Sony Media Center PC Well-Suited for the Office

When we heard that Sony was shipping a "liquid-cooled" PC, visions of pumps, hoses and thermal fluid danced in our heads. As it turns out, Sonys new VAIO RA-810G uses a more prosaic heat-pipe solution to cooling the 3.4GHz, Prescott-based Pentium 4 processor.

We were also intrigued, however, because the RA-810G uses Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition as its operating system. Weve reviewed Media Center PCs in the past, including the Gateway FMC-901X and Dell 4600C. Alas, Gateway seems to have stopped shipping the FMC-901X, which was one of the better living room PCs weve encountered from a major OEM. Dell offers Windows Media Center edition now on most of its PCs, with the apparent exception of the trim 4600C.

Home theater PCs (HTPCs) are becoming less viable as time goes on, mainly due to the growing number of standalone DVRs and digital set-top boxes that will do the same thing and look better in the living room to boot. So this new Sony VAIO seems targeted squarely at home offices and dorm rooms, where a "do-everything" PC makes sense. Does Sonys Swiss Army Knife approach work? We take the 810G for a spin to find out. The new VAIOs chassis offers clean, spare lines, without much embellishment. Its most distinguishing feature from the outside is that it appears to be a small box atop a larger box, separated by a channel nearly large enough to pass an arm through.

Heres the VAIO RA-810Gs component inventory: