The good: Solid construction; leather detailing; cool branded extras.

The bad: Kind of slow for a laptop named after a race car; expensive; poor battery life.

The bottom line: The Asus Lamborghini VX3 is the laptop recast as status symbol. It looks and feels like a luxury item; we just wish it had a bit more power under the hood.

Read full review of the Asus Lamborghini VX3 »

By Dan Ackerman, CNET.com
Apr 30, 2008

The Asus Lamborghini VX3 is a lap-based homage to the famous sports car of the same name, complete with a screamingly bright automotive yellow paint job. We've seen car-themed laptops before like the Acer Ferrari, and their audience is usually limited to auto enthusiasts who don't mind paying a premium for what is essentially window dressing on a set of fairly standard laptop components.

That being said, if you're a fan of the car company founded by Ferruccio Lamborghini, you'll find a nicely put-together laptop with excellent build quality and upscale touches such as a leather-clad wrist rest. Under the hood, it lacks that sports car DNA, eliciting middling performance from its standard Intel Penryn CPU. Still, we can't help but like the included sack of Lamborghini-branded accessories, including a leather mousepad and Bluetooth mouse.

Editors' note : This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some of other products in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia. Please check directly with your local distributor for details.

Design

The Lamborghini VX3 is similar in shape and size to the Asus U6, another leather-accented ultraportable from the same company. The back of the lid has a glossy yellow finish with a prominent Lamborghini badge, and the leather wrist rest has a nice-looking stitched border, making for an overall smart, sophisticated look that's fairly light and portable.

The keyboard was a pleasant surprise, with solid, hefty keys that didn't wiggle under the fingers at all, and we're always pleased to see separate Page-Up and Page-Down keys--usually the first thing to get cut on an ultraportable keyboard. Like the similar Asus U6, there are no quick-launch media-player or volume-control keys, but a button above the keyboard switches between several preset power-consumption modes.

Adding to the automobile effect, when powered on, the laptop briefly flashes the Lamborghini logo and plays a sound effect of a car engine revving--even if the speakers are muted in Vista.

Features

The 12.1-inch widescreen LCD display offers a 1,280 x 800 native resolution, which is standard for most 12- to 15-inch displays. The screen's high-gloss finish can cause some glare if it catches the light of a desk lamp or overhead light at the wrong angle.

We were pleased to see an HDMI output and four USB ports in this ultraportable system, along with Bluetooth and an ExpressCard slot--although for its premium pricing, we'd hardly expect anything less.

The Lamborghini VX3 is a fixed-configuration system, but we were generally pleased with the roomy 320GB hard drive, 3GB of RAM, and modest Nvidia GeForce 9300M GPU. Our review unit was from Europe and it included a Sierra Wireless HSDPA mobile broadband antenna, but we do not have confirmation if this feature will be available in Asian units yet.

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