Sony Vaio RA104 review

With its slick black finish and contemporary design, it's clear that Sony wants the Vaio RA104 to be more than just another desktop PC.

The company is hoping that this will be more of a home entertainment centre rather than a computer for the back room. To this end, the PC ships with a wireless media receiver, wireless access point and WiFi PC Card. All three use 802.11g, which is suitable for streaming video.

The desktop comes preloaded with the Vaio Media Server software. It's used to stream music, photos and videos to other Vaio PCs and Network Media servers. It's populated with playlists from third-party software on your PC, such as SonicStage, so those with large libraries in other applications have some work ahead.

It can also be used to stream TV thanks to the TV tuner. Only an analogue card is provided at the moment. A 250GB hard disk provides enough storage space for a large digital media collection, plus plenty of room for recording TV.

It's a slick system and a good way to get media into the living room. However, similar results can be achieved with other products, such as the Philips Streamium SL300i (see page 44). For anyone who already owns a PC it's cheaper and easier to buy a product such as this.

Sony hasn't ignored the RA104's standard desktop features. A powerful Pentium 4 560 processor running at 3.6GHz backed up by 1GB of RAM provides the basis of a meaty system. These components scored 5,393 in PCMark04 and 130 in our Computer Shopper benchmarks.

Unfortunately, the graphics score wasn't quite as good due to the ATI Radeon X600 XT graphics card. Despite being PCI Express, it's quite slow and scored just 4,145 in 3DMark03. A score of 13.3fps in Doom 3 means detail settings and resolution have to be turned down to play.

Most of the rest of the PC makes up for this. The front panels hide all the connectors you could need, including USB, FireWire, PC Card (for the WiFi adaptor) and S-video out. There's also a memory card reader and a DVD+/-RW DL drive.

The real shame is that there's no monitor provided. We were also disappointed with the uncomfortable mouse included.

The price is also difficult to get past. However, when you consider that it includes all the wireless kit and the network receiver, it's not so bad. The Vaio RA104 certainly provides a lot for your money.