Sony unveils ultra-powerful new Vaio Z laptops

The Gadget Show  Tuesday 19 January 2010

The fastest ultraportable around?

Sony has described its new Vaio Z series laptops as “lightning fast”, and for once we have to agree with the marketing, with truly premium performance coming in a single compact unibody design.

There’s a pair of new arrivals to get excited about – the VPCZ11Z9E and the VPCZ11X9E. The former leads the charge with a specification likely to blow any rival right out of the water.

For starters, there’s Intel’s brand new Core i7-620M processor, along with four solid-state hard drives for a total of 256GB of Quad SSD storage, which Sony claims is 6.2 times faster than a conventional hard drive.

Then there’s the 13.1in LED-backlit display, which effortlessly conjures up 1080p images, along with an Nvidia graphics card with 1GB of its own memory – leaving all 6GB of the system memory just for you.

There’s just enough room to squeeze in a DVD drive too, though there’s no Blu-ray option out of the box. The whole package comes in at a surprisingly sprightly 1.43kg.

The “lesser” X9E dials the spec madness down a touch to a twin SSD setup totalling 128GB of storage, just the 4GB of RAM and a slightly slower processor.

You’ll have to wait until the end of March to get your hands on one, and while there’s no confirmed prices yet, we suspect you’ll have to start saving too.