Running Noise – Fine Tuning in Order?

The VAIO is pretty quiet for the most part, and its noise output is very uniform. However, it is never really silent when idle, as at least one fan is almost spinning, albeit quietly. The second fan that kicks in occasionally is not really louder, but generates an annoying high-pitch whine, making it much more audible.

Even under load, noise isn’t an issue. Basically, the same applies as above – the fans are audible, but not loud, and remain at a constant speed. However, there is a certain whine that some may find annoying or distracting. If you’re interested in this unit and know you get distracted by such noises, we suggest trying to convince your salesperson to let you “listen in” before you buy.

We had the impression that Sony may be able to fine-tune the fan settings a little more. Despite what our measurements say, we didn’t feel like the difference between idle and load was really that pronounced. That makes us wonder – is the fan speed too low under load or too high when idle?

(Measurements are taken at a distance of 50 cm from the front of the unit using our PCE999 Noise Analyser.)

Battery Life

We test the battery runtime of a laptop by setting the screen to a brightness of 100 cd/m², deactivating the wireless network adapter and letting the system run in three different load scenarios until it runs out of power. Windows tasks such as search and indexing are disabled, as is the screensaver. The screen remains active throughout the test. All power management settings are adjusted manually. We don’t use the manufacturer’s tools in order to guarantee similar results across brands.

First we determine the battery life under load by running Prime95’s torture test, which stresses each of the system’s cores. Next we measure how long the unit lasts when playing back a DVD. Hardware acceleration is enabled if the included DVD Player software offers it. In the last scenario, we simply let the laptop sit idle until the battery runs down, which comes closest to office tasks, e.g. using a word processor or spreadsheet application.

As mentioned above, we encountered some quirks with the power management during our testing. The first was that even under full load, the CPU would never run at more than 1.2 GHz. Thus, our benchmarks under load seem a little skewed. After all, 85 minutes at that frequency is certainly nothing to write home about.

DVD Playback was only slightly longer at 91 minutes, while Blu-ray seemed to be more taxing, running for only 71 minutes. Actually, this is where we hit the next snag. The playback software, WinDVD for BD, seems to monitor the battery charge level. Regardless of what system and software settings we used, it would stop playback when the charge reached 13%. This applies to both the DVD and Blu-ray battery rundown test. So, in the end, the system would have easily played for another 10 to 15 minutes, but the software wouldn’t let it. Since we test using the software provided with the laptop, as this best reflects the user experience, we’ll stick with the times that the VAIO actually played back our films, not its theoretical potential.

When idle, the VAIO ran for 155 minutes, which is better, but still not competitive with many other Centrino laptops.