Asus Lamborghini VX2 review

Asus Lamborghini VX2 Review

Reviewed by: Rory Reid

Reviewed on: 19 March 2007

The VX2 is the second laptop born of Asus and Lamborghini's collaborative efforts. This new model keeps the corporate yellow livery but adds faster components and a widescreen display to the mix, along with tweaks to various elements of the chassis.

We've become so used to companies putting form before function on fashion products, so it's good to see that Asus hasn't fallen into the classic design traps here.

Design
Asus has put a lot of thought into the design and presentation of the VX2. The retail box consists of the laptop itself, a Lamborghini carry case, Lamborghini wireless mouse and a Lamborghini chamois for polishing purposes, all inside one of the most stylish laptop presentation boxes we've seen in some time.

The VX2 comes in two flavours -- a black carbon fibre premium edition and the standard yellow version, which we've reviewed here. The bright yellow lid had as many detractors as it did fans in our office -- it's a retina-searing shade that'll either win you admiring glances or make people think you have a serious taste deficiency.

The revered Lamborghini badge sits in the centre of the outer lid -- an ideal position for showing off to fellow commuters. There's a black honeycomb mesh panel near the hinge, behind which is a set of white LED status lights for the power, battery, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

This honeycomb grille effect is lifted from the rear bumper of a Lamborghini Gallardo

Questionable though the outside may be, you'd have to be a cold, heartless beast, or a vegetarian, not to love the leather interior. We've seen this type of thing before in Asus' S6F and W6Fp laptops, but it's all the more impressive here thanks to the angular cut of the leather panels and stylish yellow stitching. The leather looks great next to a pair of gunmetal speaker grilles, which run the entire length of the laptop's base section.

The yellow stitching and angular cut of the leather are highly impressive

There are other nice touches, too. The bottom of the laptop is home to a replica alloy wheel from a Lamborghini Gallardo. Then there's the swivelling metallic 1.3-megapixel webcam above the screen. We also couldn't help but fall in love with the white LED status lights above and below the keyboard.

The final touch of genius, however, happens when you hit the power button. The white LEDs flare up, the Automobili Lamborghini logo pops up and the speakers emit a satisfying "vroom vroom". If that doesn't give you the attention you crave, nothing will.

Features
The VX2 has a specification that matches its excellent design. It uses a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 CPU, 2GB of PC2-5300 RAM and a mid-range Nvidia GeForce 7700 graphics card -- all of which, on paper, make it a very quick all-round laptop. Asus could have been forgiven for installing components designed for a desktop PC in order to make it faster, but has wisely opted for laptop-oriented components that promote a better balance of battery life and speed.

Storage space is akin to that of a real Lamborghini -- fair to middling. The 160GB hard drive offers just about enough space to stash a couple of hundred DivX movies, but that's without considering other applications and files. Our review sample arrived with 60GB of free space on the main drive partition and 60GB on the data partition.