Sony EE34: Sony Makes Budget AMD Laptops?
by Dustin Sklavos on February 22, 2011 4:43 PM ESTBattery Life
When we get to the battery running time we also hit probably the most pleasant surprise about the Sony EE34. We're used to seeing pretty dismal battery life out of most AMD portables, and with the remarkably small battery the EE34 is equipped with (39Wh? Seriously?) the prognosis really only gets worse. So surprise surprise, the EE34 actually doesn't do half bad.
Would you look at that: the 25W Athlon II P340 is actually able to pull nearly four hours of running time while surfing the internet! Not too shabby and a long way from the dismal numbers the other AMD-based notebooks (barring the nimble HP dm1z) pull. It's still not quite enough to bring it up to the running times of the Intel machines, but if you look at the relative battery life you'll see the EE34 doing a pretty stellar job with what it has given that it ships with a battery so small a netbook would be embarassed to be caught with it.
Heat and Noise
Given the integrated graphics and reasonably low wattage processor Sony ships the EE34 with, it should come as no surprise that the notebook actually runs fairly cool and quiet.
These temperatures are actually really good. We're used to seeing AMD mobile chips run hot, but the 61C on the cores is actually frosty even by Intel mobile standards. There may not be much to cool, but what there is, the EE34 seems to do a good job of cooling it.
The surface temperatures of the EE34 are all pretty reasonable, with the hottest point typically being the space above the memory access panel. The cooling system actually seems to be remarkably efficient; when placed under load the fan remains very quiet but pulls a lot more heat away, resulting in parts of the notebook actually running cooler under load than idle. It's strange, but overall the EE34 remains comfortable to use and nicely inobtrusive.
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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.