ASUS Lamborghini VX2

As I mentioned, I will not be testing the laptop with Windows Vista, since many of the programs I wanted to use would not run. Instead, I formatted and installed Windows XP Professional and used the drivers/software that are available on their support site. To elaborate on why I prefer Windows XP, here are a few quick reasons. Far more than others, it’s due to the fact that Vista really drags down performance in some applications, especially since the NVIDIA drivers are not half as good for Vista as they are for XP. In fact, Half-Life 2 had it’s average FPS cut in half. Therefore, I want to give performance results representative of what the notebook is capable of, rather than giving performance results that are held back thanks to the lackluster OS.

I will state that some benchmarks did run in Vista, and most of them didn’t have major decreases. Some would not run at all though, such as Super Pi. It would start up, but as soon as a calculation was executed, it would crash. I’ve had Super Pi function in Vista before, but it’s really hit or miss. It was a miss in this situation.

That also said, the VGA drivers off the ASUS support site were not used, due to complications that arose. While the games would deliver solid performance, the gameplay would be very sticky. There were a few instances where the game would lock up entirely, then snap out of it after a few moments. I downloaded the latest WHQL drivers (97.92) from LaptopVideo2Go, which took care of those problems completely. I am not sure what was wrong with the drivers ASUS supplies, but it’s something you should be aware of.

Before testing, minor applications were closed, such as MultiFrame and Splendid. Everything system specific was left in-tact, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, TPM, power saving utility, audio and so forth. For comparative purposes, we will be showing the results of the VX2, VX1 and the recently reviewed A8Js. Here are the simple specs for each notebook:

For our synthetic benchmarks, the VX2 compared nicely to the VX1. Since both of these laptops include the same CPU and memory, it wasn’t a surprise. Our 3D Mark and PC Mark results show just how much more suitable the VX2 is for gaming, however.

Here are a few miscellaneous tests. When compared to the original, the VX2 proved a little better for DVD Playback and a lot worse for book reading. I believe this to be thanks to the larger screen and the greater white surface area. While the VX2 took two minutes longer to rip a DVD, it proved half a minute faster for ripping a CD to FLAC.

For our gaming tests, I am comparing directly to the A8Js which utilizes the same graphics card, but slightly smaller CPU. All results were gathered with FRAPS 2.82 and were manually played through. No time demos here.

The VX2 fell behind the A8Js in every gaming related test, but not that far. The VX2 actually performed far better in GRAW at 1440×900, but that’s the only advantage we saw. Although both notebooks have the same GPU, I would have figured the VX2 would have the better scores, thanks to the better CPU. I shift partial blame to the choice of video drivers used. On the A8Js, the drivers that were included with the laptop were used. Since the VX2 doesn’t support XP naturally, I used newer video drivers found on LaptopVideo2Go. It could be that the A8Js had drivers that were better suited for it, or that the VX2 just doesn’t have the same airflow scheme as the A8Js. Many factors could come into play.

Regardless, these were still good scores, so gaming is definitely something you can get into with the VX2.