Sony Vaio Z Has External Radeon Light Peak GPU

The best of both worlds for the roadwarrior and desktop replacement.

Sony has taken the wraps off its new high-end premium notebook, the new Vaio Z Series with some pretty interesting expansion options.

The Vaio Z is super-travel-ready with a weight of about 1.18 kg or 2.6 lbs and a thickness of 16.65 mm or just under 0.66 of an inch. Despite its small size, it is sturdy thanks to a carbon fibre composition.

The 13.1-inch screen has a 1600x900 resolution with an anti-reflective coating. Various configurations include Intel Core i7 processors and fast SSD storage as well as an optional secondary sheet battery gives up to 14 hours of use.

While roadwarriors will love the Vaio Z for portability and speed reason, this fancy notebook can shine with some added power thanks to a docking expansion called the Power Media Dock.

Notable about the Power Media Dock  is that it contains an AMD Radeon HD 6650M with 1GB DDR3, which takes over the graphical duties from the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000. The discrete GPU can an additional three external displays with a maximum resolution of 1920x1200 through VGA and HDMI outputs.

Besides just packing a GPU, the Power Media Dock also sports an optical drive bay that can be specified with a Blu-ray Disc or SuperMulti combo drive.

The Power Media Dock obviously has big I/O requirements with the laptop, and that is all facilitated by the architecture codenamed 'Light Peak'. Apparently, it can't be called Thunderbolt because it uses a USB connector interface rather than the DisplayPort that Apple first implemented earlier this year. When the optical-based Sony proprietary cable isn't plugged into the notebook, the port can function as a regular USB 3.0/2.0 one.

As for pricing, the premium Vaio line has never been cheap. Expect prices starting in the $2000 range and into the $3000 range depending on configuration and Power Media Dock.