Sony Vaio Y-Series Preview
AMD’s Fusion platform is beginning to make waves in the lower-range notebook market. Having phased out the 2010 11.3-inch Intel-based VAIO Y series, Sony has totally renovated the range to offer a new, larger display and AMD chipset.
Sony now presents a petite 11.6-inch portable, though the machine’s style mirrors that of its predecessor. A contoured wristrest leads to the same Scrabble-tile keyboard, and the Sony Vaio Y Series still sports its brightly-coloured lid. Our test model came with silver, you can opt for hot pink instead.
The Vaio Y ships with an Intel 1.6GHz AMD E-350 processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM and 320 GB of hard disk space, which puts it into the super-league of netbooks.
In benchmarks the Sony Vaio Y E-350 outperformed any Atom netbook by 25%. It is very responsive for general system tasks, and also superior to the average netbooks for multitasking. The E-350 is undoubtedly an improvement on the C-50 chip AMD puts in such netbooks as the Toshiba NB550D, but its greatest strength is in its graphics processing ability.
The Vaio Y is supplied with AMD’s HD6310 graphics, and it performs admirably. Crisis is too much to ask from a low-end notebook but the more limited TrackMania Nations Forever at medium settings on the native 1366 x 768 resolution brought a just-about playable 29fps. Although 1080p video is available in only a few formats, 720p video played back impeccably in all common formats. At 1080p YouTube HD rendered smoothly, as did MOV files, but the Vaio Y was not quite equal to iPlayer HD.
The Sony Vaio Y Series also comes with an HDMI port at left for outputting videos to an external display.
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