Nice PC for home users
Written: Apr 25 '01
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Pros: speed, good video playback, good multimedia editing software and superb digital video I/O through firewire
Cons: may be too costly for some. Not good rendering of 3d graphics
The Bottom Line: A good system for 2D games and internet surfing. a home computer for the family as digital video can be downloaded and edited.
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| arindamb's Full Review: Sony VAIO PCV-RX260DS PC Desktop |
The PC come with 800MHz processor. windows me, 128 MB ram an Intel graphics card with 4MB video memory( on the low side I must say) an 8x CD Rw drive and a DVD drive. a front firewire port and a USB port and also a rear firewire port and a USB port. a 40 GB disk
Now coming to the PC. i will say it is blazing fast for normal home multimedia operations. DVD playback is smooth at full screen ( i have a 19 inch monitor).. The flat trinitron monitor adds beauty to the whole system.
I have also installed linux on the system RedHat 7 kernel 2.2.x. Linux performs fine.. the only problem i had was that sony makes the 40 disk preformatted in 16 and 24 GB partitions. so having a partition more than 1024 cylinders makes it a problem to boot linux through LILO.
Anyway leaving that aside I must say the graphics card doesn't perform well for 3d graphics. I played 2d games and they were fine. I had installed inventor on the system and did some 3d graphics programming.. a lot of aliasing came on screen. i had some graphics stress tests on the system.
I did volume rendering which was a bit slow with VTk. But I guess a few home users will use that kind of graphics until and unless an application doing 3d graphics is used. in that case please upgrade the graphics card. I guess a good graphics accelerator card will solve the problem
I am on an ethernet LAN so I will say that network performance is blazing fast. comes with a realtek ethernet card which is good.
The speaker could have been made a bit better .. the low frequency effect on the speakers is not that great.
The sound card doesn't support Dolby 5.1 surround so do not think of plating ur DVDs and sending the output to a hifi system for dolby effects.
But the display is great and the system is fast for all other operations.
I had some problem accessing the CMOS bios setup.. not an easy thing to do .
I haven't tried upgrading the memory but it is easy as my friend has done it. Two PCI slots are available to put other cards.
The firewire support is awesome. A sony handycam or digital camera downloads images and videos in no time. the movie editing software is also great.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1300
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40
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Epinions.com ID:
arindamb
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Reviews written: 5
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