Asus Lamborghini VX2 laptop
Show off how big your processor is...
Review Cars and laptops obviously make good bed-fellow if Asus' latest Lamborghini-badged model is anything to go by. While its first effort - the VX1 - may have been seen as a me-too effort to rival Acer's Ferrari tie-up, there's got to be something in the partnership to produce further offspring.
Given its premium branding - and equally premium price tag - Asus hasn't skimped on the components when assembling this model.
Under the hood, as it were, the VX2 sports an Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 ticking away at 2.16GHz and a healthy 2GB of 667MHz DDR 2 RAM. The hard drive stretches to a more than comfortable 160GB and connects via a SATA interface. Graphics are powered by an Nvidia GeForce Go 7700 chip with a healthy 512MB of dedicated RAM to play with. If you've heard of PCs that are not capable of running Windows Vista with all the bells and whistles activated, this certainly isn't one of them.
The VX2 is fully up to the job of Vista's Aero interface, with glass window effects and whizzy 3D application switching galore. In keeping with the performance ethos, you'll find a copy of Vista Ultimate installed. Vista pegs its performance rating at a not too shabby 4.7 Windows Experience Index score, which currently goes up to a maximum of 5.9.
Running it through PCMark05 showed that the VX2 had beefed up compared to its predecessor - topping the latter's score of 3,954 by over 1,000 points at 4,991.
When it comes to gaming, though, it's adequate rather than exemplary. Run it through Doom 3 and it's not bad at all - at 1,280 x 1,024 it racked up 62fps. Drop the res down to 1,024 x 768 and you're looking at 85fps.
COMMENTS
its a good machine, but the price lets it down
for nearly £700 cheaper, you can get an Asus G1 which is almost exactly the same spec.
A T7200 @2Ghz instead of a T7400 @2.13Ghz
A 802.11a/b/g wifi connection instead of pre-n, which will be redundent in a month or two anyway when the N specification is officially released.
The Nvidia Go7700 is still sufficient to provide a good game. you're not looking for pure frame rates, but the imersivness of the expirience. i can play all my games at 1680x1050 just fine thanks.
World of Warcraft, need for speed, halflife2, quake4. etc etc.
very happy with my G1 for £1300, but in comparison, don't buy these car badged laptops unless you really have nothing better to do with 2grand.
Screen resolution
I'd agree with a lot of the comments above; WSXGA+ is a very standard resolution, and higher than that found on the majority of 15.4" widescreen machines on the market, which are usually shipped with a rather pedestrian WXGA (1280x800) screen, even on quite expensive models. I's also say that for general use it's an extremely good compromise between definition and legibility.
It most certainly IS possible to get higher resolutions - a 1920x1200 screen on a Dell Latitude D820 is available, and costs about £35 extra over WSXGA+, so it isn't ruinously expensive. That said, although I order such machines for people like architects, where the additional resolution can be very important, in general they also need large fonts and icons set to make the screen more usable. That said, I'd disagree that such a resolution is "impractical"; it's just overkill for the vast majority of users.
The premium for resolution
Ha, premium for 1680x1050 resolution. Check out this laptop:
http://www.microconcept.com/html/index.php?action=ZOOM&produit=9971&infosav=9&nomproduit=Asus+F3JP-AK055C+
Yes it is in France, but the configuration is not much worse (at least on paper) and the price is much much less. Of course the fan of my F3Jp (not this one) sounds like Lamborghini, but hey, that is not the point I wanted to make:)
Overpriced for what it is
Asus already offer other laptops of similar spec for far less... around the £1k mark in fact. A quick bout of googling uncovered G1-AK005C, which is available for £1095 on the site I looked at. The processor is clocked at 2.0Ghz rather than 2.16, but the difference isn't that immense, and although it has only Vista Home Ultimate, the upgrade cost isn't going to make it worth buying the Lambo.
All the other specs looked pretty similar, except the G1 lacks the rather pointless fingerprint reader... does anyone actually use those things anyway?
Performance-wise I'd expect them to perform reasonably similarly, especially if you trashed Vista and installed XP (which despite hogging vast areas of your machine, hogs less than Vista), or dare I say it... Linux ;)
One thing to be aware of with Asus laptops though is that they don't seem to care if the processor is 64bit... mine (an A6Km) had XP Home 32Bit installed, despite having a 64bit processor. I'm not quite sure whether the core-duo is a 64bit as I've not used an intel processor for years, but it may be worth taking into account that you will have to buy a new version of windows to get the full potential out of the machine.
Holy cow I ramble don't I?
What on earth...
This is a rather strange review, methinks.
- The resolution on the screen should be commended. Not only is it a standard resolution, it's most commonly found on 22" monitors. This is a 15.4". Good, no?
- If the resolution was raised, the next level up is 1920x1200, most commonly found on 24" monitors which cost upwards of £500. Plus it'd be impractical.
- Supposedly the gaming performance is lacking. Well duh, it's a laptop. It uses the second-best laptop graphics card available (it's narrowly beaten by a Go 7600GT if I remember correctly).
- To summarise the review by saying it's not 'an instant must-have' is very odd. Of course it's not an instant must-have, high-end products never are. You don't see anyone saying quad-core processors are 'an instant must-have', do you?
- Yes, it's expensive. But it's got a damn Lamborghini badge on - it's for those who have money to throw around and acts as much as a flagship for the Asus brand as a direct money-maker.
So in essence we have a 35% drop for it being a bit on the pricey side. Over the top, no?
I'm not trying to attack the reviewer here, but it really does seem like this is a pretty short-sighted review. Interesing that the article page shows four comment titles but only three are displayed. Do I smell conspiracy?
