Sony VAIO VGN-A790

PCMAG.com reviews the Sony VAIO VGN-A790 and give it a three out of five. The notebook is a very expensive edition to the Sony VAIO’s already pricy line, but is it worth having?

The Sony VAIO VGN-A790 ($2,799.99 direct), the update to the VAIO VGN-A690, is undoubtedly the most powerful machine in Sony’s laptop lineup. Its exterior is unchanged–same gorgeous 17-inch display, same ultrathin chassis. Inside, the updates are minor; a boost in processor speed and more graphics memory. Sony also keeps the VAIO Zone suite, a worthy adversary against Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). All in all, the A790 is an impressive media-center laptop.

At 8.6 pounds the A790 isn’t light, but it is relatively thin at just 1.8 inches. The 17-inch XBrite screen, always a favorite, delivers a mind-blowing 1,920-by-1,200 resolution—great for photo editing, gaming, and watching movies.

The A790 comes with a 2.0 GHz Pentium M 760, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and the ATI Mobility Radeon X600 graphics card with 256MB of memory. With a faster processor than the Qosmio G25, it earns higher SYSmark 2004 SE scores. The A790’s MobileMark 2005 results were a modest 1 hour 55 minutes. Sony should probably offers a battery bigger than the standard 44-Wh one, but then again, it’s unlikely you’ll be lugging the 8.6-pound A790 far from a power source. Gaming, something Sony usually falls short on, is actually quite decent on this system, but the A790 still lagged behind the Qosmio G25 on our Doom 3 and 3DMark 2005 tests. The Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 remains, however, the system to pick if gaming is your passion.

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