Sony VAIO PCV-RS720

The Sony VAIO PCV-RS720 is a good mainstream desktop computer system that also has some multimedia features that make it a good stepping stone for those that might be interested in a home theater PC.

2/21/05 - Sony has a history of consumer electronics and they try to carry over features between products as a selling point. It's no wonder that they have an interest in merging the home theater with their computer systems. The Sony VAIO PCV-RS720 is kind of a stepping stone between the two worlds.

Powering the RS720 is the Intel Pentium 4 530 (3GHz) processor. This is fairly common for this segment computer and does well for pretty much all tasks. It is matched up with 512MB of PC3200 DDR memory that should let it run all but the most memory intensive applications smoothly.

Storage on the RS720 is quite good. A 200GB hard drive handles the primary storage and is quite sizable for most applications. Most companies elect to include a burner and a ROM reader for optical drives in their systems, but the RS720 only features a single 16x DVD+/-RW burner. This is actually a very useful feature for burning video to DVD.

The graphics is where the RS720 differs from most mainstream computers. The integrator Intel GMA900 graphics are typical for the segment, but leave much to be desired for 3D graphics. The unique feature is the GigaPocket MPEG2 encoder/decoder with TV tuner. This allows the RS720 to function as a TV and PVR. Its kind of surprising that Sony doesn't offer the Windows XP Media Center to take more advantage of the multimedia capabilities.

In the end, the VAIO PCV-RS720 is a good mainstream desktop system that also has strong multimedia features.