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

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

As would be expected the i7 2620M falls in behind the i7 2640M found in the Dell 14z laptop. Very good results however all round, especially when factoring in the diminutive physical dimensions of the Z series machine.

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