Asus Lamborghini VX2 laptop 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 …
Just wanted to disagree with the reviewers score of 65% for this notebook.
I think that this is perfect for the market the Lamborghini notebook is aimed at, this is a premium product. It is a fact that the nvidia7700 is the fastest graphics card in any 15.4" notebook on the market.
The screen resolution is 1680x1050. These higher resolutions are only found in premium notebooks. This it not a bad thing.
£2k is a lot of money - but should Asus be criticised for producing innovative products at premium pricing. Surely we should applaud companies for being different? 65% is a measly score for such a product.
Actually, the resolution is more than fine for displaying both 720p ie progressive scanned content, and 1080i ie interlaced content which incidentally is the HIGHEST BROADCAST resolution used either in the US or Europe!
This is because in the former case, all 720(horizontal) lines are displayed together and in the latter, the alternate 540 lines are shown in an odd/even rotation that relies upon the phenomenon called "persistence of vision" to build the picture!
It is solely when it comes to displaying 1080p(rogressive) content that the missing lines of resolution will matter , i.e. playing HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/X-Box content in the form of prerecorded films and games.
Thus the Asus' screen is a halfway house that will serve the majority of users at least until the format wars have settled down and the prices and media are more attainable by all and sundry.
...these Asus machines are the labrador's loveballs.
I'm figuring if you've got 2 grand to spend on a laptop you want to do something rather less anal than sod around with games all the time. My V6J (1.8 processor, half the RAM, half the hard drive) that I've had for nine months has taken over as my main machine, running typically at any one time MySQL server and a couple of clients, a couple of RDC connections, IIS, compiling hefty DLLs for some fairly substantial e-applications in Visual Studio, a couple of Office documents, Thunderbird, Firefox and a handful of other general apps under XP Pro has never once skipped a beat.
The keyboard's great - and if you're gonna buy one of these, I think you might just use it enough to get used to the function key ;) - the "obtrusive lights" are, well, under your left hand mainly ;)
Basically I've been using PCs for two decades, working actively with them for fifteen years, have no connection to Asus, hammer the hell out of the equipment I have for serious business use and would recommend their laptops to anyone.
I probably wouldn't pay the extra for the Lamborghini but then my assistant's Acer Ferrari went completely tits up in a matter of months.
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:)
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?
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?
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.
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.
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