Call it a bikini minitower: Sony Electronics' new Vaio desktop PC chassis has a gap or air intake in the middle instead of the front. Combined with a liquid-cooled heat exchanger and smaller, efficient fans, Sony says, the black case's airflow design drastically reduces ambient noise to increase enjoyment of AV applications -- like Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, newly integrated with Sony's own Giga Pocket TV tuner and MPEG-2 encoder, Click To DVD authoring software, and a DVD±RW drive with DVD+R Double Layer capability.
Shipping in June, the Vaio VCG-RA710G (about $1,600) offers a Pentium 4/3.2E Hyper-Threading CPU, 512MB of DDR400 memory, a 250GB hard disk, and 128MB Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 AGP graphics. The flagship VCG-RA810G (about $2,400) will come with a 3.6GHz Pentium 4, 1GB of DDR400, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 128MB PCI Express ATI Radeon X600 Pro card. Custom configuration options will include up to 1.6 terabytes of Serial ATA storage (SharkyExtreme).
The Sony VAIO "Filing Cabinet"
Link to Sony webpage
I don't think that I'll ever buy a Sony PC, but this new VAIO "R" Series sounds interesting -- it would be great if SPCR could review this!