S ony has always been led by design. It's what makes us punters pay that little bit extra, instead of going for some ugly bit of kit that does pretty much the same job. The Vaio RM1N, you'll be unsurprised to hear, doesn't break with this tried and tested formula, although it does challenge our notions of the PC.

It's in two distinct chunks, you see. One houses a pair of optical drives and a bunch of ports, while the other handles the business end of the PC. Don't imagine that this is some magical Home Server-esque machine, though; the two sections are tied together by a particularly chunky - and surprisingly short - cable.

Since it's been designed with video editing in mind, you'll find easily removable hard drives nestling in the base unit; a Blu-ray writer in the drive module and even a USB video jog wheel attachment to aid in cutting and slicing. This isn't top quality equipment, however; the jog wheel feels too flimsy, a league away from what you'd find in most editing suites.

There's a GeForce 8600 GTS looking after the graphics end of things, which is adequate in terms of HD editing and reasonable when pushing gaming pixels, but frankly insulting given the ridiculous price tag Sony has slapped on this PC. Performance is good, you know, but it's not £2,499 good.

No, for this kind of moolah, we'd expect Rolf Harris to pop out and start drawing the screen for us in his inimitable fast-paced style or, if not Rolf, at least a pair of high-end cards. "But you don't need them for HD editing!" Sony will no doubt cry, "Look at all the other stuff we've put in there!"

Yes, there's a terabyte of storage, a quad core CPU, and yes, you get the unfathomably expensive Adobe Premiere Pro preinstalled. It's a heavyweight, but we reckon we could build a PC equivalent to this for a whole lot less, albeit without the mildly attractive split case.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether this is a video-editing PC or a games rig - it's simply poor value for money compared to the competition.