Sony Vaio Z2: Everything is Peripheral
by Dustin Sklavos on February 13, 2012 12:55 AM ESTBattery Life
The 45Wh battery that comes standard with the Sony VAIO Z2 could probably seem at least a little anemic, but we've seen there's a decent amount of latitude with Sandy Bridge when it comes to ekeing out running time. Sony's own VAIO SB produced a tremendous amount of running time off of its main battery, so much so that the value of the battery slice for that notebook seemed like a genuinely questionable value. So how well does the Z2 handle our battery tests?
It may not be at the top of the charts, but the Z2 also features a 35W processor instead of the usual 17W low voltage chips found in ultrabooks and other ultraportables. With that taken into account, the Z2 suddenly looks a lot rosier. Add the battery slice to the equation and you're suddenly looking at the vaunted "all-day running time." If ten hours of productivity isn't enough for you, consider taking a break.
Noise and Heat
Where things start to fall apart again for the Sony VAIO Z2 is specifically in noise. Internal heat is a little higher than we like to see, but it's the fan noise that becomes troublesome. Sitting at a normal distance from the notebook, it produces about 43.3dB under load, though fan noise ramps up very gradually. That's not the real issue, though; the real issue is just how high pitched the fan noise gets when the system is under full load. During testing there were times when the fan from the Z2 actually hurt my ears. Thankfully, under load the external dock doesn't produce much in the way of fan noise and is easily drowned out by the Z2.
This is, of course, a good part of the reason why the fan noise is so nasty: even running at full tilt, the fan has a hard time keeping the i7-2620M's core temperatures under a blistering 90C. While the surfaces of the Z2 never feel too hot, Sony may well have been overreaching trying to put a 35W processor in this chassis.
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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.