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

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

The system returned a final score of 16 minutes and 2 seconds, which is around two minutes faster than the Dell XPS 14Z system which we reviewed in December last year. Very impressive overall results.

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