It seems that having a laptop stamped with an Italian sports car brand is the in-thing these days. Acer has been hanging around the pit-lane with Ferrari, and Asus has teamed up with Lamborghini to create the VX1. It comes in a choice of black or yellow trim - Lamborghini's corporate colors - although there's more to the VX1 than a cool paint job...Acer's other team loyalty is AMD, so it's perhaps no surprise Asus has gone with Intel. The VX1 is a Centrino laptop. My review model came with a Core Duo T2500 processor clocked at 2GHz, although models with a Core 2 Duo processor will be available soon, Asus tells me. The chipset is the Intel 945PM, so there's no integrated graphics. Asus has gone for the Nvidia GeForce Go 7400 VX with 512MB of Turbo Cache, which is a souped up version of the GeForce Go 7400 but still far from a suitable solution for gaming on the move. This is rather disappointing considering the Lamborghini badge, and one would think that Asus would've fitted a more powerful graphics chip into the VX1.The review model also came with 2GB of DDR 2 memory - which is more in line with what you would expect from a top of the range laptop - and a 160GB IDE hard drive. It's disappointing (again) that Asus hasn't gone for SATA here - the machine's chipset supports it - as this is quickly becoming the norm on new notebooks. The optical drive is a super-multi DVD writer which handles all the common formats and DVD-RAM. It's not the fastest drive out there and it's not, alas, a slot-load unit.The optical drive is mounted on the left-hand side of the chassis alongside an ExpressCard 54 bay, a four-pin FireWire connector, an infra-red receiver and a standard VGA connector. There's no DVI or HDMI connector, which again is a shame on a machine so clearly targeting the performance end of the notebook market.The right-hand side is home to four USB 2.0 ports spread out along the length of the laptop; a multi-format memory card reader that accepts SD, MMC and various Memory Stick formats; a headphone and microphone socket, with optical S/PDIF output inside the latter; and finally a 56Kbps modem and a Gigabit Ethernet connector.
The VX1 ships with a carbon fibre-look laptop bag as well as a Lamborghini branded zip-up carrying pouch. This is a nice bonus, but again doesn't make up for the shortcomings.
