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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Martin Schou - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
When I browse Sony's Danish website, I find 2 E-model laptops with AMD CPUs displayed: http://www.sony.dk/lang/de/product/vn-e-seriesThey're not hidden away or anything.
I suspect the reason they are hidden on the US website, is that their web designer is on LSD or some other mind altering substance, that makes him think we don't want to know what products they have.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
It's more likely that intel got to him than he is on LSD.HangFire - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
The purpose of this laptop is obvious- to put pressure on Intel and show that Sony can make an AMD laptop if they want to.By opting out of the mobility driver program, Sony has assured it won't sell many, nor are they trying to.
Give it a real keyboard and support it with the AMD's mobility driver program, and I would be interested. As it is, I wouldn't even consider it at half price.
nitrousoxide - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
I've been using a Vaio EA200C for six months, the keyboard is great, almost as good as a desktop mechanical keyboard.The driver is of course the matter of concern here. I'm forced to use the crappy OEM driver provided by Sony, and they simply never update it after releasing the product. The dfriver itself is poorly built, many problems occur with H.264 decoding, Flash acceleration and OpenCL feature does not work properly.
Anybody who intend to buy a laptop should be aware of this: if you are a Stream/OpenCL/CUDA developer, or you really need these features in Adobe's CS5 package or other GPU accelerated softwares, skip Sony and consider other manufacturers who offer official driver.
futurepastnow - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
I just bought a similar machine, an HP G42-303DX ($429 at Best Buy with the Turion II P540). It'll be delivered on Monday; having played with similar machines my only real concern is with the screen quality and battery life.So why not wait for Llano? Because it's been repeatedly delayed and I wanted something now. I figure the performance of AMD's old platform will be "good enough". If it turns out to be a mistake, well, it's a very cheap laptop.
Thanks for the review of something so similar, though. There are a dearth of reviews of AMD's current platform as it seems almost everyone is waiting for Sandy Bridge and Llano notebooks.
futurepastnow - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
Incidentally, does this platform support DDR3-1333? Would faster memory impact the integrated graphics performance?strikeback03 - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
Nice to see a logical keyboard layout. Why does it seem so many laptop makers are allergic to having the arrow keys drop below the rest of the bottom row and instead do wacky things like have the up and down keys half-sized?Otherwise I think this is OK but would make a lot more sense with no Blu-Ray and $100 cheaper
jonyah - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
These AMD sony's are everywhere. the model you tested has been going for as low as 499 at places like frys, walmart, best buy etc. They have the new AMD fusion netbook/notebook that looks really cool.oh and i love my brand new z.
Etern205 - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - link
Saw a AMD based Vaio for around $500 at BJs around 2-3 weeks ago.Mr Perfect - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
This was looking like a nice machine, right up until Sony opted out of the AMD Radeon driver package. I just stopped reading at that point. I'm sure we've all been frustrated by this sort of vendor driver crap in the past, I'm not wasting time on it anymore. Nicely done article though!