about screen flex on the SR? Or the case flex itself (what the guy said, lifting it up from one palmrest).

 

I was talking about the display flex. There isn't any flex in the case itself..very sturdy. It was mentioned elsewhere that the case bottom and sides are plastic on the SR. That is incorrect. The case bottom is magnesium. The covers over the HDD, RAM, and the sides are a rigid plastic...feels like CRP (carbon reinforced plastic).

 

Okay, just making sure, since the case doesn't flex for me, but the display does. I read in a magazine stand of a PC world a couple months ago that said a toshiba ultra portable had a super flexible screen, so much that it like freaked them out, I'm glad I don't have that.

 

I saw a SR demo unit in a local Sony Style shop, flipped it over and saw 2 plastic cover areas with screws. My guess was one is for the RAM and the other is for the HDD. If this is correct, it is definitely a big improvement coming from SZ. My question: is it possible to use SSD on SR? Anyone knows?

 

Sure. Common 2.5" SATA SSDs will work.

 

Hey,
does the SR come with Vista SP1 preinstalled?

 

Yes it does.

 

So its been a couple days, have any issues with the new montevina platform popped up?

 

Couple of noob questions:

1. Does the SR have a 16:9 screen?
2. What colour options are available?

 

1. No.
2. Black Silver Pink. If you order from sonystyle you also get the option of glossy silver or glossy pink.

 

No, unlike the Z and FW, the SR screen is 16:10.

 

Well, my SR finally came this morning. First impressions--LOVE the hardware, not sure about the software. This is my first experience with Vista, and it's not a very fun one. Plus, the notebook came with several unwanted applications.

So, I really want to install a copy of XP Professional, but I have a few questions. First, where, if anywhere, can I find drivers for XP? Do I need XP drivers for my laptop to work properly? If I install XP, then can't get some things working, is there any going back to Vista? I've already made a backup DVD, but I don't even know how to use it! Thanks in advance.

 

Congrats ccutlip on getting your SR. What are your spec's and where'd you order from?

 

Sony Support and Google are your best bet for finding XP drivers. I believe there are a couple of SR that will be released with XP pre-installed, so there will be XP drivers around for download soon. Here is the link to Sony Support here in US:
http://esupport.sony.com/perl/select-system.pl?PRODTYPE=1,24,26,66,9,70,5,72

You will need XP drivers, and chances are some functionality will be lost when you switch to XP. To switch back to Vista, just pop the DVD back in and boot from optical drive. The auto-run will walk you through the restoration process.

 

Drivers may be uploaded on the sony site. just check Sony.com. If not, you're going to have to search drivers on your own. For example the ati hd3470 will not be hard to find using google.

For doing a clean install of Vista you'll need a copy of Vista SP1 (ms site or trackers), you can fill in the serial on the bottom of your SR.

 

I know a few people have listed all 4 colour options, however, I note you're from the UK and from what I can see only the silver option is listed for the 2 UK configurations.

I'm not sure why the UK (and Europe?) only has 1 colour option. I wonder if/when others will become available?...unless I'm mistaken...I did ask in the local Sony centre who only had silver ones on their database (although they were pretty clueless).

 

I got it from Newegg for $1270 shipped

And BTW thanks for the links to the drivers page--looks like I'll have to wait a bit before installing XP, but thankfully after uninstalling OneCare and some of the other applications, my experience is slightly less annoying.

 

Not that I doubt you but my experiment using SSD on SZ still left me with some bitter taste. That was before the BIOS hack was found.

 

One of the "gotchas" to VAIO's is that SONY is generally very weak in providing new drivers for their products.

I got my wife an inexpensive NR last year that came with VISTA Home Premium.
I wanted to put Ultimate on it, and I had to figure it out myself, and finally got lucky. You would think that VISTA Home drivers would work on Ultimate, well some of them did not.

SONY will only provide drivers for the OS's that ship with the product, and if a new version of Windows comes out in the next 2 years, don't hold your breath waiting for drivers, they won't happen.

Glad you like your SR!

 

Well congrats to Sony, they got my $$ and completely switched my opinion of them. I was actually checking out OTHER brands at a bestbuy when I spotted the FW. Nice I thought, but oh.. it's a Sony, bet it costs 2k and is massively underpowered. Checks price tag. Only 1k? For a new platform that's reasonably powerful? Is this really a Sony? Hmmm... well I don't really want a laptop this big though, let's see what else Sony has.

And then I found the SR. It's a m1330 without the problems! Exactly what I'd been looking for. Having owned Dell's and HP's in the past, I'm sick and tired of heat issues, and now that Sony pulled their head out of you-know-where, and price their systems reasonably. They've got a new customer Just got my SR and love it!

Dan