Sony Vaio PCV-RX680G Review Saint Louis MO

provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.com

The Northwood High AV Department

Does Sony's right hand know what its left hand is doing? Alongside technology-haters like Disney's Michael Eisner, the MPAA's Jack Valenti, and Hollywood campaign contributee Sen. Fritz Hollings, Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment are in the front lines of the war on fair use, determined to kill MP3 in favor of uncopyable digital formats and releasing Celine Dion's new CD in Europe (though not the U.S.) on protected discs that won't play on a PC. (Of course, the ideal Celene Dion disc would play on no devices whatsoever -- Ed.)

Meanwhile, Sony Electronics ships a Pentium 4 PC that comes with not only a CD burner but a DVD burner -- and a TiVo-style personal video recorder that lets you save TV programming to the hard disk, then burn your camcorder movies and captured shows to DVDs. Should you hurry and buy it before someone at Sony HQ realizes it's slipped out? Read on.

Apple's Only Rival?

Priced at $2,000 with no monitor, the Vaio PCV-RX680G is next to the top of Sony's new Digital Studio desktop line. It comes with Intel's 2.0GHz Pentium 4 Northwood processor (popularly known as the 2.0A, with enhanced 0.13-micron design and a fat 512K of Level 2 cache), 512MB of PC2100 DDR memory, and a 120GB hard disk, as well as DVD-RW and CD-ROM drives and what Sony calls the Giga Pocket video recorder and TV player.

Two grand isn't cheap in these days of rock-bottom PC prices, but the RX680G is a pretty good deal -- better, we think, than the top-of-the-line RX690G, which offers a 2.2GHz Pentium 4, 512MB of RDRAM instead of DDR, a faster graphics card, and stereo-receiver-worthy Dolby Digital audio output, but costs $500 more. (Or Sony's Vaio MXS20, which combines similar specs with a previous-generation P4/2.0 plus FM stereo receiver and MiniDisc recorder for a pricey $2,800.)

To be sure, you can buy comparably equipped Pentium 4/2.0A DDR desktops from Dell and Gateway for a couple of hundred less than our test system. But they don't have personal video recorders, and when we configured a Compaq Presario 8000 that did (via ATI's All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 card), it came to $2,147.

And no other PC vendor bundles as much creative and audiovisual software as Sony, which seems serious about taking on Apple's iMovie and iPhoto (or at least living up to its "Video Audio Integrated Operation" acronym). Besides Windows XP Home Edition and a few nonartistic tools like Intuit Quicken 2002, Corel WordPerfect 10, and Trend Micro's PC-Cillin antivirus, the RX680G comes with a mountain of music-, image-, and video-managing and editing applications. The third-party list alone includes Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Premiere LE, ArcSoft's PhotoPrinter 2000, and Sonic Solutions' DVDit for Vaio.

Sony's house-brand applications include its own Media Bar DVD player, the friendly yet flexible MovieShaker drag-and-drop video editor, Simple DVD Maker, PictureGear image manager, SonicStage audio jukebox, and Smart Capture and DVgate to control digital still cameras and camcorders respectively.

To help you hook up those cameras, a panel on the Vaio's front -- below a power switch that glows blue when the PC's on and green when it's hibernating --opens to reveal an iLink (Sony's name for IEEE 1394/FireWire) port, two USB ports, and video and audio input jacks. A slot for Sony's Memory Stick flash modules is next to the floppy drive behind another door.

Even more well-labeled connectors are at the rear -- one more iLinkk and two more USB ports; serial, parallel, keyboard, and mouse ports; a 10/100Mbps Ethernet adapter; headphone/speaker, microphone, and line-in jacks; and expansion cards supplying monitor (analog VGA) and 56Kbps modem and the main TV connections -- UHF/VHF (coaxial cable), video and S-Video in and out, and left and right audio in and out

Under the Hood and On TV

A single squeeze latch lets you remove a side panel for access to the drive bays and Asus P4B266-LM (Intel 845D chipset) motherboard, but unfortunately, the compact Vaio presents one of the most crowded, unfriendly interiors we've seen lately.

You can get at the one AGP and three PCI card slots without difficulty, and savvy users can probably make use of the one empty hard disk bay. But other drives and components are crushed together in daunting fashion, and the two memory sockets (one holding a 512MB PC2100 DDR module, the other vacant) are buried under a thicket of drive and power cables.

Sony advertises the RX680G's hard disk as an ATA/100 device, but it's actually Maxtor's 4G120J6, an ATA/133-compatible, 5,400-rpm drive with a hefty 120GB of capacity (partitioned here as a 15GB drive C: and 100GB drive D:). The DVD-RW drive is Pioneer's latest DVR-104 (a.k.a. DVR-A04), which offers 1X DVD-RW, 2X DVD-R, 4X CD-R, and 8X CD-RW writing, as well as 4X DVD-ROM and 24X CD-ROM playback.

A generic Asus 40X CD-ROM drive fills another bay for playing music CDs or copying tracks from one to a recordable disc. The PC comes with a pair of color-coordinated, powered speakers; they're fine for casual listening, but audiophiles and gamers will scrap them in favor of a three- or five-piece setup with subwoofer -- and a sound card, replacing the system's AC97 integrated audio (Analog Devices' AD1881A chip).

Sony's MPEG-2 encoder/TV tuner card and a Lucent V.90 modem fill two of the three PCI slots. The AGP slot is occupied by one of the Vaio's most disappointing features -- the 32MB Nvidia Riva TNT2 graphics adapter that apparently will not die, at least as far as cheap consumer PC product managers are concerned.

The obsolete accelerator dragged the RX680G to a dreadful 36 frames per second in the lowest-common-denominator Quake III Arena Normal Quality (640 by 480) benchmark; in High-Quality 1,024 by 768 mode, the game floundered along at 15 fps. For a family to spend $2,000 on a new, 2.0GHz desktop and find it can't play current games is just wrong, and will result in unhappy Vaio customers.

Missing Keys and Blazing Speed

Our unhappiness with the Sony's 3D game performance definitely does not extend to its other benchmark scores, however: Pairing the 2.0GHz Northwood CPU with an ample 512MB of DDR makes the Vaio a first-class workhorse, posting an excellent score of 194 in BAPco's SysMark 2002 test -- 142 in Office Productivity and a sizzling 264 in Internet Content Creation.

MadOnion.com's new PCMark 2002 also yields great numbers, with a CPU score of 4,931; memory score of 4,315; and hard disk score of 778. In everyday use, we found the RX680G loaded and switched among applications as smartly and finished productivity tasks as promptly as we could want.

About our only other gripe is a carryover from the last Vaio desktop we tested, almost a year ago: Sony persists in saving an insignificant inch or so of desk space with a notebook-style, compromised keyboard layout. The group of cursor keys between the main area and numeric keypad is missing -- the Insert and Delete keys are awkwardly placed above the keypad, while the cursor arrows double up with a Fn key to simulate Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys.

Fewer and fewer laptops lately are putting users through this pain; doing so on a desktop simply makes no sense, and we suspect users will replace Sony's plasticky keyboard and rolling-ball mechanical mouse with a superior, normal-sized keyboard and optical mouse as soon as they get the chance.

But hey, you want keys and buttons? There're a good 40 of them on Sony's supplied remote control, which talks to an infrared receiver that plugs into one of the system's USB ports. The remote launches Media Bar and controls DVD playback and chapter and menu options. Once you master the somewhat complex (though well-documented) rigmarole of tapping the RX680G into your TV and set-top box cable line -- cords and cables for many setups are provided, though a coax splitter would be a welcome addition -- the remote also operates Sony's Giga Pocket TV tuner and video recorder.

The tuner and software let you watch TV in a window or full screen, changing channels or capturing stills as you like. You can record shows to the PC's hard disk, pausing live TV just like in the TiVo commercials, or log onto Sony's edition of Zap2It.com's free Web-based program guide and tag scores of shows for later timed recording.

Giga Pocket lets you record video in three modes or quality levels -- LP or MPEG-1 (up to 3 hours and 45 minutes on a 4.7GB DVD or 32 minutes on a 650MB CD-R); SP or 4Mbps MPEG-2 (117 or 16 minutes, respectively); and HQ or 8Mbps MPEG-2 (67 or 9 minutes, respectively).

The Vaio stores shows as "split MPEG" files -- we saved one minute of CNN in each mode, yielding hard-disk files of 10MB, 29MB, and 58MB -- accompanied by "split indexes" that track scene changes. You can use the latter to combine portions of different videos into playlists in Sony's Simple DVD Maker.

When you've finished saving or editing shows, a Video Explorer file manager lets you rename them, organize them into "cabinets," or export them as MPEG-2 files (for DVD-R or -RW discs playable in, Sony says, selected recent decks and PCs as well as on the Vaio) or MPEG-1 or AVI clips playable on other computers. (One minute of mid-quality or SP video exported to a 10MB MPEG-1 file, 29MB MPEG-2, or 217MB AVI file.)

The TV-watching and DVD-recording features work smoothly (although impatient impresarios will be frustrated by the fact that burning a DVD can take up to an hour, with Sony's manual warning you repeatedly not to attempt any audiovisual multitasking lest the disc spoil).

Smooth is the word, as well, for the Vaio PCV-RX680G overall: With the awful exception of 3D games, it delivers first-rate performance while giving buyers a handy, preassembled TV-recording, video-editing workshop with plenty of solid software. Maybe next year's model will solve cable clutter with a wireless connection from the PC/personal video recorder in your den to and from the TV set and cable box in your living room -- if Sony's music and movie divisions don't quash it first.

Pros: * Longing for a fast new PC, a DVD burner, and a personal video recorder? Get all in one at a fair price * Stellar software bundle, with creative tools that make Windows Movie Maker look lame

Cons: * Crowded case, cramped notebook-style keyboard * Rummage-sale TNT2 graphics card is inadequate for 1999's games, let alone today's