Sony VAIO SE: An IPS Laptop for Under a Grand
by Jarred Walton on April 3, 2012 5:40 PM ESTDouble Your Pleasure with a Sheet Battery
Battery life is good, which isn’t too surprising as Sandy Bridge laptops with switchable graphics have always delivered the goods. The wrinkle here is if you want to get the $150 sheet battery, you can double your battery life. As mentioned earlier, Sony also has some intelligent battery circuitry so that you’ll discharge/charge the sheet battery first, allowing you to put it away (or connect it to the separate charging station) and take the now lighter laptop with you.
If we take the stock scores, battery life is similar to what we’ve come to expect from Sandy Bridge laptops. The integrated 49Wh battery actually delivers better battery life than some competing laptops with 56Wh batteries, but we’d take the reported battery capacity with a grain of salt as there’s certainly some wiggle room there. Even so, our normalized battery life charts show that Sony knows a thing or two about power optimizations. As for the sheet battery, it does more or less double the battery life—there’s some margin for error in our battery life tests and given the number of battery tests we already had to run we didn’t repeat most tests multiple times.
We also did a quick test of idle and Internet battery life with the discrete GPU enabled, just to see how much extra power that consumes. Based on the 49Wh battery capacity, the VAIO SE idles at around 7.75W and averages 9.41W during the Internet test while running off the IGP. Turn on the HD 6630M and idle power draw (on battery) increases to 11.71W while Internet power draw is 12.42W. Based on that it appears the HD 6630M has an idle power draw that’s around 4W more than the HD 3000, but for “typical” Internet use it only uses 3W more than the IGP.
We also tested dGPU battery life while playing games and still managed two hours of gaming with the main battery, but that was using the Balanced power profile with AMD’s PowerPlay set to Maximum Battery Life. Using those settings, we found that typical gaming performance dropped anywhere from 3% (Battlefield 3) to as much as 40% (Skyrim), with most titles showing a drop in frame rates of around 15-20%. Set PowerPlay to Maximum Performance and you’ll get full performance from the HD 6630M at the cost of battery life; our 122 minute result became 90 minutes with PowerPlay at Max Performance. Double that with the sheet battery, though, and you’re looking at roughly three hours of decent gaming performance while unplugged—something you’re not likely to exceed right now with any “gaming” laptop!
Thermals: Too Hot to Handle?
We mentioned earlier that we have concerns with the way the hinge and LCD pivot down to block the sole exhaust port on the back of the laptop. We never experienced any instability from the design, but one look at thermals under load should help you understand why we think the design is flawed:
We’ve seen a few laptops run hotter than the VAIO SE under load—notably, the Toshiba Portege R835 ultraportable we just reviewed hits 100C on one of the cores during our stress tests—but 94C is still far more than we’d like. For an i7-2640M, this is the second laptop that might simply be “too thin” (the first being the Razer Blade that hit 95C). We’d really like to see max CPU thermals under 80C, even for thinner laptop designs. Long-term, the concern is that once you start to get some dust inside the fan and radiator, cooling performance will suffer and you’ll start to hit 100C or more. I recently saw this exact issue with a friend’s laptop (with an older Core 2 Duo T9550 CPU), which caused the laptop to get very hot to the touch and eventually shut off (with no warning) after heavy use.
Noise Levels
The high temperatures unfortunately have a secondary companion: noise pollution. At idle and under light loads, the VAIO SE is well behaved: we measured 31.2 dB from around 18” above and in front of the laptop (where your head would typically be if you’re using the laptop), and for many tasks the noise levels never broke 35 dB. All that starts to change when you put a heavy load on the system. For gaming, it really depends on the type of game you’re playing—specifically, how CPU intensive the game happens to be. 3DMark06 for instance never got about 36 dB in the graphics tests, but it tends to be pretty light on the CPU side of the fence. Batman: Arkham City and several other modern titles (Battlefield 3 and Skyrim) are a different story, with fan speeds apparently maxed out and noise levels hitting 46.7 dB—very similar to the Razer Blade, though I’d characterize the noise as being less annoying on the VAIO SE. The real culprit here is the CPU, though, as any heavy CPU load (video encoding, Cinebench, etc.) will peg the fan speed and noise at the same 46.7 dB.
For all the noise the fan generates, it doesn’t feel like it’s moving a lot of air, and this is where the hinge and the blocked exhaust port really makes its mark. It’s about what you’d get from other laptops if you stuck your hand in front of the exhaust and left it there. Provided you’re not planning on doing a lot of CPU intensive tasks, however, the VAIO SE isn’t all that noisy. For office applications and Internet browsing, I never had issues with the fan, and assuming you have a desktop to do your heavy lifting (e.g. video transcoding), gaming is about the only time you’re apt to hit max fan speed for “mainstream” use.
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peterfares - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
1 4GB stick of RAM costs $20 or less. Just order it without any RAM stick and put the 4GB module in, leaving you with 2x4GB=8GB. 2GB soldered on would have been horrible. I'm already sick of 8GB and want 16GB in my laptop. I will when I get a sandy or ivy bridge laptop. My arrandale only supports 8GB.piroroadkill - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
A perfectly serviceable specification and a great display, for a reasonable enough price.Everyone else needs to pay attention..
bunnyfubbles - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
the screen, relative light weight (you'd be hard pressed to find any other 15+" lappy @ 5.4lbs let alone 4.4), and price really were what sold it for meI was going to go with the 13.3" S series for its portability, and while the 13.3" S series 1600x900 screen was definitely a cut above all other PC laptops that are stuck with 1366x768, the 1080p IPS of the SE really was that much more gorgeous when comparing them side by side in store.
The HDD is a disappointment, however I just upgraded my desktop from a 128GB Crucial M4 to a pair of Samsung 830s, so I was able to plug that M4 into the laptop, as well as replace the 2GB module with a 4GB (was less than $20) for 8GB total. Those two simply hardware upgrades along with a reformat with only the essential software and drivers (all of which can be found pretty easily and conveniently from Sony's support site) lead to a very awesome overall computing experience.
The last upgrade I did was grabbed an external USB DAC. The Speakers on this laptop are extremely anemic, and the onboard sound leaves much to be desired. I have a Creative X-Fi GO! (was less than $30) for when gaming and chatting (has both plugs for headset and mic, laptop itself has only one jack so you can't have both headset and mic, and thus would have to rely on the built in mic on the laptop which is passable but not ideal) and my trusty FiiO E7 when just watching movies or listening to music
The 128GB SSD might not seem like much, but its certainly enough for the OS and apps, and no laptop will be able to satiate my gaming like my desktop, so very few games get installed to it anyway. Anything else (mostly large media files such as music and movies) can be handled via portable USB HDDs and flash thumbdrives, of which I converted the 640GB HDD to a portable drive with a portable 2.5" USB3.0 enclosure.
jigglywiggly - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
I'd take the tn panel 95% ntsc color gamut (The clevo one you were talking about) I have one in my np8130 and it is absolutely amazing. Contrast and brightness is most important thing imo, then viewing angles.piroroadkill - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
I disagree. You're not going to be using a laptop for serious colour sensitive work, but you might have a laptop out to watch a video with a few friends sat around it.charleski - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
On TN panels the gamma changes (usually dramatically) with even a slight movement off-axis. They're completely unsuitable for colour-sensitive work unless you're going to lock your head at the optimum position.There certainly are people who need a decent portable screen for reviewing images, but the available options are very limited.
Stacey Melissa - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
I'm not quite as worried about the hinge, but after three months with my base SE, I agree with the rest of the review, for the most part. I immediately swapped the HDD for a 128GB Crucial M4, and did a clean Win7 install, so performance is pretty good. I only get about 4 to 4.5 hours runtime, but I'm running the screen at fairly high brightness (82%) and turned off a couple obscure power-saving tricks. I'm very picky about noise. Luckily, fan noise is very low for my typical use, which involves browsing, Visual Studio, and video playback. I usually use a Targus wedge laptop cooler, which I don't plug in. Clicks are noisy. The trackpad is placed too far to the right, and I really miss two-finger scrolling. The keyboard is excellent, except for the spacebar, which often doesn't register left-side presses. It could use dedicated volume buttons. I like the manual graphics switching, except that it takes several seconds.Bugs: Scrolling usually quits working after waking from hibernation. To fix, open the mouse control panel, and click OK. The BT hardware sometimes quits working upon resume, even after the driver update that supposedly fixes it. When running on battery, the DVD drive switches on and off regularly and often, which causes the standard hardware attachment/detachment sound notification.
The screen is easily the best I've used on a laptop. It also bests my old Dell 2405 desktop S-IPS in brightness, contrast, and of course sharpness, but not quite in gamut or accuracy.
adece - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
...is actually appealing! What do you knowMrMaestro - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
I bet Dustin wouldn't have minded getting his hands on this laptop to review, how did AnandTech decide who had dibs? Coin toss? Rock-paper-scissors? Fight to the death?JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
Dustin got the Z2, I got the SE... wasn't sure which would be better, but ultimately the Z2 is too costly for what you get and the keyboard doesn't appeal as much.