Sony has followed yesterday's announcement of a Blu-ray Disc drive-equipped Vaio notebook by touting a desktop fitted with the same next-generation optical disc system capable of reading and writing 50GB dual-layer BDs.

The Vaio RC204 also contains a 3.2GHz Pentium D 940, a Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT with 256MB of graphics memory and an Sony-made HD audio chip, the Sound Reality Direct Stream Digital (DSD). Pitched as a HD content creation system, the Vaio is configurable at purchase with up to 600GB of storage supplied by two 300GB units in a RAID 0 set-up.

The machine will ship with Sony's usual bundled of Adobe software: the cut-down Elements versions of Photoshop, Acrobat and Premiere, the latter the developer's video editing tool. The machine also ships with DVgate Plus 2.2 for capturing HD video and Ulead BD DiscRecorder for burning it to BD-R/RE. Buyers will also find Roxio DigitalMedia SE 7 and Intervideo WinDVD BD on board.

Sony didn't say when the machine is scheduled to ship, or how much it will cost, but we'd expect it to arrive late June for around £1,700. ®