Sony Vaio VPC-SA4W9E/XI
Specifications
Price comparison
Average of 1 scores (from 2 reviews)
Reviews for the Sony Vaio VPC-SA4W9E/XI
Source: Notebookjournal
DE→EN Archive.org versionSingle Review, online available, Long, Date: 04/22/2012
Rating: performance: 70% features: 70% display: 50% mobility: 70% workmanship: 90% ergonomy: 30%
Source: Notebookinfo
DE→EN Archive.org versionSingle Review, online available, Medium, Date: 03/14/2012
Rating: Total score: 87% performance: 90% display: 85% mobility: 80% ergonomy: 95% emissions: 82%
Comment
Series:
Sony Vaio’s VPC-SA series, which was introduced in Q2 2011, is the second addition to Sony’s S range thin-and-light notebook and the brother to the more popular business all-rounders SB series. The SA series was positioned at the middle-high price sector, between the high end Z series and the more affordable SB series. The SA series’ built quality and spec is at a higher level than the SB Series, which justifies its price, even though looks, form factor and weight are almost the same. The SA series comes with two choices of color: black and silver, though so many SA laptops on display come with black that some people didn’t even know there’s also a silver version.
At the time of its introduction, it’s one of the best subnotebooks on the market, beaten only by Sony’s high end Z Series with its thin and light size, powerful Sandy Bridge i5 or i7 CPU and dedicate middle class ATI 6630M graphic card, 1600x900 screen as well as optional blu-ray optical disk and a battery life of up to 14 hours. Other strength of the SA series includes fast SSD, matte display, docking port, TPM chips. Touch typist and office users would also love this laptop for the full size back-lit keyboard with good typing feedback. Its weaknesses include iits high noise and heat during load due to smaller case, somewhat short battery life without the $150 optional battery-slice compare to newer Ultrabook and most important of all, a narrow color spectrum, contrasts and weak viewing angles separate the SA series from premium-class notebook such as the Z series.
Even though Intel introduced many Ultrabook in 2012 as a direct competitor to Macbook Air series with focus on weight and battery life, not many of them can beat the SA series in their own game.
AMD Radeon HD 6630M: Successor of the slow clocked (low power) versions of the Mobility Radeon HD 5650 with more cores, UVD3 processor and Eyefinity+.
Non demanding games should be playable with these graphics cards.
» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List.
Intel Core i7: The Intel Core i7 for laptops is based on the LG1156 Core i5/i7 CPU for desktops. The base clock speed of the CPUs is relatively low, but because of a huge Turbo mode, the cores can dynamically overclock to up to 3.2 GHz (920XM). Therefore, the CPU can be as fast as high clocked dual-core CPUs (using single threaded applications) but still offer the advantage of 4 cores. Because of the large TDP of 45 W / 55 W, the CPU is only intended for large laptops.
2640M: Very fast dual-core processor based on the Sandy Bridge architecture with an integrated graphics card and dual-channel DDR3 memory controller. » Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Processsors.
