Sony VAIO Z13 review

With Core i5 laptops available for as little as £500, the price at the top of this page is enough to make anyone wince. Sony’s VAIO Z Series is unashamedly expensive. At nearly £1,600 exc VAT – and that’s for the bottom of the range model – this is a laptop that only a precious, deep-pocketed few will even be able to contemplate buying.

And if you’re expecting something designed along MacBook Pro lines, or even HP’s Envy range, the Sony just doesn’t look like nigh-on two grand of laptop. If you’re the kind of person who likes your premium-priced purchases to look exactly that, you’re likely to be underwhelmed. Painted top-to-toe in aluminium and grey, the Z13 looks smart but ultimately unremarkable.

It is pleasingly compact, though. The 13.1in display and lithe build make for a slender physique and it’s feather-light at just 1.4kg, just a little heavier than your average 10in netbook. That it also feels stiff and sturdy, barring that ever-flexible lid, is impressive for such a portable piece of kit.

Indeed, picking up the Z13 is a disconcerting experience. With many expensive products reassuring as to their value with a weighty feel, the Sony feels barely there. Before you press the on button it’s easy to speculate that someone forgot to put anything inside the chassis at all.

Unlike many ultraportables, the Z13 isn’t hobbled by a low-voltage, low-power processor. Instead, even this lowliest model of the range is well equipped for such a waif. The 2.53GHz Core i5-460M processor is accompanied by two 64GB SSDs lashed together to form a 128GB RAID0 array, while Nvidia’s GeForce GT330M graphics chipset sits alongside. With a result of 1.64 in our benchmarks, the Sony outperforms the majority of far bigger laptops we’ve tested, and it managed a perfectly good 55fps in our Low quality Crysis test.

Turn your attention to graphics performance and the Sony has a trick up its sleeve. Nvidia’s Optimus graphics-switching technology is nowhere to be seen, but Sony’s dual-graphics arrangement is arguably more flexible: a three-way rocker switch flicks between the Nvidia chip, Intel’s HD graphics and an automatic mode that switches between the two according to whether you’re running on mains or battery power. Where Nvidia’s Optimus makes all the decisions, Sony’s system hands the choice to the user, and for such a high-end yet portable laptop it’s a sensible approach.