Sony online special offer

It's been "processor" for quite a long time for Vaio Pro series. Now with Sony dumping vaio , do you think it will change once more, or is it doomed to be the processor "special offer" till they take it down from the site?

I'm asking since I bought (and sold later) a SVP13 with 256GBs SSD once on such special offer. It'd be super lame to order an SVP13 now only to see a special offer on pcie SSD or sheet battery a week later.

Then again, if I wait too long, there may be no SVP to buy at all...

 

I would wait, if it's possible to do so. I'm considering the SVP13 also, and the £70 i7 upgrade doesn't appeal to me much. If they offered a free upgrade from the i3 to i5, though, I'd probably buy it, assuming I can verify that the fan noise issues I've been hearing about aren't commonplace.

 

Don't forget that the difference between i3 and i5 in the haswell U series is next to none. Definitively not worth the high price tag. Both have two physical cores and two virtual ones (regular i5s have 4 physical, but U series i5 have 2...) and both have the same cache size. The only difference is the turbo which you don't want to use anyway because of 50 dB noise the Vaio produces at maximum strain.

I'm honestly very happy they added a "cheaper" i3. The i5 that the Vaio has installed is a joke i5 anyway, it should be called i3 straight away.

I'll probably wait till 10th March, see if the special offer changes, and if not, I'll just buy it as it is... Because it's going away quite soon. If we wait too long, we'll have no Vaio to buy at all.

My config is i3/4GB ram/128 GB PCIe SSD. I think it's the optimal one, honestly, because extra 128 GB of SSD memory is pretty irrelevant (I have a cheap 2TB external drive for storage and it's pretty hard to max out the 128GB via applications already). What I'd love to get for "free" is the sheet battery.

 

Still processor. Seems like this is unlikely to change till Sony pulls Vaio off sale.

 

That's unfortunate. The i3 is a bit on the puny side for me. I should say that the offer is due to end on the 17th, so you may see a new offer then.

 

Don't fall for cheap intel marketing. The i5-4200U is a joke. it should be called i3 in the first place because that's what it is (it's the only i5 of Haswell generation to have two physical cores, like an i3 - all other i5s have 4). The cache is identical between i3 and i5 of the U series, too.

And the offer was due to end on 3rd, then 10th, now 17th - they renew it every week

 

It's not Intel marketing; I've looked at the benchmarks. The i3 seems to be roughly equivalent to the Pentium B970 (!). Also, you are incorrect to say that "it's the only i5 of Haswell generation to have two physical cores, like an i3 - all other i5s have 4". Very many-I believe in fact all-Haswell mobile i5s have two physical cores, e.g. the i5-4200m.

With the i5 configuration, the Vaio Pro 13 costs about the same as the MBP 13. However, its warranty is for a year less, which makes me reticent-as do the stories about fan noise.

 

Well, I guess it depends on the type of work you need to do. I honestly never recall using more than 10-20% of processor power on anything on my Vaio Pro 13 (the one which I sold) which means the 80% goes to waste. Thing is, I never really used it for anything other than word, excel, internet browsing and movies. (yes, in VLC with acceleration on, 1080p movie uses 3-5% of i5's power - waste of money to buy i5 for me).

Keep also in mind that benchmarks are oriented around 100% usage at demanding tasks, like image processing - but at those amounts of demand, the 100%+turbo would make your ears bleed because SVP13 at 100% load emits 50 dB of fan noise, which is a massive no-no to me. This laptop isn't a good idea if you want to do demanding tasks and keep your sanity.

So, if you really need that much power, I'd recommend buying the MBP 13 instead of Vaio to me, i3 is more than I'd ever need and under 10% load Vaio is either completely silent, or barely audible. And i3's performance = i5's performance (actually i3 has better parameters... 1.70 GHz per core rather than i5's 1.60 GHz) until turbo kicks in. But if turbo kicks in, you'll get deaf from the fan noise...

Falling for benchmarks is exactly falling for Intel's marketing - who cares if the processor gets more points at something if you'll never really need to utilize that feature? In the end many people simply pay for power they never use.

 

Of course benchmarks artificially make CPU's perform very intensive tasks, which most people won't be carrying out very often at all. The point is that benchmarks allow you to gain an impression of a CPU's overall performance and to draw comparisons between different CPU's. In this case, the i3 benches poorly (as I said above, about the same as a Pentium B970), and far behind the i5. That's pretty significant even if your usage is just average, I think.

I'm also not entirely convinced you understand Turbo Boost. The CPU is regularly being dynamically "overclocked" in small increments, such that even in scenarios where both cores are active the i5 will likely usually outperform the i3, even though its base clock rate is slightly lower; see under "performance" here, and compare the benchmarks here and here. It isn't 2.3GHz/2.6GHz or nothing, and changes in clock rate occur often.

 

I checked those benchmarks and I honestly don't see a point of ever considering i5 for the kinds of tasks I need the ultrabook for. The benchmarked difference between i.e. rotating huge images (7 seconds for i5, 10 for i3) isn't worth i5's pricetag IMHO and I guarantee that using Word or such, you will not notice a difference between the B970 and even an i7.

As for me not understanding turbo boost - that might be the case, but keep in mind that that "dynamical overclocking" probably causes the processor to rise its TDP as well during those overclocking acts, and this directly contributes to Vaio's already annoying Fan issues. So I'd pick i3 just for that, if it works the way you said. I don't mind extra seconds during image rotating (which I never do), but I do mind that the same faster rotation on i5 overclocks the CPU, increases the temperatures and contributes to making the fan go berserk at some point. Correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: looks like it's the last moment to buy a SVP13. In my country's version of sonyonline, there's no longer a possibility to order SVP13 with:
-128GB SSD SATA
-256GB SSD SATA
-Non-touch screen

so... if you want to buy it, do it now. I'm sure it will be gone by april.
The config I'm interested in (128 GB PCI-e and Touch) is fortunately still there but who knows for how long.

 

Final update - Sony Vaio Pro 13 sale ends on 21 March. If you want it, it's the last chance.

No special offers this time, sadly.