Sony Z Series Review (i7, Bluray, 1080p, Raid SSD, AMD HD6650, dual battery)

1. Introduction2. Sony Z Series (Premium Carbon Version)3. Sony Z Series (Super High Res Gallery)4. Extended Battery (VGP-BPSC27)5. Extended Battery (Super High Res Gallery)6. Power Media Dock (VGP-PRZ20A/B)7. Power Media Dock (Super High Res Gallery)8. Installed Software, Hardware Configuration and Testing Methodology9. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra10. Synthetic: PCMark 711. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit12. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage13. Synthetic: 3DMark 1114. SSD Drive Performance15. Real World: BluRay Playback Performance16. Real World: MKV Performance17. Real World: Flash HD Performance18. Real World: Media Encoding19. Gaming: Resident Evil 520. Gaming: Dead Island21. Gaming: F1 201122. Gaming: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 323. Technical: Acoustics Performance24. Technical: Thermal Dynamics25. Technical: Battery Life26. Closing Thoughts27. View All Pages

When this machine was built for us, it was configured with the latest ‘Gen 3' Flash SSD setting – offering 128GB of storage at the fastest speeds. A 256GB configuration adds another £410 to the price, and 512GB a wallet sapping £1,150. Ouch.

Wow. A sequential read score of over 1GB/s! not bad for a superportable machine. If you want to see just how right Sony have got this, head over to our last review of the Asus G74SX system which uses two 750GB mechanical drives. We are talking around x8.5 times the read drive performance from this svelte Sony superportable system.

In real world terms the Sony Z Series is lightning quick to use, booting up in around 20 seconds, and eating through data without so much as a pause. For instance Adobe Photoshop CS5 64 bit loads in around 3 seconds on this laptop.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark verifies the sequential findings with CrystalDiskMark, showing around 1GB/s read and around 290 MB/s sequential write. Amazing results, and the highest we have seen from any laptop system since we opened Kitguru.

Finally, we added the Physical Disk Test from SiSoft Sandra, which scored the drive at around a whopping 957.14MB/s.

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