Latest Notebook with Processor Type Intel Core i7

Mar 24 2010 - Sony's VAIO Y series ultraportables may be affordable for the brand but it does cost several hundred more than the competition. What this extra money does pay for is a much more durable magnesium chassis and some peripheral ports not found on any of the competitions units. Performance is typical but the battery life is a bit below average and Sony's claims.

It's powerful enough to handle itself. Sony's Y-series laptop is good-looking and light. Styled to turn heads, the Y series is a decent laptop with good battery life and great ergonomics. And the Y series laptop trots along happily enough thanks to a brisk enough Intel Pentium SU4100 processor running at 1.3GHz and 4GB of RAM. The battery is well-designed, plumping up the underside of the laptop rather than poking out at the back. It's a comfy keyboard to use, thanks to the large and generou... *

Price aside, the Vaio Z may be our new 13-inch laptop of choice, as it breezed by many other recent 13-inch systems we've tested, which all use older Intel CPUs (or slower low-voltage ones). The Vaio Z's touch pad is likewise excellent, offering plenty of space and small, but effective, left and right mouse buttons separated by a fingerprint reader. *

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). The first small drawback is seen in the theoretical graphics performance. Due to a strong processor and available video acceleration of both graphic cards, the Vaio doesn't have any problems rendering HD videos in 1080p smoothly. Further the small display needs few energy, which improves the battery runtime and in consequence the mobility. In the... *

Excellent performance . Discrete graphics . Short battery life . High-resolution display . Weak speakers . *