We’ve gotten pretty slack around these parts with our reviews. We’re not a review site, exactly, but I think it’s important for us to be familiar with a wide range of products so we can speak with some authority about what we like and what we don’t instead of extrapolating from regurgitated press releases all the time. So we’ll probably be a little review heavy this week as we get back up to speed, but I think we’ll survive. First up is this review of the water-cooled Sony Vaio RA810 (and RA710, actually) by our Unix nerd and musician friend Matt Myers, the only man I’ve ever met who named his daughter after an SGI workstation.
A long time ago, my wife yelled across our home office to tell me that a quiet computer crusade had begun. She was tired of the overly loud systems and I couldn’t really blame her. With a couple dual processor workstations and a file server, 120mm fans running at full bore were all over the place. Adding to the mix was an SGI Octane, which I swear is the loudest freaking workstation ever. Slowly we whittled down the pile and as it got quieter in the office, what began as a request from the wife became somewhat of an obsession to me. Our eventual quest led to a Thinkpad for her and a homebrewed Athlon 64 with the usual air cooled quietness trickery applied for me. It is a lot more quiet now, but I still think it could get better.
Enter the Sony Vaio RA810.
The design goal with this machine seems to be low volume first and high performance a close second. It is a full-on media consumption machine, one that you put in your living room and hook up to your home theater system. It comes flush with features which are typical of a high end machine but adds to the mix a liquid cooling system for the CPU. The end result is a very quiet machine, which is only bested by machines with no fans whatsoever.
Sony sent me two review units to check out, the RA710 and the RA810. This review will focus on the RA810. They are mostly the same machine, the primary difference being that the RA810 is a bit snappier due to newer hardware.
My computer usage patterns are somewhat different than the average gaming and illegal movies experience pursued by most of the people I know. As a musician and audio geek I tend to do a lot of home audio recording and production which is why a designed-for-silence workstation was and still is important to me for more than just annoyance reasons. After all, it’s hard to mix 30 tracks of rock band properly or dial in that perfect distorted square wave synth patch when you have fan noise to work around.
I ran the Sony for a while as a digital audio workstation unit, doing mixing and processing chores on a number of projects I was working on. I would like to say that I recorded audio with it, but the MOTU 828 which I use didn’t want to play nice with it. Chalk that up to issues with MOTU’s finicky Windows drivers though because it won’t work with a couple other computers I have either.
This leads me to gripe #1: The firewire ports. While playing around with the firewire on this machine I noticed that there was one port on the back and one on the front. This is perfect for consumers who might want to have a firewire drive hooked up in back semi-permanently and plug a video camera or mp3 player into the front port now and then. But when I tried to do exactly that, I discovered that only one port works at a time. How did they swing this? I have no idea. But it’s annoying.
Once I was able to get audio out of the unit in a reasonable fashion I had a great time with my mixing chores. The hard drive is quite fast and I found myself getting a lot done when it came to shuttling files around. This didn’t save it in a head to head competition against my home workstation though. In almost every mixdown and plugin layering stress test I came up with, the Athlon 64 finished before the Sony. This is sort of surprising considering that my Athlon 64 is a 2GHz CPU and the P4 in the Sony runs at 3.4GHz. This perplexed me and I spent a good hour shutting off services and making sure there wasn’t any weirdness going on with background processes, but nothing I did made it catch up to AMD’s rump shaker. The front side bus speed is the same for both so it came down to on-chip cache, raw megahertz, and whatever chip design voodoo Intel and AMD decided to involve. This isn’t a fair benchmark in my eyes, but it was without a doubt the most surprising part of my review session. The astute reader will note that I said “almost” in that sentence up above. That’s because for some reason, the Sony far and away beat my Athlon 64 when it came time to add reverb to tracks. This just proves that reverb is the Devil’s Effect.
Now when I say that one is faster than the other, we need to get one thing straight: They are both way freaking fast. It’s not like I was able to go get coffee while waiting for the Sony to do its thing. The difference was measured in seconds.
For as quiet as it is, my second (and biggest) gripe with the Sony involves noise. Specifically speaking, the DVD drives are loud. Irritatingly loud. This irritation is made worse by the relative quiet-as-a-mouse behavior of the overall unit, and watching a movie is tough with the fanlike whirring noise. Sony, if you’re listening, I’m very disappointed. My mother in law was here this weekend with her new Dell laptop. It had a really quiet 24x DVD drive which I didn’t even notice. If Dell can pull it off, you need to be coming correct as well. There’s no excuse whatsoever for my mother in law having better gear than me.
Oh, and another thing: Who was the wise guy who decided to route an analog audio cable along the bottom of the case to ports on the front panel? Letting this little EMI noise inducing nightmare slide by is the workstation design equivalent of the guy who hid the penis drawing in the cover of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”. Granted, most people are going to be using the optical port for audio anyway like the good little girls and boys that they are. But those of us who care enough to plug headphones in directly curse you.
While most of the retail sites I’ve looked at offer the RA810 as a standalone unit, Sony felt that it would be logical to send a monitor along, and the one they picked deserves honorable mention. The monitor was a 51cm (that’s 20.1 inches to us fookin’ Yanks) LCD display.
There’s not much to say about the display (which for some reason I could only get to work with the Sony) that differs from the other high end LCDs out there. It looks great at its 1600×1200 native resolution and mine had no dead pixels. I give it high marks for having a really thin bezel with a small compliment of visually unobtrusive buttons, as well as a very nice built in cable management setup in the back. One DVI and two analog video ports round out the display’s options. I’ve read some flack about this monitor from video geeks (which I am not) but watching movies on it with one or two other people, there were no complaints about image quality or angle issues. It’s so choice. I highly recommend picking one up if you have the means.
The verdict: The RA810 is the quirky but thuggish love child of Darth Vader and Dr Dre which deserves consideration if you are looking for a good workstation without a lot of noise. The things that bothered me about it are non-issues for the vast majority of the people who will probably buy this computer, and it is damn fast while looking sharp. Sure, you could build one cheaper.. but it wouldn’t look as good without some extreme case modding, and it wouldn’t feature a warranty backed by a huge Japanese megacorp.
