Blog

In this article, I give you my VAIO SX12 (2019) review with specs included. The full name of my model is VAIO SX12 (2019) VJS121X0311A.

This is the VAIO SX 12 if you haven’t seen my other articles about vaio in the last couple of years it’s his own company now. Sony sold them off and then became a separate entity. This thing is so small it’s so light one point nine nine pounds which is 0.9 kilograms.

So they even a full kilogram. And 18 millimeters at its thickest point. So you figure it’s gonna be compromised right in a world where there aren’t many twelve point five inch all true bucks on the market anymore usually your ports are gone everything else.

No I mean this one has a whole lot of ports on even BGA for business people. Because they do target business people. Three USB a ports USB C Ethernet HDMI nice. We’re gonna look at it now. But wait there’s more of course it has a headphone jack on it and a full-size SD card slot.

This has a carbon fiber casing. Discover the keyboard deck which is aluminum and it’s dyed aluminum and all that sort of stuff. So this is not gonna be something that fades or something like that. Carbon fiber on the bottom and unidirectional carbon fiber on the top which apparently is a thing.

It looks a little bit more attractive when the strands go in one direction and also it’s supposed to be a bit more rigid. So it’s available in three colors a matte black that we have it’s also available in silver a pink rose gold they probably call it.

And there’s gonna be a limited edition cutting color which is Japanese from this really nice indigo blue. And then each one of those is hand done and hand dyed that sort of thing. That one is a glossy finish unlike this one which is a matte finish.

So with the violine they tend to target business consumers and I’m not sure why. I mean this is a laptop for anybody granted. It’s available with your choice of a full HD or a 4k display it’s mattes IPS so displays. We have the full HD model here.

Not touch so if you want to touch that’s not for you. One of the good things that they’ve done though is they have expanded the keyboard out so it reaches just about to the very size edges. So no more kind of cramped keyboard with of ios X line.

We reviewed the VAIO SX 14 the 14 inch model and this one actually has better ratio. The trackpad is still small on this but it doesn’t look as small because this is relatively speaking a more tiny laptop. Compared to today’s oversized trackpads it’ll probably strike you as being on the small side.

Does have two dedicated clickers. Face model with the core i5 that ones start in a full HD display. Starts at 1199. So the price isn’t that terrifying. Of course you can option it up if you want to get a really big SSD or Core i7 you get the idea.

Of the 4k display then you can push it up to like it’s $2,000. And if you want the limited edition color who knows what that one’s gonna cost. But anyway overall our competitive price. So carbon fiber is very durable. You probably know this by now.

But also it’s more flexible which means it can impact without cracking and breaking. But there are still people back from the days when Sony made BIOS who freaked out because you have lid flex. That’s just the way carbon fibers design.

If you go to Vaio’s youtube challenge you can see the rigorous test they put this thing through bending for us all that sort of stuff. So I’m not worried about it. Back to the keyboard key travel and this is not really very deep because it’s such a thin small laptop but it’s not egregiously small in terms of travel. It has better feel actually than the Dell XPS 13 in terms of key travel and key feel.

The tactile this is nice. It’s got white backlighting on it. One of the VAIO signature things and i kind of like it they still do their own thing is when you open it up that the bottom edge of the lid kind of props up the keyboard for a more ergonomic and comfortable typing experience.

A little thing like that but you know it’s worth mentioning. The display others and actually didn’t measure as well as I thought. Looking and it looked pretty nice. I thought this would be your standard nearly full srgb coverage of this bike. It didn’t quite hit that four color gamut it’s a little narrower than usual which is a little bit disappointing.

Although like I said to look at it you might not guess that. Brightness is pretty good on the rest of the specs or fine on it. Unfortunately we didn’t get the 4k one into test so I can’t tell you how that one measures. I would expect probably higher gamut on that though usually with 4k displays they up all the specs of it.

In terms of performance is available with Core i5 and i7 late 8th generation whiskey leg quad-core cpus. These r15 want Ultrabook cpus inside of here. It’s too small to put anything more powerful in there. And Intel UHD 620 integrated graphics. Again too small for something like dedicated graphics.

You can get it with either 8 or 16 gigs of low-power ddr3 RAM and that is soldered on board. It has a m2 socketed nvme SSD available native capacities. So in terms of heating noise. I mean this is an ultrabook this is not a gaming laptop you’re not going to have the world’s loudest laptop here it’s not going to burn you.

Particularly that’s one of the benefits of carbon fiber it doesn’t get very hot to the touch the way metal laptops do. And they’ve got a nice little heat cage over the CPU heatsink in fact to to kind of absorb the heat a little bit. So it’s fine in terms of surface temperatures.

In terms of noise is also fine. It has a fairly small but nice quality fan on it and you like hearing if you push it hard you know more than a wall. It’s probably not gonna bother you. The core temperatures do get up there because this is you know a good amount of performance squeezed into a small spot. Nothing dangerous or worrisome for the health of the CPU but you’ll see core temperatures go into the lower 90s if you’re really really pushing it hard.

So you’re trying to export 4k video which is not really something ideally an ultrabook is meant to do but yeah. If you’re buying for business used social media streaming video some number crunching even even for some coding it’s perfectly fine for that.

And then core temperatures are reasonable their. Battery life though you know and if part of the way they get these so small is with the small battery. 35 watt hour battery is not a very high capacity battery. And this is how the SX line rolls. You have a 45 watt relatively compact charger on employment. They claim up to 10 hours of battery life it’s gonna be really hard to do that.

Just running it on the normal default balanced power profile plan with a full HD display and we have the Core i7 model it more like five and a half hours yeah. That’s about it with 115 it’s of brightness and Wi-Fi on and active. So open this up and get inside and there actually are just by the fact this is so thin and light things you can do when you get inside here.

Remove a whole lot of Phillips head screws you can see where the holes are. Note that the ones at the front are slightly smaller screw so keep track of those when you put it back together. And just like the bigger of ios X 14 that we reviewed after you do that do not try to pull the lid off.

What you’re gonna do is use a guitar pick around the edge to pry off and you’re actually gonna lift up the keyboard deck instead. Which is pretty easy to do probably with the guitar pick. Now there is one big ribbon cable so be careful of that.

Yeah we’re just gonna rest the keyboard over here you don’t really have to worry about detaching the ribbon cable. Here’s our m2 SSD this is our socket and Wi-Fi card often ones is teeny this Wi-Fi card soldered some good stuff that. This slot over here you might notice it’s a little hard to see but that would be for the Japanese version where you have optional 4G LTE.

But that’s not an option for the US version of this allowance. So under here this is actually the processor heatsink. There’s no RAM slots or anything. Ram is soldered on board here like it is on many of today’s ultrabooks. And this is just a little heat shield here. And we have a small thin and a metal cage one’s kind of classy.

And are not terribly high-capacity battery here. So that’s the vo SX 12. A kind of refreshing miraculously small and light ultrabook with usable usual Ultrabook performance and an amazing number of ports. It’s just it’s nice that they’re still doing their own thing you know what I mean. And starting at $11.99 it’s not gonna break the bank either granted if you want to option it up of course you can easily spend $1500 or more that sort of thing. But stuff it’s good stuff for the price.