14 DAY TRIAL // Although during our meeting with Nvidia late last month the company’s presentation was touting “over 300 Ivy Bridge design wins,” we keep seeing many launches with AMD Radeon graphics instead.
SONY’s adoption of the new Nvidia mobile line was regarded as a great achievement in the presentation, but out of the four laptops announced by SONY today, only one has Nvidia’s new GPU inside. And it’s not even the top model.
Today, Japanese giant company SONY is announcing the new VAIO E Series 15 notebooks along with the VAIO E Series 17, on its official website.
The E Series 15 comes with a 15.5” screen sporting a mediocre 1366 x 768 resolution with the usual 16:9 ratio.
Processing is handled by Intel’s Core i5-2450M Sandy Bridge CPU that comes with just 3 MB of Level 3 cache. The two core benefit from Intel’s HyperThreading technology and run at a base frequency of 2500MHz, with the option to turbo up to 3100 MHz.
The CPU comes with a dual channel DDR3 memory controller able to work with DDR3-1333 memory and an HD3000 iGPU that works at the default 650 MHz but that is able to reach 1300 MHz in Turbo mode. The maximum heat dissipation is 35 watts.
The graphics part of the new VAIO E Series 15 and 17 is well serviced by AMD’s Radeon HD 7650M GPU, complete with 1 GB of VRAM for the 15 model and 2 GB for the 17 model.
AMD’s Radeon HD 7650M is based on the same chip like the 6650M, with the same 480 Shaders in VLIW5 architecture and the improved tessellation performance just like the desktop Radeon 6800 series.
The chip is usually clocked between 450 and 500 MHz and comes complete with AMD’s UVD3 video decoder.
Performance should be significantly superior to AMD’s 5650M and nVIDIA’s GT 620M and GT 525M. The Radeon 7650M used by SONY here should be in line with nVIDIA’s GTS 250M and 350M maybe a little bit behind the GT 435M.
The 17” model comes with a 1600 x 900 display and there are FullHD options also.
There is 750 GB worth of storage space by the means of 5400 RPM HDDs for both models, while the 15” model weighs 2.7 Kg and the 17” model is weighing 3.2 Kg, but the latter also comes with a Blu-ray drive.
Connectivity is well-endowed with Bluetooth 3.0, Wireless N, USB 3.0 (just one port), three USB 2.0 ports, one HDMI and a 1.3 MP webcam.
