Digital Trends

Sony PCV-W20 April 13th, 2003 | by Logan Lindquist

When looking over the following benchmarks, you will see that the Sony VAIO PCV-W20 performs average overall when compared to our reference systems. Where the PCV-W20 really hurts is in the graphics department making this system better suited to applications other than gaming.

Application performance is average and the Intel Pentium 4 1.8 GHz processor is a lot stronger than the previous models Intel Celeron 1.6 GHz CPU. Sony's in house software performed adaquately while being tested.

The PCV-W20 comes preloaded with multiple multimedia applications suited for video editing, digital imaging and other multimedia projects. AMD might sell their 1.8 GHz processor as performing with 2.2 GHz performance but the PCV-W20 closely trails the AMD reference system. We feel that this benchmark would have the same result regardless of the system and is thus showing the raw processor speeds rather than overall system performance.

The PCV-W20 system comes equipped with a Samsung Spin Point SV0602H hard drive which has an ATA 100 interface and runs at 5400RPM. While we would have liked to have seen a higher performing drive, we can only assume that Sony chose this particular drive and speed to keep heat temperatures down due to the systems small enclosure. The PCV-W20's hard drive performance edged out our reference system using the same ATA 100 interface and RPM speed and performed well above our ATA 66 7200RPM system as well.  

The Sony VAIO PCV-W20 uses DDR PC2100 memory in its system. Our testing showed that the PCV-W20 performed better than our VIA KT266 test system running memory of comparable speed and even nipped on the heals of our Intel 850 reference system which sports CAS 2 PC800 RDRAM memory. While the PCV-W20's DDR memory is running at a faster speed than the Intel 850 system, RDRAM memory is known to push more bandwidth due to its architecture.