Nice find.  I’m glad to see the ‘S series’ evolving so well.  I hate to go bigger on my next laptop, but that gadget has me thinking twice considering the slow developments on the ‘U series’.

Out of curiousity and based on benchmarks in this article , I decided to see how good the performance of the Sonoma chipset with the new Nvidia 6200 chipset is.

Mind you, this is an F/FS model but it’s using the same CPU, chipset, graphics chip as the High-Spec S92 model. So, I think it’s a fair comparison.

I’m testing my VGN-S170P (at 1.7GHz) and Radeon 9700 against the numbers in that review of the Type F/FS with Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz) and the GeForce Go 6200 TC. I figure these systems are fairly close in specifications in terms of clock speed. Technically, the F/FS should be faster with the faster memory and tiny clock advantage. I used the stock S drivers on my S170P so there’s funny business involved.

I don’t have all the benchmarks since I don’t have all of the programs they used.

3DMark 2001SE - 1024x768 @ 32-bit - 3DMarks

VGN-FS70B - 9,065
VGN-S170P - 10,470

3DMark 2003 - 1024x768 @ 32-bit - 3DMarks / CPUMarks

VGN-FS70B - 2,120 / 671
VGN-S170P - 2,653 / 668

Quake III Arena - fps
I’m assuming they ran the standard timedemos. I’m not sure if it was demo 1 or 2 but regardless, the scores were about the same for each time demo.

640x480
VGN-FS70B - 293.3
VGN-S170P - 325.4

800x600
VGN-FS70B - 215.6
VGN-S170P - 253.5

1024x768
VGN-FS70B - 141.4
VGN-S170P - 202.1

So, one could argue that the good old ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 is a superior part and the High-Spec S92 really isn’t all that high. The 9700 has the advantage of extra “real” memory and that seems a little evident in the 1024x768 Quake III benchmark where the margin difference grows markedly. So, even with the newer chipset with a faster memory subsystem and marginally faster CPU, the S series is still equally capable despite using “older” technology. So, owners of current S’s probably won’t have much envy for the new Sonoma based S’s other than the fact that it can come in a silver finish. 

The S92 does bring SO-DIMM DDR2 to the table as well as SATA 2.5” hard disk support. However, those are two technologies that aren’t necessarily readily available and affordable.

Thanks gr00vy0ne for the information!!!
Really feel so glad to see that as I have just got my UK specs S2XP two weeks ago and I was really feeling the ‘pain’ to see the Sonoma being released and Sony annouced the new S series straight right afterward… Anyway, good to hear that the different is NOT that singnificant!  :wink:

Patrick

Sorry, anonymous poster, I do not play online games.  No time.  I have found that TruthSeeker is a common online user ID.  So much for me trying to be creative. :wink:

Whew!  I thought my recent purchase of S360 is going to be obsolete in some months.. thanks a lot gr00vy0ne..  Actually I was aware of the release of this FS version from Sony, more like a replacement for the F series or FRVs.. but the moment I read the article at Cnet.com (CES) geesh its video memory is shared, I said nevermind.. plus its weight is a pound more.. AND it’s a bit bigger, I can’t hide that on my backpack bag.. hehe..

You make a good point. The F/FS models aren’t meant to be some high end model. Based on the price point, it’s actually an affordable thin/light system. The US released FS actually has inferior specs since it’s using integrated Intel GMA 900 instead of the 6200TC which is an option some of the Japanese Domestic models.