ASUS-Lamborghini VX1 Notebook

PC fans commonly liken the speed of their computers to that of high-performance cars. It's therefore somewhat surprising to note that relatively few hardware manufacturers have released car-inspired PCs. Acer pioneered this phenomenon with its Ferrari laptop range, but it has taken almost two years for anyone else to follow suit.

Ever eager to widen its range of stylish laptops, Asus has just released the sports car-inspired Lamborghini VX1 range, which promises as much performance and style as its namesake.

Design
The VX1 comes in two flavours: black, and the more traditional Lamborghini yellow. Both are attractive, but our yellow review sample makes an instant retina-searing impression straight out of the box, making it the more suitable poser's accessory. Asus says the laptops use the same paint finish as the iconic cars, incorporating subtle golden paint flecks that catch the light of the sun, as well as the famous Lamborghini logo.

Features

Any laptop bearing the name of a high-performance sports car deserves high-performance components, and the Asus Lamborghini VX1 doesn't disappoint. It's not the most insanely well-equipped laptop we've seen, but its 2GHz Intel T2500 CPU and 2GB of DDR2 RAM give it a very potent foundation from which to build.

We'd have preferred if the laptop used the 2.2GHz T2600, the fastest CPU in the Centrino Duo range, but this is an acceptable alternative. Graphics performance comes courtesy of a custom Nvidia chip, the Geforce 7400 VX. This is essentially a GeForce 7400 that was renamed for Asus' use, but it's a welcome and capable inclusion for a laptop that doesn't tout itself as a dedicated gaming machine.

Unusually, Asus has opted not to use a widescreen 16:9 display on the Lamborghini VX1. Instead, you get a 15-inch screen with a native resolution of 1,400x1,050 pixels. This is fine for everyday use, but its 4:3 aspect ratio limits the number of windows you can view side by side, and means you get a letterbox view when playing 16:9 widescreen movies. Some may take exception to the screen's glossy coating, which is a tad too reflective to use in direct light, but aside from this, we were very impressed with the image quality. Colours were recreated faithfully, and the screen was able to accurately display the subtle tonal differences.

Also impressive was the capacious 160GB hard drive. It's the largest laptop drive on the market and is perfect for storing a wealth of games and other multimedia content. You also get a dual-layer DVD rewriter drive that lets you burn up to 8.5GB of data per DVD disc. Unfortunately it's quite slow at 4x, and is a tray-loading model. We'd have preferred a slot-loading drive to help maintain the sleek lines of the laptop.

The Lamborghini VX1 features the usual assortment of ports, including three USB ports, a 4-pin Firewire port, plus a Gigabit (1,000Mbps) Ethernet port. You also get a 5-in-1 memory card reader which supports all major formats, but there's no sign of a modem -- you'll need to buy your own USB modem, as is the case with most new laptops.