It was back in August when Evan asked me to pick a Sony product that would enhance my productivity. At first I thought of getting the MFM-HT205 (20” wide screen LCD/TV), which up to now, I still haven’t seen any that matches the specs for the same price. The lowest I’ve seen on Froogle is $679.00, not a very high WAF (wife approval factor) rating but still worth it. After telling Evan this, he said to try and see if I can find a system that’s close to the price range. By the way we started working on Greater Good TV early June and we all became like hyper-threading processors, multi-tasking and all that, pretty exciting. Basically my main responsibilities now are the audios and the soon to be launched online videos, among other things. So from audio to video, thus the hardware upgrades. I was really surprised when Evan told me that he would be getting the RC310G, I found some nice models that would do the job under $1,500 but he said we might as well get the higher end model and the boss was right, overall it’s far out!
I got the system first week of September and it came in a huge box. The package included a Logitech X-530 5.1 speaker set, wireless keyboard and mouse (RF) and an MCE remote control. And yes, it came with one of its cool features, the Blu-ray disc.
I’ve been using the system since then and so far I’ve never had one of those days where it was totally working against me. I have gathered a few pros and cons which I hope will help anyone planning to get one, no cons really but anyway without further ado;
The power you need for the most demanding A/V applications.
– Delivered as advertised. Like me, if you’re going to use it for work, you’ll get a good performance for editing audio / video with this system as is right out of the box.
– Intel Pentium D 940 Processor 3.2 GHz Dual Core; need I say more
– 2 GB DDR2 memory; the balance of memory and processor couldn’t be much sweeter. I’ve tried compressing a video while burning a DVD (files coming in from another PC on the network), playing music while browsing, batch resizing some images, an open spread sheet, downloading videos from ftp site and 3 instant messengers running. All at the same time, at the middle of burning I thought that it would bail out but it didn’t. It took about 20 minutes for it to finish 160 3072×2304 pictures resized to 800×600, 4 GB of data burned with all the other stuff running. I was expecting it to crash but it didn’t even blink. Yes the data on the DVD is intact. This is not my everyday routine but sometimes it’s even more grueling and in those times, the RC310G has never failed me.
Advanced Cooling and Acoustic Technology
– When they say quite and cool, it really means quite, except for the glowing VAIO logo, you won’t be able to tell if it’s powered on.
Casing
– the construction and layout is superb. I added 3 more hard drives and installing it was easy, just pop open the metallic gray cover on the right side, remove the tray, screw in the drive and put it back in, that’s it. You don’t have to open the whole case. SATA cables are color coded, can’t go wrong.
– Having the hard drive bay away from the mother board is genius. At first I thought that the hole at the back of the metallic gray block was just to make it easy to carry or something but it’s actually the air intake for the drive bay and the radiator for the processor. Well designed simply put.
Notes;
– First model to come out with the Blu-ray R/W, now it’s still not that widely used but it’s cool to have one. Movies are coming out in Blu-ray but it’s still on the pricy side compared to DVDs and not that many titles available. For use on data backup, yes it can hold up to 50 GB but right now buying hard drives will still come out cheaper. But when the Blu-ray disc price goes down, I’m definitely using it.
– The MCE remote control, well not Sony’s fault, but the rewind and fast forward don’t work. It’s lame I hope Microsoft is working on an update for this.
– The wireless mouse is accurate and the battery consumption is average. The keyboard though won’t work 2 inches away from the receiver even on new batteries, so yes it looks like a wired keyboard. I wish Sony packed this with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse set and the MFM-HT205 (20” wide screen LCD/TV)
For a detailed specs go to http://www.sonystyle.com
I hope this helps if you’re planning to buy one either you use it as a media server or your work PC, the RC310G is definitely worth it. If you think that, ok she’s fast; with some tweaks on the OS, it’s mind blowing. Well at least before the quad cores come out. I’ll definitely write about the “tweaks” I made.