Internals
The interior of the Sony is quite compact. Storage comes courtesy of a couple of 250GB 7,200rpm Seagate Barracuda hard disks, with 8GB saved for a recovery partition. The processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, which runs at 2.13GHz, and 1GB of memory is provided. It's a decent combination and there are even two free slots for adding more RAM.
The graphics chipset is an nVidia GeForce 7600 GTL with 256MB of DDR3 RAM, which means that you could conceivably play games on this machine. The GTL indicates that this is not a mainstream card - not many cards have passive cooling with HDCP and an HDMI connection. The CPU and the graphics card use passive coolers, as does the chipset, which helps to make an impressively quiet system. My Sky + box is certainly louder than this Sony machine.
We pulled out the Blu-ray drive to take a closer look. It's a low-profile, laptop drive with an adaptor board on the back to take a full-size SATA cable and a floppy power cable. It's slot-loading. Is it the most expensive optical drive in the world?
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