Sony Vaio PGC-RC204 review

If you haven't already heard about Blu-ray, don't worry, you will soon.

It's the next generation of optical drive - named after the colour of the laser used to read the discs - and the marketing machine will kick into high gear in the months leading up to Christmas. Blu-ray discs can hold up to 50GB of data, compared to 8.5GB for a DVD, which makes them ideal for back ups. The real push, however, is from Hollywood, since Blu-ray discs are perfect for carrying the enormous files involved in delivering high quality, high-definition video.

Copy protection

There are a couple of catches, though. Firstly, the Blue-ray standard isn't completely finalised and no one is sure whether it, or the competing and non-compatible HD-DVD, will win out as the high-definition movie format of choice. Secondly, Blu-ray movies are also expected to contain some kind of copyright-protection mechanism based on digital rights management (DRM), which means you'll only be able to play them with suitable DRM-equipped hardware.

Which leads us onto the Sony Vaio PGC-RC204. Since Sony is one of the main movers behind Bu-ray, it's no surprise that this PC has a Blu-ray drive and it can use both write-once (BD-R) and rewritable (BD-RE) Blu-ray discs. Given that the discs currently cost around £15 apiece though, they're an expensive backup medium.

Since it doesn't come with a monitor and won't look out of place in a living room, the Vaio is ideal as a media centre PC. It has Windows XP Media Center Edition installed and can be connected to an HDTV via the nVidia GeForce 7600 GT's HDMI-enabled DVI port. The card also contains the necessary DRM hardware to cope with encrypted Blu-ray movies, making this a perfect home entertainment PC.

If you bought the Vaio just to watch films though, you'd be wasting your money, since it has a prodigious amount of processing power. Its processor is a nippy 3.2GHz Pentium D 940 and with 1GB of RAM, it scored a healthy 139% in our benchmarks. With a demanding task like video editing (even high-definition video), the Vaio will really shine.

Exceptionally tempting

The Vaio's two 300GB hard disks are set up as a mirrored RAID array, with one disk automatically duplicating everything that's written to the other. Apart from some performance benefits (particularly for video editing), this means that you'll never need to worry about a backup if one hard disk should fail.

For a PC that's designed to handle all your multimedia requests, the RC204 has a slightly odd choice of TV tuner. It's a DVB-T card that allows you to pick up Freeview channels, but it's single-tuner card means that you won't be able to watch one channel while recording another. An nVidia 7600 GT card is also included, which scored a respectable 88% in our 3D benchmarks.

The RC204 is an extremely ambitious PC, but don't just buy it for its Blu-ray drive. This is a beautifully designed system, with a wealth of powerful components and if you have the money to spend, it's a tempting choice. Given the difficulty we had in getting even an unprotected Blu-ray movie to play though, we'd advise waiting before buying your first HD-ready PC.