Sony VAIO VGN-A160 Review

The Sony VAIO A-Series laptops are designed to be desktop replacements. While the VGN-A160 looks elegant on the outside, is there enough strength on the inside?

Summary

The A160 is a desktop replacement that is different from those sold by other companies. It is not designed to replace a workstation, it doesn’t feature a full-fledged Intel Pentium 4 desktop processor and it only has 80GB of storage space. The A160 is a notebook that appears to be designed to replace your home’s desktop system rather than an office workstation in most instances, although it would make an adequate computer for the office.

We didn’t give the A160 an award for a couple reasons. There is way too much preinstalled software and junk on the system and it can ruin the user experience. Sony also didn’t add a media card reader (other than their own Sony Memory Stick) and they didn’t include a scroll wheel. These should both be a given in a desktop replacement system, and why they left these out is beyond us.

On the upside, the AV Entertainment Dock that Sony packages with the A160 is simply amazing and includes every conceivable port and connection you can think of; this alone separates the A160 from its competitors. And instead of trying to market the A160 as having audiophile quality sound using integrated speakers and subwoofers, Sony throws in a pair of nice external speakers so that when you are plugged into the docking station you are not stuck with the systems internal speakers.

Lastly, we have to give Sony credit for designing a system that not only features a 15.4-inch widescreen display with Xbrite technology, but does it all in a chassis that is slimmer than the competition. We are on the fence about whether they should have gone with a desktop processor instead of the Centrino chipset and Pentium M CPU though. The bottom line though is that the Sony VAIO VGN-A160 is a masterpiece that fuses cutting-edge technologies with a breathtaking design. Sony fans should be more than happy with their latest offering.

Introduction

When we were first told about the Sony VAIO A Series notebook computers, we were curious to see how Sony designers approached the desktop replacement idea. If you’ve been shopping for a desktop replacement notebook, you probably know that manufacturers have tried several concepts to distinguish their large notebooks from real desktop computers. Some companies have installed Microsoft’s Media Center OS on their notebooks, while others have tried to integrate huge 16:9 widescreen displays and large subwoofers. As the name suggests, desktop replacement notebook computers are not designed to be ultra portable. Let’s face it, at over 10 pounds and no matter how large the battery in the notebook might be, most people will have these systems plugged into the wall. So why not give the system a media dock and external speakers to use while it on your desk at home or work? Sony’s engineers may have come to that same conclusion when they designed the VAIO A series notebooks.

There are three versions of Sony’s VAIO A Series product line. The A150, priced at $2,099.99 is their lowest priced system and features an Intel Pentium M 715 (1.5GHz) processor, a 15.4-inch display, and 512MB of memory. The subject of this review, the $2,399.99 A160 adds an AV Entertainment Dock and speakers, and the top-of-the-line, $2,699.99 A90 comes with a Pentium M 735 (1.7GHz) processor, a 17-inch wide LCD display and the AV Entertainment Dock.

Performance

The Sony VAIO VGN-A160 has a lot to offer in terms of compatibility, but just how fast is this system? Well keep in mind that even though this system is physically larger than Sony’s others notebooks, its still Centrino based. This means that the Pentium M 1.5GHz processor is the same as the CPU used in Gateway’s 200XL for example. The Gateway 200XL is an ultra-light computer that weighs just over two pounds compared to the A160’s 8 lbs.  In our 3DMark 2001 tests, the A160 outperformed the competition boasting a score of 7318 at 1024×768, 16-bit resolutions. This is because the A160 uses ATI’s Radeon 9200 graphics adapter versus the Intel Extreme integrated graphics adapter found in other Centrino based systems. But when it came to CPU benchmarks, the A160 was stuck in there with the other notebooks scoring a CPU Arithmetic score of 4861.

System Configurations: