Vaio Y-Series: The Madness & The Tiny Laptop

A while back, I (Asatiir) was participating in a competition that involved talking about AMD’s APU, where we were given Vaio Y-Series (VPCYB15AG) netbooks to play around and talk about, basically we get free netbooks, they get publicity and free marketing win-win situation. I set up a separate blog for it here, I didn’t win but I kept the netbook as it was a gift from my buddies over at AMD. While the netbook in its “out of the box” state wasn’t exactly that impressive, it came with Windows 7 starter pack (32-bit), 2 gigabytes worth of RAM and regular hard disk. I took a further step in making the machine run faster, since it was AMD powered with a gpu, I downloaded AMD’s Catalyst driver that helps optimize GPU performance and make it more efficient, alongside the obvious upgrades likes an SSD, 8 gigabytes of ram and a clean install of Windows 7 home edition 64-bit.

What was special about this netbook was in fact the APU that it was running, a brief explanation is that an APU is a chip that does both the CPU processes and the GPU work together, giving better performance and power efficient results. In short, I’m getting more out of a netbook and costing less battery power.

Being absolutely clear, we have had a netbook with the exact same hardware that we promised to go through games to see how it does, the problem we had was we weren’t exactly sure whether or not we were allowed to alter anything, we were stuck with the regular hard disk, the 2GB RAM and the bloatware filled windows 7 32-bit starter pack. The Vaio on the other hand I had the green light to go crazy, so if you were planning to get the hp Pavilion DM1, you would probably (and most likely) get the exact same result as I did with the Vaio if you do the exact same modifications.

Before I went forward with my upgrades, I made a benchmark to see how the netbook fares out of the box, I gave Dirt 2 a go with its benchmark (I did not have Dirt 3 at the time):

Average FPS was 23.4 and the minimum was 14.8, remember that I’m running the game on very low settings (it is a netbook after all), even with the low settings it looked sort of decent.

Here’s the same benchmark after the modifications:

While the average FPS is slightly high and closer to 30 fps, check out the minimum, 21.6, that’s closer to the previous average FPS. The closer the minimum FPS is to the average, the better the performance, you get a more consistent frame rate that does not bounce around very often, so the modifications did pay off.

Here are pics of the netbook during the modification phase:

The modifications did cost me a pretty penny, SSDs don’t come cheap.

I have also tried several other games, and had very promising results, both Halflife 2 and Devil May Cry 4 ran fluidly at constant frame rates ranging between 30 and 40 FPS. Obviously I had to take the graphical settings down for Devil May Cry 4 to keep that kind of  frame range, but Halflife2 worked fine without that many tweakdowns.

Devil May Cry 4:

Halflife 2:

That’s with a few old games, now to try out with something more recent, Bastion obviously ran well, it even looked better than what I played on the 360, the imagery looked immensely sharper. Bastion however is a 2D game, I decided to play something a little heft, Skyrim!

I had to go in and heavily tweak the graphical settings (involves playing with the ini file and reducing the resolution down to 800 x 480 pixels), framerate ranges are very high, in the outdoors it would be around 20 frames per second and 10 in towns, but sky rockets up to 40 in houses, dungeons and castles. The game doesn’t seem to be taxing on the hardware either, the fans stay fairly quiet with battery life of 2.5 hours unplugged.

Sources say that PS1 games (emulation) should be playable on this netbook, I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m planning to do so very soon.

I wouldn’t recommend anyone to do anything as drastic as I did with this netbook, while the netbook is cheap but totaling the price of it with the modifications you really are better off getting a mid range laptop with better specs. That being said, I wish I had this netbook with me back when I was stranded in that backwater island in Kerala. Its form factor is another thing I really like about it, it has easily become my 11.6″ portable Skyrim player and I am really happy about it. I will be experimenting more with this netbook hoping I’d get more positive results. Sadly, we won’t continue with the pavilion dm1 list, but we might continue with this netbook. Remember, we are not saying that one netbook is better than the other, both netbooks are running the same hardware and will get similar results with either netbooks or any netbook running the exact same hardware. So let us know what games would you like us to try out, we won’t make a fully blown list, we might do this on a demand basis.

Edit: We have made a group in the forums for these kind of netbooks, due to some system limitations, you need to be registered in order to see it. We will keep posting on our main page though, the group can be seen here

 More tests here

Mohammad AlHuraiz

Founder, editor and host of Lochal Archade. Mohammad has been running Lochal Archade for years and working hard in bringing video game-related content to the UAE and the Middle East as a whole.

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