Official Sony VAIO F Series i5/i7 owners thread *Part 3*

No it's not "retarded". The CPU automatically goes into LFM: Lowest Frequency Mode: the power saving CPU clocking mode used by the Vaio_F Series (and other brands of laptops with i7 CPU's) when running on battery which has a power output too low (54W) to be able to feed an F working @ full speed which needs up to 100W + 10% according to_Sony's power requirement specs. That's why the VAIO_VPCF11 and_F12 comes with a 120W A/C power adapter.

Lowest Frequency Mode is also used @ idle on the Power Saver & Balanced power plans even when the F is plugged to save energy & reduce heat & wear & tear. As soon as you run any task requiring more computing power, it will kick in higher speed and/or Turbo Boost as task(s) requires & max TDP permits (Thermal Design Power). If you set to High Performance plan, you are turning off the LFM feature when plugged with the Core Frequency as the minimum but NOT when running on battery as explained above. Note that that plan's downside is more heat so more fan work > more noise & more wear & tear and all that w/o any benefits for the max computing power a given CPU can produce (max TDP).

LFM is a CPU characteristic by design and made by Intel. This was talked about so many times, see this post: VAIO_F Series CPU Speed, Turbo Boost & Battery.

For example:

i7-720QM:

Max Turbo Boost Frequency
4 Core: 1.73 GHz
3 Core: 1.73 GHz
2 Core: 2.40 GHz
1 Core: 2.80 GHz

Core Frequency: 1.60 GHz with DDR3-1333
LFM* Frequency: 0.933 GHz (same as 933 mHz)

Now if you want to play Blu-ray disc on battery, you can easily create your own optimized power plan and use Task Manager to turn off useless stuff when watching a movie like anti virus, media programs scanning drives in the background, unused ports & whatnot bloatware running in the background. My Corel WinDVD Pro created a custom power plan that kicks-in when playing a movie on battery:



This said, I never tried playing a Blu-ray disc on battery but even with an optimized power plan, the F can barely play the complete movie. That's not why it was designed. It's not a 8 hours on battery netbook. You can play DVD's or rip to your hard disk to reduce power demand on battery.

So no, it cannot "be fixed in a future BIOS update" and no, the user cannot mess up the TDP management with overclocking. That's what the Turbo Boost was designed for and it's extremely efficient IMO.

 

Just picked up a F12 series (VPF126FM) from Best Buy and was curious....Am I SOL if I want to have the resolution up to 1920x900?

 

Guten tag. Haben Sie spass mit der laptop?

 

I should be receiving my F12 tomorrow according to FedEx .... finally!

I will be wiping it right away in order to install Ubuntu (I run Windows in a virtual machine)

Wondering if anyone also runs linux ... and if so ... did you have an install issues that you had to work around?

Examples would be ... keyboard backlight was tricky to get working ... some of the function buttons didn't quite work right ... the processor or memory needed to be adjusted to receive full performance ... multi-touch issues etc etc ...

So anyone out there like me? Thanks!

 

1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels and 1 is stuck red right in the middle of the display? That's bad luck.

I don't mind a stuck pixel in the corners but not in the center of the display. Why not try to get the LCD replaced again?

 

I would do the exact opposite, but hey, it's your machine.

Make sure to burn a set of recovery discs before messing up and check this: vaio-f11-linux project.

Check also this post with links like How to Install Ubuntu on VirtualBox: VAIO_F Series Virtual Machine: Virtual PC vs. VirtualBox.

Good luck!

 

^^ thanks!

will check those out.

haha ya i have to run ubuntu as my primary because of development work ... i only need windows for photoshop and skype (cuz skype beta on ubuntu is sad)

 

^^

Skype and Photoshop support ... the exact two reasons I ditched Linux in favour of a 'operating' system instead of a 'hey, look .. we had a go' system

 

Thank you for that informative post. +1 for your rep power .

I am a newbie when it comes to sound and I'll follow & research some of your pointers including the external sound cards suggestions.

I'm not an audiophile & the F suits my needs with a good pair of headphones & for my semi-advanced-amateur video production but will try to run some tests like you did.

Thanks again for all the work & sharing!

 

Can you tell me which of the following can i delete without problem?

Vaio Gate
Vaio Gate Default
Vaio Event Service ( Its related with Fn Brightness? )
Setting Utility Series
Sony Home Network Library
Vaio BD Menu Data
Vaio Window Organizer
Vaio Screensaver
Vaio Wallpaper Contents


I removed all the other Vaio Software and i will keep only these :

Vaio Care
Vaio Power Management
Vaio Control Center
Vaio Update
Vaio Smart Network
Vaio Data Restore Tool



Also, can you tell me what processes can i remove with safety and some tweaks?