Sony VAIO Pro 13: Exceptionally Portable
by Jarred Walton on October 16, 2013 12:00 AM ESTSony VAIO Pro 13: Excellent Battery Life
If the performance in applications wasn't particularly impressive, where Sony positively shines is in their battery life. We have our standard Light, Medium, and Heavy battery life tests, and even the Light test is reasonably demanding (loading four web pages every 60 seconds). We also run the LCD at 200 nits (87% on the VAIO Pro 13), so turning down the brightness will only improve these results.
This is also one of the tests where we can make cross-OS comparisons to Apple's MacBook Air 13. We've seen in the past that OS X gets substantially better battery life with MacBooks than Windows, but we're at least able to run the same workloads so the tests are more or less “fair”. Anand ran the MBA13 under both Windows 8 and OS X, and we've included both results in the charts below. For the VAIO Pro 13, we likewise have results using just the integrated 37Wh battery as well as with the extra sheet battery.
In terms of pure battery life numbers, with the extra battery the Sony VAIO Pro 13 comes in at the top of our charts, but even without the doubling of capacity it does well. In raw battery life, it trails the Haswell-equipped MacBook Air 13 (particularly when the latter is running OS X), and in the Heavy test it also falls behind the Acer V7 and the AMD Kabini prototype. That's only part of the story, however, as the integrated battery is pretty small compared to many of the other laptops in our charts.
Look at the normalized battery life and the VAIO Pro 13 is quite a ways ahead of any other (Windows) contender in the Light and Medium loads. Apple still does better in heavy loads, indicating that Apple is either more aggressive in getting down to lower power C-states, and in OS X Apple also posts an impressive result in our Medium workload. The Heavy load tends to not allow the CPU to relax much (It averages out to around a 20-30% CPU load throughout the test), so it's not too surprising that the MBA13 results are a lot closer to their Win8 results in that particular test.
Adding the sheet battery basically doubles battery life, which puts Sony way ahead of any other laptop we've tested in recent years (though it doesn't change the normalized results). It was almost painful to test battery life, simply because it took so long for the battery to go dead. With the Light dual-battery testing, I started the test, went to bed, came back the next morning and the combined battery charge was still around 50%. If you need even more battery life, you could purchase additional external batteries and swap them quite easily with no downtime, and since Sony has the laptop drain the sheet battery first, you don't need to worry about the integrated battery unexpectedly running out of power.
However you want to look at it, the Sony VAIO Pro 13 delivers on the battery life front. This is how every Haswell laptop should behave, at a minimum. Sadly, we have plenty of examples where this level of power optimization is clearly not in effect, but I'll save that discussion for an upcoming review (cough, Clevo, cough).
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JarredWalton - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link
While I understand the importance some users will place on the SSD speed, the reality is that we often have component lotteries on laptops. I can run a few SSD performance numbers, but keep in mind that the time to review a laptop is already rather long, so adding more low level tests just bloats that. We're one of the few sites that continues to focus on long-form content these days, and even then we still have to draw the line somewhere. My feeling is that I can leave low-level SSD benchmarks to Anand and Kristian, where they can fully characterize the performance in a specific test bed, and I can mostly focus on the overall laptop experience.fr33h33l - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link
Jarred,A lot of users and reviewers have complained about the loud fan noise on the Vaio Pro 13 but you didn't seem to have any such issues.
Did you use the Silent fan settings in your review? Can you tell whether the lack of loud fan noise in your review is due to CPU throttling (i.e. loss of performance) or has Sony resolved previous issues in this area?
Would you know whether there would be a noticeable difference in this regard between the i5 and i7 config?
Thanks
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link
The CPU and Fan setting (in the VAIO Control Center) is set to "Performance" -- so apparently fan noise has been addressed with an updated BIOS/firmware, and perhaps resulted in more throttling.BMNify - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link
It is not that expensive if you consider the very expensive Vaio Z series which was replaced by this vaio pro.JarredWalton - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link
Which had a dGPU and thus better graphics performance (by far!)ketacdx - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link
Awesome review Jarred, thank you! I had fallen in love with this laptop at BestBuy in Canada last week where it was on sale for $1199 with 8GBs of RAM, touchscreen and 128GB SSD, however upon looking into it more, maybe I should wait...Problem is I am stuck with a Samsung Series 5 with an AMD A10 4655M and although the CPU isn't the best, I don't want to spend $1200+tax for a slightly lower GPU....decisions decisions...lolDurandal7 - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
On battery life: why does this review assign 559, 414 and 327 minutes to the MBA13 on light/medium/heavy web browsing, whereas Anand's original review:http://anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-ai...
shows 11.03 hours, 8.93 and 5.53 hours (662 minutes, 536 and 332 minutes respectively)? Are they different benchmarks? Is the MBA running windows in this test?
JarredWalton - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Interesting. I grabbed the numbers for the MBA13 from Mobile Bench, but I honestly don't know where those figures came from. I will have to ask Anand -- it's possible he ran the tests under Windows, or maybe he retested and got better battery life the second time. It's also possible there was an error in putting scores into Bench, but really I don't see any relation to what's there and what's in the MBA13 article.I'll update when I have more information....
juhatus - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
And now that the windows 8.1 is available maybe you could run more thest to see it those S0ix-states really matter on haswell?Btw anyone updated to 8.1 already on SVP13? Any problems? Im a bit hesitant to upgrade still..
JarredWalton - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
I'll give the update a shot today. As for the MBA13 numbers that Durandal7 asked about, they are indeed from Windows 8 on the MBA, so I need to edit the text. As usual, running OSX delivers much better battery life than under Windows for the Apple hardware.