Review: Sony Vaio VGX-TP2B home entertainment computer

While most computers follow a standard design pattern with little deviation, media centre or home entertainment models often throw up some entertainingly bizarre shapes.

That's borne out in Sony's new VGX-TP2B (shame the name is less sleek than the case) which is shaped like a shallow hat box, or some sort of ersatz living-room ornament.

The cylinder shape, while quite odd-looking at first, is actually quite efficient, and as a Sony it's well designed in general, with good build quality.

The front of the case houses the Blu-ray/DVD writer, two USB sockets, a Firewire port and a memory card reader (for SD and Memory Stick cards).

It uses Windows Home Premium and comes with a remote control as well as a wireless keyboard. There's no mouse – instead, a notebook-style trackpad is built into the bottom of the keyboard.

At its heart are an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor and 2GB of memory, giving it a good performance rating in our lab tests.

There's an Nvidia Geforce 8400M GT graphics card installed, with 256MB of its own memory, but this isn't enough for playing recent games in high quality. It copes perfectly fine with music and video playback and editing, which is probably the most intensive thing modern computers have to do, after games.

In addition to a wired network socket it also connects to wireless networks, and has a digital/analogue TV tuner. There are outputs for a standard monitor, HD television and composite/S-video for older screens, as well as two more USB ports on the back. If you want surround-sound you'll need an amplifier that can accept an optical sound connection, because the standard sound output is stereo-only.

It draws a maximum of 120W of power, less than most desktops, so it won't be too costly to leave it on much of the time, as home entertainment PCs are designed for, and it's fairly quiet, which is important for film-watching.

Certainly, £900 is a high asking price for such a computer, but this is a very powerful one that will last a long time in the living room, and the Blu-ray player makes it completely state-of-the-art.

See also:

Philips LRPC7500 home entertainment computer hardware review

A small computer to go with your TV  02 Apr 2008

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