Below is the CPU-Z screen shot so you can see what VAIO is working with.

A/V Encoding and Battery Life

The Sony VAIO VPCZ125GX will be run through the standard notebook/netbook test regime here at TweakTown. This includes iTunes Encoding and Media Transcoding plus Battery Eater Pro for battery life estimation. This machine will also be put through our new expanded benchmark regime with the addition of boot time, PCMark Vantage, SuperPi and Cinebench.

All systems are tested "as is", which means operating systems and drivers can and do vary and some come pre-installed with applications that may or may not affect performance. Any anti-virus or security applications are disabled and uninstalled before any testing is started as they can affect test numbers.

For the iTunes encoding test I take Stone Temple Pilots - Core CD album in MP3 format and encode it to AAC format using iTunes and time the results with a stopwatch.

All tests are performed with the system in High Performance mode with minimum CPU set to 100%.

The Sony VAIO VPCZ125GX was in the top five in performance and all of the machines ahead of it in this benchmark were gaming notebooks. The performance in this benchmark considering this is an ultraportable is excellent.

For the movie encoding test I take the Microsoft Magic of Flight VC-1 WMV video with six channel audio (1080p HD) and transcode it to XviD (1080p HD) with LAME MP3 two channel audio and a MP4 container using MediaCoder 0.7.3.4616 32-bit edition.

All tests are performed with the system in High Performance mode with minimum CPU set to 100%.

The Sony VAIO VPCZ125GX was sixth place in this test, and again all the other machines that placed ahead of it were gaming notebooks.

Battery Eater Pro is very hard on batteries, so you are likely to get more run time in the real world, depending on how you use the machine. Since we compare all laptops and netbooks the exact same way though, it creates a fair and balanced playing field for our comparisons.

For the power saving mode test I run the machine in 'Power Saver' mode with turn off display disabled and brightness set to 50%, sleep mode disabled, HDD turn off disabled and minimum CPU set to 5%.

For the performance mode test I run the machine in 'High Performance' mode with turn off display disabled and brightness set to 100%, sleep mode disabled, HDD turn off disabled and minimum CPU set to 100%. Do note that some systems even when set to 100% CPU may force drop down the clock speed when AC power is lost.

Wireless is kept enabled during all tests and nothing else unusual is disabled. Time is rounded up to the nearest minute.

The Sony VAIO VPCZ125GX put down battery life results on my Battery Eater Pro benchmarks that actually beat the ViewBook Pro that had TWO batteries. The VAIO is simply the best notebook I have ever tested when it comes to battery life.

We measured boot time using a stopwatch and timed from the point we turned the system on until the very first point the desktop was reached and fully loaded.

This is a new benchmark we'll be including hereon in all notebook and AIO desktop reviews. The SSD certainly helped the VAIO in this benchmark.