Model: Sony VAIO VPC-L118FG
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Price: $2499 inc. GST
Web: www.sony.com.au

All-in-one PCs have, for the most part, been a compromise and quite a few have been based on Intel’s Atom N270/N280 processor range. However, Sony has taken the all-in-one to a new level with its 24-inch Vaio L.

Take a 24-inch widescreen panel with 1920×1080-pixel resolution, add in touch-screen capabilities, power it with a Core 2 Duo E7500 processor and throw in a Blu-ray/DVD combo drive and you’ve pretty much got the Vaio L.

The L doesn’t bother with a traditional base stand, which isn’t surprising as this thing weighs around 12kgs. It comes also with a 500GB Western Digital hard drive and a digital/analog TV tuner.

The built-in speakers aren’t bad but there’s an optical digital audio output on the rear. The other issue is that with only a 500GB hard drive, it wouldn’t take long for digital TV capturing to chew through it. Given the asking price and the price of 1000GB hard drives, Sony could easily have doubled the capacity here.

The screen is powered by Nvidia’s GeForce G210M mobile graphics chip but it only provides marginal gaming speed. Application performance is passable, hitting 40.4 on our UserBench Encode tests (an Atom-based all-in-one would be lucky to hit 8 on the same test, making this one about five times as fast on audio/video operations). The Vaio L is aiming to be the complete home entertainment PC and although pricey at $2499, it combines PC and home entertainment unit all in the one design. It also comes with five USB2.0 ports plus a Firewire port for digital video. And don’t forget the wireless keyboard and mouse. All up, it’s nicely designed with a good list of features. But at $2499, some features could have been more generous.

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