Sony's VAIO R Master splits the tower
Come young grasshopper, it's time to meet the Sony VAIO R Master. Now, instead of looming over your desktop as a giant tower of yore, Sony has wisely spilt the VAIO R's innards into two smaller slabs connected via some USB/PCI Express magic. This allows you to arrange the clutter to your liking with up to 1.8-meters (about 6-feet) of tethered separation. The smaller of the boxes contains the most frequently accessed components such as BD drive and various memory card, USB, and Firewire slots while the fatter base holds the rest of the computing guts configurable with up to 4x 500GB SATA disks, a 2.96GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU, 256MB nVidia GeForce 7600GT graphics, a suite of analog and digital TV tuners, up to 3GB DDR2 RAM and plenty of PCI/PCI Express expansion slots to get you through a couple of product release cycles. All that and a bundled 24-inch, 1920x1200 pixel LCD connected over one of the base unit's two DVI outputs, one of which is HDCP-enabled, and plenty of software from Adobe and Sony to make the most of this multimedia powerhouse. And if you're quick, you can snatch the new R from the hand of Sony Japan starting October 28th for ¥192,000 (roughly $1,632) or more than ¥555,000 (about $4,717) fully equipped.
[Via Impress]
