Product Reviews

It was only a few short years ago that Sony caused a stir with its first Vaio notebooks.

Suddenly, the black and grey bricks we were all used to carrying looked like relics from Soviet Russia. Everyone wanted to be seen carrying a slinky Sony Vaio.

At first glance, Sony's new desktop PC, the Vaio PCV-LX1 seems just as revolutionary. It has that distinctive, Vaio style written all over it. The compact system unit comes in the usual grey and light blue colours, and it's accompanied by a matching keyboard, mouse and LCD monitor. Overall, it's subtle but striking.

And that design proves as intelligent as it is stylish. On the system unit's front panel there's a sliding flap, which shifts to reveal a Type II PC Card slot, USB and FireWire sockets, and a slot for Sony's Memory Stick storage cards, all within easy reach. The rest of the connections are tucked round the back, with a total of three more USB ports, a 10/100 BaseT Ethernet adaptor, another FireWire socket, and outputs for a VGA monitor and the Vaio's LCD display - Sony's own digital display connector is not a standard DVI connector. Vaio doesn't include old-fashioned serial or parallel ports either.

The lack of a modem might seem more surprising, but Sony's multimedia vision of the future demands broadband access. There's even an offer to join NTL's broadband service in the box - at a reduced rate, of course. That's fine if you live in an area where it's offered, but not every UK region has a broadband option available, in which case a separate USB modem will be needed.

The downside of the Vaio's compact chassis is a lack of expansion potential. The interior is easily accessible, but you can only add one more SDRAM DIMM and one more PCI card into that highly

ADVERTISEMENT

organised space. Luckily, the Vaio is already well equipped for any audio-visual shenanigans. Along with FireWire and Memory Stick support, you've got a 60Gb hard drive and a Samsung DVD and CD-R/W combo drive. Sony hasn't forgotten software, either. The PCV-LX1 ships with Sony's usual audio and video applications, including Open MG Jukebox for music, MovieShaker and DVGate for digital video, and PictureGear for still images. Be aware that it's all very focused on Sony hardware, something which users of other digital cameras and camcorders could find frustrating. All the applications share a common look and feel, although it's more Sony's than the Windows standard. Luckily, that's not too tricky to get the hang of.

The bundle gets even better with the inclusion of a complete suite of Adobe software, including PhotoShop LE, Premiere LE, the GoLive! Web editor and the ImageReady Web graphics/animation package.

You can't fault the quality of the peripheral components, either. The 15in TFT monitor is genuinely superb, producing a picture of brilliant clarity which never fails to do justice to the most colourful images. Even the keyboard and mouse share the same high-quality feel.

Sounds like a rave review? Well, not quite. From the exterior, the PCV-LX1 is a cutting-edge system that's packed with cool, innovative features. Sadly, the same can't be said for its core specification. Some components, like the 1GHz Pentium III processor and 128Mb of PC133 SDRAM, are really just run-of-the-mill, but some poor choices have also been made. The worst is the decision to base the PCV-LX1 on the SiS 630 motherboard chipset, complete with that old villain, integrated graphics.

As soon as you hear that, you know that you can forget about playing the latest 3D games, while overall system performance is hardly likely to scale the heights. In 3DMark 2000, the Vaio could only rustle up a pitiful score of 1061. It couldn't even run 3DMark 2001. The result in our 2D application benchmarks, meanwhile, was an unimpressive 2936.

This PC is a contradiction. Its looks and design are both beautiful and futuristic. Some of its internals, though, are plain old-fashioned. Given the £1,702 asking price, the whole package should be perfect - not just its looks. Still, let's hope one day all PCs look and feel as good as this.