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Sony VAIO VGC-RM1N HD workstation

Make and edit your own HD movies

Sony VAIO VGC-RM1N HD workstation
Sony supplies the RM1N with a whopping 1TB of storage

Using a combination of this huge cooler with its associated ducting and the passively cooled bridges on the motherboard, Sony has been able to use a small fan to keep the CPU cool, which helps keep the RM1N remarkably quiet in operation - well, that is until you give it some serious encoding to do, but considering the job it's doing a little noise is the price you have to pay.

Behind the cooler at the back of the chassis sits a drive cage that can hold two drives. The position of this drive cage had us going for a while as it's not possible to use the SATA ports on the board. Then it suddenly struck us, with two free PCI slots and a single x4 PCI-E slot free you could use one of them to add an internal SATA card to control any drive(s) you put in this cage - although good luck hunting for a PCI-E card of any sort. The two free PCI slots are handy if you want to turn your RM1N into a full HD media centre as, because of the size of the case, the slots will accept full size card. Just add one or two TV cards and away you go.

Back to the theme of storage, Sony supplies the RM1N with 1TB. Yep, that's one Terabyte of storage in the form of two 500GB, 7,200rpm drives built into a RAID 0 array for speed housed in the front drive cage.

If you need more storage, the cage can hold up to four drives. Accessing this front drive bay cage is a bit involved as you have to take off the front of the system box to get at it. A small push panel on either end releases the front bezel; once this is removed you are faced by the drive bay outer cover. A small latch to the left of the cover locks it in place. Once this cover is removed you are faced by yet another removable plate, and once this is out of the way you can access the drives.

There's been a lot of thought in the design of the drive enclosures themselves. The drives are side mounted - as you might find in some servers - and by sliding the locking latch each individual drive assembly is freed. To access (or mount) the hard drive, you have to undo four small screws, which release the locking plate mechanism. The drive enclosure has rubber built into it which forms a very snug fit for the drive and helps to reduce drive vibration and, therefore, reduce noise.

It sounds a more complicated procedure than it actually is. Graphics are powered by a nVidia GeForce 8600GTS card with 256MB of dedicated memory, and while it's not going to get any hard core gamers' juices flowing its more than adequate to play games with - as proven by its 3DMark05 score of 10144 and 3DMark06 score of 6962.

Next page: Verdict

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