Sony Vaio VGC-RM1N review

You're unlikely to run out of disk space on the RM1N. The base model ships with two 500GB hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. This setup, also known as striping, asks the PC to break data into fragments and spread it across all the disks in the array. This allows multiple chunks to be read in parallel, thus improving disk access times. It's like having four separate mechanics change the wheels on your car instead of one. But the danger is that if one drive becomes damaged, the entire RAID array is destroyed, along with all those terabytes of lovely data. If you're a tad insane, or your movie collection rivals that of Ron Jeremy's, there are two vacant 3.5-inch drive bays at the rear of the base unit so you can add even more storage.

The Blu-ray drive in the access unit comes in very handy. It'll let you create backup discs with up to 25GB capacity, but be aware each disc will set you back in the region of £10. More economical backups can be made with the DVD rewriter drive, although the process of making large backups involves swapping between lots of discs -- the maximum backup size per dual-layer DVD is 8.5GB.

The PC Card slot, mentioned earlier, is a rather strange inclusion as it's more often found on laptops. In the RM1N, however, it's designed to accept a DVCPRO P2 (Professional Plug-In) card. This is a special type of solid-state memory card consisting of several individual SD memory cards linked together.

The PC Card slot at the rear can accept DVCPRO P2 plug-in cards

The RM1N's primary purpose is to edit high-definition video, so it's no surprise to find plenty of media-manipulation software pre-installed in addition to Windows Vista Business edition. It ships with Adobe Premier Pro 2.0, worth £500, along with Photoshop Elements, SonicStage Mastering Studio, WinDVD 8 and DVgate Plus -- all you need to start editing your next high-definition blockbuster.

Interestingly, Sony has included a jog controller, which never fails to make you look as if you're a true professional -- even if you're not. This works much like the iPod's Click Wheel in that it allows you to move backwards and forwards through video or audio on a frame-by-frame basis. In the box you'll also find an infrared remote control, a stylish Vaio mouse and a PS/2 keyboard -- we guess Sony didn't want a USB keyboard hogging one of the 12 USB ports littered around the machine.

Performance
Yes, it's fast. But not as fast as you might think. The RM1N racked up an impressive 7,329 in PCMark 2005, which blows over 90 per cent of desktops clean out of the water. Unfortunately it's nowhere near as fast as the Dell XPS H2C 710, which uses an overclocked Core 2 Extreme CPU. For the record, that achieved an astonishing 9,251.

Gaming isn't this PC's forte, but it doesn't shy away from a few polygons. Its Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS graphics card helped it score 5,571 in 3DMark 2006, at the default resolution of 1,024x 768 pixels. That's extremely impressive, but again it's put in the shade by the Dell XPS H2C 710. Its twin GeForce 8800 GTX cards helped it score more than twice as much: 15,299.

Conclusion
The RM1N is a well-designed PC that will appeal to video editing and encoding enthusiasts. Its swappable hard drives, excellent software package and sheer speed make it very attractive. But if raw performance is all you need, there are definitely faster PCs out there -- notably the Dell XPS H2C 710.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide