Under test, PCMark Vantage gave the VX5 an overall score of 4,703, which places it well up the league of recent laptop testees, beaten only by the HP Envy 15, with its impressive 5,759. When you break this combined score down, you can see that the Asus machine scores well in most of the benchmark sub-sets, with Memories, TV & Movies, Gaming and Productivity scores again only second to the HP Envy.
Overall performance is hit by the ample, but sluggish storage
The one place where it’s let down is in its hard drive performance. The two 5,200rpm devices, from Seagate in our review sample, only scored 2,772 under PCMark Vantage, over fifteen percent down on any of the other machines in our recent tests. It’s a shame this one component should let down the overall performance, but portable drives of this capacity aren’t noted for blistering throughput.
Life from the six-cell battery is miserable and we recorded just 68 and 72 minutes on two runs, looping PCMark Vantage. On batteries, you could watch a complete episode of The Wire, but not an old Poirot rerun. Running office software, you might see one and a half hours away from the mains.
Currently, there are VX5s still available with Vista pre-installed, but you can get it with Windows 7 from some suppliers and at the same price, so push for this. Other software is mainly Asus’ own utilities, including the bizarrely-named Splendid utility, which introduces different video presets for vivid, soft and theatre colours. More to the point, you’ll want to disable the default screen saver, which sees the VX5 competing with the Reventon in a blaze of squealing tyres and a theme tune worthy of a Transformers thriller.
Verdict
If you want a desktop replacement laptop with good video playback facilities, there are other machines with similar performance available for less than the VX5. The same is no doubt true of the Reventon, so you have to decide if the extras in this Asus machine warrant the £200 or so premium demanded by the little bull badge. ®
More Nifty Notebook Reviews...
Apple MacBook Pro |
Rock Xtreme X790-i7-950 |
HP Envy 15-1060 |
Acer Aspire 5935 |
Asus Lamborghini VX5
COMMENTS
'notebook' ??
I would not call a 16 inch screen machine a notebook, at that size it's a fricken laptop!
Why do these netbook/notebook creators keep increasing the screensize of their products? 8.9" is perfectly fine for me and a lot of others, yet they all want to sell me 10" or bigger screens now. Don't cite the old "oh but the keyboard is too small" bollocks, the keyboard on this Eee is perfectly good enough for me to be able to touchtype on - it's 'fullsize' keyboards I have trouble with now because you have to move your fingers so far in all 3 axis to touchtype.
So what are you getting for your money here?
Just picked up a "clearance stock" Advent 7555GX (yes I know, Advent are awful but this was cheap) quad core from the hell-on-earth that is PC World for less than half the cost of the Lambo. True, it has a rather awful 1440x900 screen, but being based on the MS-1722 I'm guessing I can upgrade the screen and the dog-poo 5400rpm diesel powered SATA2 hard-disk. Graphics are from an ATI4850 which is fine for what I will be using the machine for (portable DAW).
The main selling point for me was quad-core for £730 and as this was ex-demo I got it for £500. Preposterously cheap. Just waiting for my Windows 7 disks.
The point being - why are ASUS selling a quad-core that costs this much when it ought to be possible to build and sell it for much less. It's all very well having a Lamborghini sticker on it, but is it worth the extra grand?
Call me when....
...someone releases the "Ultima GTR" Laptop.
Faster, better looking and a 10th the price.
http://www.ultimasports.co.uk/Content.aspx?f=gtrintro
