Sony VAIO PCG-818 Pentium II 300 Notebook
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 19, 1999 2:52 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Performance & Stability
The performance of the PCG-818 is comparable to a poorly made desktop 300, in that the performance of the hard drive and the video card slows the overall system performance down a few notches. That can be expected since it isn't really practical, once again, to outfit a laptop with a 7200-RPM SCSI hard drive and a nVidia Riva TNT graphics accelerator, although a better chosen graphics chipset would've been favorable in this case.
The processor and memory sub-system performance in this case is top notch for a laptop, something which was seemingly impossible just a few years back. The 512KB of L2 cache running at 1/2 clock speed (150MHz) truly helps with the business performance of the PCG-818, making windows fly open and document editing productivity no longer limited by the speed of your processor rather how fast you can operate the sluggish track pad.
The disk performance of the PCG-818's Toshiba drive is about half the performance you can expect from a normal desktop EIDE disk, which isn't too bad considering that you'll very rarely use a laptop for extremely disk intensive applications. Sony does offer an additional 4GB add-on drive through their VAIO Direct Website, however if you've ever looked into buying a new hard drive for a notebook, the price can be a highly discouraging factor.
The stability of the system is average for a desktop, however since a laptop isn't generally viewed as a server/workstation environment computer the few crashes AnandTech experienced during the testing process could be considered "normal" for a laptop.
The Final Decision
| For $3000, the PCG-818 is a bit overpriced for the common user, and with Intel boasting the ability to offer a 600MHz+ mobile processor before the year's end an investment in such an expensive unit would not be the most intelligent one to make. However if you need the performance now, and you don't mind spending $3000 on a laptop which will be worth less than half that in 6 months time (welcome to the world of computer hardware) then the combination of a long lasting battery life, a sleek and easy to manage design, and a high performance multimedia solution make the Sony PCG-818 a clear winner. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
| If you are in the market for a laptop of this caliber, you may also want to consider some of the latest offerings from Micron and IBM as well, as both of them happen to have high performance, low profile offerings featuring the mobile Pentium II processor. As a laptop that you can go out to your local Best Buy or CompUSA and pick up, the Sony has the retail competition beat, but before you slap those crisp new hundred dollar bills on the counter you may want to do a little surfing to see if you can get a better deal on a more attractive laptop. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
0 Comments
View All Comments