ASUS Lamborghini VX1 Notebook

General Field Testing How does it perform in daily tasks?

Portability And Connectivity:

In an effort to truly put the ASUS VX1 to the test and see how it performs in the real world, the notebook accompanied ua on a daily basis for a few weeks. Thanks to a surprisingly light 5.6lb weight, small physical size, and powerful components the VX1 was able to tackle nearly any application with ease.

Unlike most bulky Desktop Replacement notebooks, the Thin and Light ASUS VX1 was nearly effortless to take on any trip. Whether you wanted to pack the system with other items for a longer trip or just carry the notebook with you on a trip out for coffee, the ASUS VX1 was extremely manageable. Thanks to the included Intel 3945 802.11a/b/g wireless card, the system was able to hop onto nearly any available wireless network as well. In practice, we found the wireless performance to be on par with other systems we've tested using the same NIC.

General Application Performance 

In terms of true productivity applications where every bit of horsepower could be utilized; the power of the included Intel Core 2 Duo processor and healthy 2GB of memory was greatly appreciated. Having a dual-core processor certainly gives users a lot more liberty in terms of what they can concurrently do at once. Here, the system was able to have multiple applications such as Photoshop open along with countless browser windows and some streaming music without so much as a hiccup.

Gaming: 

Without a doubt, the Achilles' heel of the system would have to be gaming. Granted, the 512MB GeForce Go 7400 is infinitely more capable than any integrated graphics solution and still offers a solid improvement over the GeForce Go 7300. However, the 64-bit memory architecture and 8 pixel pipelines certainly struggle with resolutions higher than 1024x768 on most modern games if any enhanced image quality settings are used. Should the user opt to not use any FSAA or Anisotropic Filtering, the ASUS VX1 can muster some acceptable framerates though. Clearly, the ASUS VX1 is designed around the very casual mobile gamer who will only be playing games here and there.

The lack of gaming horsepower is a difficult situation to deal with after someone spends such a considerable amount on a flagship notebook. It truly is a shame the GPU could not have been something with more performance as the rest of the system is exceptional from a hardware standpoint. Granted, a thin and light notebook only has so much physical room and can only dissipate so much heat. Power constraints immediately exclude flagship mobile GPU's from available options. However, there is a great deal of middle ground between flagship GPU's and the included GeForce Go 7400.