Sony EE34: Sony Makes Budget AMD Laptops?
by Dustin Sklavos on February 22, 2011 4:43 PM ESTNot Fast, But Fast Enough
Historically we've been pretty underwhelmed with AMD's mobile offerings, barring maybe the Turion II Neo and now Brazos. These aren't bad chips, but if AMD's been struggling to play catch-up on the desktop they've been left miles behind in notebooks where power and heat become ever more important.
With that said, though, the 25W, 2.2GHz Athlon II P340 dual-core processor isn't a particularly bad chip either. Inheriting the K10.5 architecture from its desktop siblings, it at least offers a good bump over older K8-based chips and is capable of handling most of the tasks you're liable to throw at it.
Before we get too far in analyzing these results, it's important to note that our usual x264 benchmark refused to run on the EE34 and would always crash at exactly the same point. This occurred whether on the factory install or on a clean installation of Windows 7, and it's the only time we've ever seen this happen. The EE34 completed all our other tests perfectly fine and was nice and stable in regular use, but it bears mentioning that for the x264 results we did have to simulate the processor using a desktop Athlon II X4 with two cores disabled and the clocks adjusted. I'm confident that these scores are within the ballpark for what you could expect from the Athlon II P340, but they bear mentioning nonetheless.
Comparing against the other AMD processors in the lineup, the P920 is a quad-core chip running at 1.6GHz while the N830 is a tri-core chip running at 2.1GHz. So with that in mind, the tri-core running at 100MHz slower than the P340 in the EE34 seems like it's probably the best compromise, but the P340 doesn't put in an awful showing either. All of the AMD chips are more or less dwarfed by their Intel rivals, but it's not a complete bloodbath. For reference we've included the E-350's scores so you can see what bumping up to even a slower full-sized AMD notebook can get you.
Unfortunately the 3DMark tests bear out just how poorly AMD's 40-shader IGP has aged. The E-350 beats it at every turn and even the utterly anemic GeForce 310M is a substantial improvement. While Llano's CPU performance doesn't promise to be a substantial improvement over what we've seen here (the cores are basically K10.5), the integrated graphics should at least be a big enough boost to make it a very compelling mobile part. Hopefully between Brazos, Llano, and Sandy Bridge, the era of poor integrated graphics can finally come to a close.
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piroroadkill - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
You don't always need to buy cheap junk. Lenovos aren't too bad though.Quick example, my main laptop is a Dell Latitude D800, which still works perfectly now with a new hard disk and 2GB RAM upgrade, and Windows 7, alongside the existing 2GHz Pentium M and Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo (128MB).
That must be 6 years old. It has a nicer screen than anything I could get now (1920x1200).
I don't need to upgrade it unless I wanted to play 1080p video or new games.
Stuka87 - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - link
I too had no clue Sony made a budget laptop period, much less a laptop with an AMD in it. And it actually looks like a pretty nice machine for the price.And it was a nicely written review at that.
roko98 - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - link
"I've been paid to fix those computers. I don't like doing it anymore. There are bargains, and then there's getting what you pay for. When my dad's girlfriend complains because the illegal immigrant she paid a paltry eight bucks an hour to take care of her front yard didn't do a very good job, she sounds dense."Maybe you are right, maybe not. Please keep it for yourself. This comment doesn't fell right for a very professional site like Anand's. If you skip this... good review.
Jumangi - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
Oh noes!!! Here comes the PC police!We all know its supposed to be "undocumented immigrant"...don't want to make the progressives angry...
Nfarce - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
Exactly why does the phrase "illegal immigrant" get liberals so upset? What part of illegal and immigrant in the phrase "illegal immigrant" is not hard to understand? It is what it is whether one is from South America, Europe, or Indofreakingchina. Get over yourselves.7Enigma - Friday, February 25, 2011 - link
I'll be honest, I could care less about PC comments (see the other comments below), but I also agree it just didn't fit in the piece. Seemed to me like an extra paragraph was needed for the article and this fluff was thrown in to pad the page. Not all of us have a great deal of free time and I doubt the target audience of this piece needs/cares about someone complaining about yard work.Stick to the substance, and we'll be happy.
RaistlinZ - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
So basically, they got all the cheapest components they could find and wrapped them around a Blu-Ray player for $600. This thing offers netbook performance for a higher cost. Why put a Blu-Ray with a crappy screen to watch it on?13x7 resolution? 5200 rpm HDD? 10 fps average on games? I don't see a market for this thing. Maybe at $400, but not at $600.
Calabros - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
I prefer budget notebooks, cause if it lost or stole or dropped, I loose $600 not 1.5KHHCosmin - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
nice to see sony making an... ahem... less expensive lappie.first thing is i think people over value the cpu power. laptops are more about mobility: weight, autonomy, durability and less about horse power. don't like much the optical drives. there a lot of ways to carry data besides optical drives: sticks, online, nas etc.
runtime... this is one of the things that plagued amd.... but you see notebooks are not made by amd but by integrators: acer, asus, sony etc. so the runtime is not the cpu runtime but the platform runtime. well the platform is the integrator business. since amd was mostly for cheap builds then the integrators cared very little for making a good platform with good runtime. my point is that we get a laptop with same battery, same cpu, same ram amount, comparable hdd, same igp we will get the same perfromance.... but bingo!... not the same runtime. in fact we may get big differences and this is the case with intel too. my hunch is that the lame runtime under idle - low, video play usage of a laptop is the integrator's fault. and the driver makes also.
so congrats for sony on making a good build and caring about runtime.
the cpu power is enough, the runtime is at last ok as sony cared about it, the price is ok
jabber - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
Indeed. Folks cant get their minds out of the turn of the century CPU power struggle that you always have to have more.As soon as we got dual core CPUs the power struggle came to an end for 80% of users.
The needs of the many have long since been met.
I've been using a 1.3GHz CULV laptop for the past year and its been superb. Never once have I found it wanting. I cant tell the difference performance wise to some of the i3/i5 laptops I've worked on. Its no different in 95% of tasks other than video encoding.
Oh and did I mention that I get nearly 7 hours running time from it?
In fact my 3.5GHz quad-core crossfire box has pretty much been relegated to video encoding.
More power to the low power revolution.