 "Asus VX1 Lamborghini Laptop")
In today’s consumers world the word “choice” has many different connotations. It varies from age brackets to level of disposable income and to perception. It has lead to sharp segmentation of products and goods being sold today broadly into value, mainstream, performance and enthusiast levels. Everyone in the PC industry seems to broadly follow these categories and the kinds of products that are available in the channels reflect this movement. However things have been changing as of late. Companies like Asus have been trying to introduce a new category, which can be broadly termed as “Lifestyle products”. These products offer above average performance with great looks and exclusive branding.
The Asus VXI laptop which is sold with the Lamborghini name attached to it, is aimed as a lifestyle product and has been designed to convey a feeling of luxury, speed and exclusivity. Does it really live up to the hype? Read on to find out.
The Asus VX1 is undoubtedly the best looking laptop I have ever reviewed, period. The body of the VX1 is sleek, sharp and sports a very high quality gloss finish which has been designed to instill a sense of pride in its owner. The VX1 comes in two colors Jet black and Striking yellow. The test unit we had with us had the Yellow one. The body of the laptop has the Lamborghini name emblazoned across the top and has a hard sharp sporty look giving it the appearance of a fast car. It looks unerringly similar to the Lamborghini Gallardo right down to gilt-edged glossy finish. In terms of weight, the laptop, despite its sharp looks, is surprisingly heavy. The construction material used is sturdy. This is a plus factor as it gives u a sense of assurance that the laptop will be able to withstand the rigors of daily use. Finally, the bag that is provided with the laptop, also comes with the Lamborghini branding and is tough with strong straps and multiple storage compartments.
For the laptop itself, Asus has thoughtfully provided a sleeve and velvet bag. This is a great move, as we often tend to dump a lot of stuff in our laptop bags such as keys and charger-ends. Normally most laptops would not be affected by this but keeping in mind the high-gloss finish of the VX1, the provided sleeve and velvet bag proves invaluable in preventing scratches.
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Once you get past the beautiful exterior and open up the laptop, that’s when you realize that the good design has not flowed into the keyboard area. They keyboard is surrounded by a brushed steel-like surface which looks somewhat tacky. The LED lights are rather tiny and nearly unreadable unless you really get close and look at them. This is probably the only annoying part I found physically about this laptop. The top of the keyboard area has special function buttons which control such features as Bluetooth and WiFi. This makes life a whole lot easier especially when you are traveling and don’t want to spend time mucking around with menu options for disabling the WiFi radio.
The 15-inch LCD panel on the VX1 sports the same splendid video enhancement technology that is present in the Asus PW201. The laptop allows you to set pre-defined modes which vary the color, contrast and brightness. This makes for some brilliant viewing at the widescreen resolution of 1400x1050. Colors really jump out at you and movie playback is very sharp.
Asus is a firm believer of usable touchpads and this is reflected in all their laptops. Quite a few manufacturers often make sunken touchpads that are either too smooth and you don’t get proper traction or are so rough that long term use is just out of the question. Asus has thankfully escaped this tendency, and has provided touch pad that has just the right balance of smoothness and texture to give you a good experience and not give you wrist pain. The keyboard itself is backlit in a soft shade of blue and provides excellent tactile feedback. Working late at night, presents no problems as the keys are clear and brightly lit up. An annoying thing that I found here was the placement of the “/” key. It is positioned next to the Z key. This is an absolutely odd position to have and you tend to miss it entirely. Try using Windows Explorer with the key being where it is, and it will definitely lead you to wonder what the designers at Asus were thinking. In our audio tests we checked out the playback of movies and mp3s. Here was another area, the laptop aced. The sound was fairly warm with good amounts of bass and not an embarrassment.
In a good move Asus has kept the front side of the laptops clear of any ports or keys. All the ports are present on either sides of the laptop. The right side of the laptop holds the multi-functional dual-layer DVD drive, along with the Expresscard slot, mini Firewire port and is rounded up by the Kensington security slot. The right side of the laptop is where things begin to get interesting. Firstly there are 4 USB slots which offer a massive amount of connectivity upgrade options, the Ethernet slot, modem slot, audio jacks and finally an SD card reader.
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The VX1 is powered by a very fast Core2duo T7400 dual-core processor (2.166 GHz) and 2GB of RAM. Storage is taken care of by a 5400 RPM 160 GB hard drive (which makes for a lot of space for a laptop) It is strange that the graphics of this laptop does not match up, as the budget integrated GeForce Go 7400 video which handles the graphics does not do justice to the rest of the components. Despite this very heavy drawback, the laptop has pretty strong specifications which actually make it ready for Vista Premium.
For testing the performance of the laptop we ran it through our normal series of tests consisting of PCMark 2005, 3dmark2006 and Battery eater pro. On both our system test’s the graphics really held back the laptop. In PCMark 2005 the laptop managed to achieve a very credible score of 4412 PCMarks. This could easily have been in the 6000 range, if Asus had equipped this otherwise beautiful machine with either an SLI setup or a 7900 GS GeForce Go chipset. 3Dmark2006 performance was painful to watch. The laptop limped to an atrocious score of 868 and that is based more on the strength of the Core2Duo processor rather than the graphical chipset itself.
The battery tests were a real revelation. Overall considering the rather powerful CPU and the ultra-bright screen battery life was a very strong 3 hours 04 mins. In a flat-out test, with all power-savings disabled we managed to achieve 2 hours 05 mins. of usage which is quite spectacular overall. All the tests were run with the help of Battery Eater Pro version 2.70.