Review: Sony Vaio VGX-TP2B home entertainment PC

It’s fair to say that home entertainment PCs tend towards an unorthodox design.

They need to be able to fit in with people’s hi-fi and television equipment, as well as with the design of their living rooms, rather than being stuck away under a desk.

As a result, manufacturers often come up with weird and wonderful chassis designs.

Sony is no different, with its new VGX-TP2B system resembling a hatbox or some sort of ersatz ornament.

While it looks odd at first sight, its cylindrical shape is actually quite space-efficient and, being a Sony device, it’s very well designed.

The front of the case (or, being circular, one section of it) houses a combined Blu-ray reader and multi-DVD writer (this includes the ability to read and write DVD-Ram discs), two USB ports, a mini-Firewire 400 socket and two memory card readers (one for SD-sized cards and one for Sony’s own Memory Stick format).

The computer is loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium, which includes the excellent Windows Media Center software that forms the heart of the computer as an entertainment device.

It comes with a decent Windows Media Center remote control, so you can run things from the comfort of the sofa without the need for a keyboard or mouse. A compact and light wireless keyboard is included, but there’s no mouse – instead you get a touchpad at the bottom of the keyboard.

An Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 clocked at 2.1GHz drives the computer and sits alongside 2GB of DDR2-667 memory. That was enough to lift it to a respectable 5.1 score in the Windows Experience Index and 5,590 in PCmark05.

Graphics are less impressive. There’s an Nvidia Geforce 8400M GT card installed, with 256MB of video memory, which, although decent enough for watching and editing video, isn’t up to much when it comes to playing games. The unspectacular 3Dmark05 score of 3,101 backs this up.

Still, a computer such as this is very much designed with video and audio playback in mind, and it includes a couple of nifty features to that end.

There’s a wired Ethernet socket along with 802.11b/g wireless. It has a hybrid (digital/analogue terrestrial) TV tuner with a socket on the back of the case for an antenna connection. Also on the back are a composite/S-video output, two more USB ports, a VGA socket, audio input and output, and an HDMI port for outputting 1080p high-definition content to compatible TVs.

Four USB ports isn’t much these days, but again, home entertainment PCs are less likely than standard desktops and notebooks to have lots of devices hanging off them.

There’s a digital optical (S/PDIF) sound output, but other than that there’s only a two-channel stereo output and microphone socket, so if you want surround sound, you’ll need to go through the optical connection to an amplifier; those with dedicated surround-sound speaker systems without optical inputs will be stuck.

Home entertainment PCs are designed to be left on much of the time and, drawing a maximum of 120W, this one won’t cost the earth in electricity bills if you do so. It’s also fairly quiet – there’s a low hum, but it’s not too annoying and you certainly won’t hear it while watching a movie or listening to music.

At £900, the TP2B is fairly expensive for a Windows Media Center PC (see the £320 Philips LRPC7500 for a cheaper, if less stylish, alternative), but it packs a lot of power and plenty of features into its small and round case.

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