Sony Vaio Z2: Everything is Peripheral
by Dustin Sklavos on February 13, 2012 12:55 AM ESTGaming Performance
I've gone ahead and run whatever benchmarks I could on Intel's IGP, but understand that since we recently refreshed our mobile benchmark suite, these charts are going to seem pretty spare. To make things worse, Intel's HD graphics drivers still leave something to be desired in the way of compatibility, as some of our tests just plain wouldn't run on them. Likewise, the AMD Radeon HD 6650M in the Sony VAIO Z2's dock had issues with running our DiRT 3 test: if you tried to run the game in full screen, the system would lock up, and if you left it running windowed you'd get roughly the same performance as if you were just running it on the IGP.
While Intel's HD 3000 IGP was fine for our last set of benchmarks, our current suite is almost exclusively DirectX 11 populated and far more stressful to boot. In certain situations you can also see the HD 6650M clearly isn't up to snuff; even at our lowest benchmark settings in Battlefield 3, the GPU seemed hamstrung by the PCIe x4 bandwidth afforded by the Power Media Dock. Meanwhile, DiRT 3 sees no improvement by switching to the 6650M, undoubtedly due to driver issues.
Bottom line, at our mainstream settings the VAIO Z2's HD 6650M is utterly overwhelmed. 900p was already going to be a hair too much for a 128-bit DDR3 memory bus, and the results confirm it. The GTX 560M grossly outmatches the Radeon (and it ought to), but remember that the G74SX is a 17" desktop replacement and not an ultraportable. It's an unfair comparison, but it's the only one we have at present.
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bjornb - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
I've owned the Z2 for about 6 months now (so I am biased ;) ). I didnt realize the hinge design was a problem before reading this review :). I have never experienced any problems with the computer sliding about during use or finding the sweet spot for screen angle. The incline is not that dramatic.I agree that the keyboard is not perfect (it was better on the previous Z) with the shallow travel, but in my opinion it is not bad and it didnt take long to get used to.
Regarding graphics performance it is at least partially a driver problem. Sony is unfortunately poor at releasing updated drivers (I have sent a complaint/request about this to Sony Norway), but there are community drivers that work well. I'm using the AMD 11.12 drivers from here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/636724-univer...
It actually makes BF3 playable on the laptop. It is also possible to overclock the GPU and control the GPU fan using Sapphire Trixx (I understand that you dont review a unit with community drivers and overclocked GPU, but the information may be useful for other potential owners).
Regarding fan noise and temps it is noisy when playing games at full cpu load and using the Intel IGP, but I dont find it particularly noisier than other laptops at load I use (HP 8440p at work, Alienware m15x etc). During normal use (web browsing, watching HD videos etc) it is very quiet. One can also select thermal profiles in Vaio Control Center (silent/balanced/performance).
I did a quick test yesterday regarding CPU temp: Playing two h.264 HD videos simultaneously and used throttlestop to monitor and TS bench to genereate 4 threads of cpu load. The max temp I saw during the test for several minutes was 80 deg C (balanced thermal profile, and throttlestop reported the CPU speed as 3.2GHz for both cores).
Regarding SATA speeds the Z2 is supplied with SATA 6GBs drives in some markets and/or as a CTO option, more information:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/607410-sony-v...
jcmm33 - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
I like you have owned one of these since launch. I see a fair few comments about the keyboard but for me it doesn't take long for one to get used to it.With regard to fan noise i don't play games on the device so i never really hear it at all.
Trackpad could be better, but once again its not a nightmare.
The performance of the machine however is excellent. The boot time of approx 10 secs is awesome, display is excellent and its good to have network connectors on the device not just having to rely on wifi or buying a dongle (e.g. Macbook Air) to get a wired connection going.
DesktopMan - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
"The AMD Radeon HD 6650M inside the dock is limited to a PCI Express 2.1 x4 link instead of x8 or x16, and the performance hit is a noticeable one"Source on this statement? It's been shown many times that graphic cards really aren't very bandwidth starved at 4x 2.0 and above. Taking a quick look at the 5870 we see the following: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI...
thebeastie - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
Why do they continue to ran the SSDs in Raid 0 since you can't get TRIM?Are they just trying to suck in over paid clueless CIOs or something?
irev210 - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
They use garbage collection instead.Not really sure what's wrong with RAID-0 if you have proper garbage collection.
irev210 - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
According to Crystaldiskmark, the Sony Z I tested (64x2 in raid 0) showed over 850MB/sec read speeds, which clearly shows that the Z does run in 6Gbps mode (SATA-3).Sort of interesting that I email them this info and they don't even update/check.
Fran - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
Dear friends, sell my Vaio Z21-2011 purchased in August-2011, if there is someone interested can visit the link indicated below;
http://www.ebay.es/itm/SONY-Vaio-Z21-Ultrabook-VPC...
Greetings!
Fran - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
Hi all! I lowered the price to -300 €.
http://www.ebay.es/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&a...
Regards.