Acer Ferrari 5000

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39030093,49284119,00.htm

Reviewed 10 October 2006

Reviewed by Leo Waldock

Michael Schumacher sports an AMD logo on his crash helmet as part of his Ferrari Formula 1 sponsorship package, so you can see the connection that Acer has made -- a premium laptop with an AMD processor can use the Ferrari brand to push the performance angle, and it's also a useful excuse to push the price up to £1,699.

That sort of price demands a high specification, so Acer has loaded the Ferrari 5000 with features, including a high-resolution widescreen display, loads of memory, decent graphics, a built-in webcam and a Bluetooth VoIP phone. You also get the option of an HD DVD drive.

Design
The styling of the Acer Ferrari 5000 is absolutely central to this laptop as you'll either love it or hate it. It's incredibly masculine and just in case the carbon-fibre lid, black and red colour scheme and yellow Ferrari badge slip past you, the F1 engine start-up noise for Windows will jerk you back to reality. It's the sort of joke that is funny, once, behind locked doors, but would be mortally embarrassing on a BA Club Class flight.

The chassis has been built around a 15.4-inch screen, so it's a reasonable compromise between size and portability at 364mm wide by 38mm thick by 271mm deep, and the 3kg weight means that you won't struggle to carry it over short distances.

We found the ports to be laid out very well. There are two USB 2.0, LAN and VGA ports on the right, then on the left you get a Kensington lock, a modem, two more USB 2.0, a slot-loading DVD drive, and PC Card and ExpressCard slots. On the front of the chassis there is a card reader, audio jacks, headphone S/PDIF, infrared, four-pin FireWire and control switches for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

At the rear it's practically bare apart from a docking connector, S-Video and HDMI, for which Acer includes an HDMI-to-DVI cable. On the top edge of the lid is a built-in 1.3-megapixel webcam. The keyboard is Acer's curved design, which is comfortable to use. We prefer to see the Enter key outside of the Page Up/Page Down keys, however. Try as we might, that is the only fault we were able to find with the layout.

Features
The vast majority of laptops use a processor from Intel's range of Centrino products, but the stand-out technical feature of the Ferrari 5000 is its dual-core AMD Turion X2 processor. This TL-60 model runs at 2.0GHz and in our tests it was directly comparable with a 1.66GHz T2300 or T2050, so the performance is certainly there.

System performance is assisted by the use of 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory that runs in dual-channel mode. Socket 754 AMD processors run their memory in single-channel mode, but this version of the Turion X2 uses the new 638-pin Socket S1 which allows dual-channel, so in this case fewer pins means better memory access. Strange but true.

Unfortunately, the TL-60 is a relatively toasty processor with a thermal rating of 35W and our overriding impression of the Ferrari 5000 is of the cooling fan cutting in and out every few seconds, even during the lightest Windows desktop duties. The noise wasn't especially intrusive, but it was cumulative (like Chinese water torture) and the jet of hot air expelled from the exhaust vent on the right-hand side gave us a nasty surprise on a number of occasions as we reached for our editorial coffee. During gaming sessions the fan runs at full speed, as you would expect.

The ATi Radeon Xpress 1150 chipset is combined with an Atheros 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi chip, a Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet chip and an unspecified Bluetooth controller to give you a full choice of wireless options.

Instead of integrated graphics you get a Radeon Mobility X1600 package, which includes 256MB of dedicated DDR3 memory and we were able to play Far Cry at the full screen resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels with ease. The screen is quite bright and while we found it a little harsh under normal lighting conditions, the picture was undeniably sharp and clear.

You can output the image to another screen using the S-Video, VGA or HDMI connectors, and while this laptop supports HDCP, our review sample had a standard dual-layer DVD drive, rather than the HD DVD option. Still, you get an ample 160GB hard drive to stash your MP3s and whatnot.

The keyboard is solid and feels good, but we had the occasional mis-key, where we had to press slightly harder than expected to get the result we wanted. Audio is provided by a Realtek HD controller, but the integrated speakers were fairly tinny and we might as well have been listening to the inferior AC'97 audio technology.

Acer supplies a neat gimmick in the shape of a Bluetooth VoIP phone that you charge in the PC Card slot. Pop it out and turn it on and provided your Ferrari is linked to the Internet, you can use the Bluetooth connection to make VoIP calls as you lounge back in your office chair. Well, that's the theory, but in practice we couldn't make the Bluetooth connection, and yes, we did have Bluetooth enabled.

While we're complaining, the Orbicam seemed to have a few glitches and didn't behave. Finally, we were staggered to see that the 5000 uses an ageing FAT32 hard drive partition instead of the newer NTFS variety. This will likely hamper the laptop's disk performance.

The software package is fairly minuscule and is limited to Cyberlink PowerDVD and NTI CD and DVD Maker, but Acer includes a full set of its own utilities so you can, for instance, tell the power management what battery life you need and it'll do its best to juggle the power settings to accommodate you.

Performance
The Ferrari 5000 delivers in terms of processor, memory and graphics performance and the high-resolution, mid-sized screen is a superb compromise between size and readability.

Overall performance figures gained from running PCMark 2005 were impressive. The laptop returned a figure of 4,200, which is about right given its specification. It's slightly faster than the near-identical Asus A7Tc, but its we'd expect that given the Ferrari costs nearly £600 more. Gaming performance was solid, too. It clocked up 2,000 in 3DMark 2006, ran Doom 3 at 57 frames per second (fps), and Far Cry at 71fps.

The laptop failed to run our MobileMark test, for unknown reasons, but we tortured it by repeatedly running PCMark 2005 until the battery died. It lasted a respectable 2 hours 42 minutes, which is impressive considering its powerful components.

Edited by Rory Reid
Additional editing by Nick Hide