Product Listing

Sony VAIO Z Series - VGNZ17GN Explored

By Aloysius Low - 25 Sep 2008

Performance Benchmarking

Performance Benchmarking

Here comes our favorite part of the article, where we take our review machine, crunch some numbers and then compare the results against similarly specced notebooks to see how well they perform. As always, it's not possible to find notebooks that match each other spec for spec, so we've taken the liberty of selecting a range of notebooks to see how the VAIO VGN-Z17GN holds up.

Notebook Comparison Table
Specifications / Notebook Sony VAIO VGN-Z17GN HP Pavilion dv3000 Dell XPS M1330
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo processor P9500 (2.53GHz) with 6MB L2 cache Intel Core 2 Duo processor T9500 (2.6GHz) with 6MB L2 cache Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7700 (2.4GHz) with 4MB L2 cache
Chipset Intel GM45 Intel PM965 Intel PM965
FSB 1066MHz 800MHz 800MHz
Memory 2 x 2GB DDR3 2 x 2GB DDR2 2 x 1GB DDR2
HDD 1 x Toshiba 320GB SATA (MK3252GSX 5400RPM / 8MB Buffer 1 x Hitachi 250GB SATA (HTS54252K9SA00) 5400RPM / 8MB Buffer 1 x Seagate 160GB SATA (ST9160823AS) - 7200RPM / 8MB Buffer
Video NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS

System Benchmarking

Putting the notebook through our standard PCMark05 and PCMark Vantage showed that the VGN-Z17GN was a unit that delivered on the performance aspect. As can be expected, the CPU scores were up there with the other similar processors and its other results either did better or were pretty close to the other machines compared. You'll note that we included the results of our benchmarking done for both modes and found a slight reduction in scores in the Stamina mode due to the use of the integrated graphics chip.

PCMark05's System score for the VAIO Z notebook in Speed mode came up tops due to the overall hardware package, which was also helped by the unit having 4GB worth of speedy DDR3 RAM. The differences between the two modes were also much more obvious in the PCMark Vantage test when you look at the Gaming scores.

Gaming Benchmarking

This was where it got really interesting. While 3DMark06 scores were on par with what we know of the NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS, it was our Quake 4 benchmarking results that really left us baffled as the VGN-Z17GN recorded a higher frame rate in the Speed mode with multi-core option turned off as compared to when the option was turned on. We've tried to isolate the problem but were unable to ascertain the issue that caused such a huge difference in results.

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