Acer's Ferrari is the best Ferrari of 2005

BACK IN February, I was invited to a traditional Ferrari F1 car launch in Maranello, and I heard Luca Di Montezemolo's traditional quote: "This is the best Ferrari we ever made".

However, with F2005 ended up as something of a lemon this year, we could say Luca was somewhat overoptimistic.

However, at the same time - Acer Computer, a long-standing Taiwanese Ferrari partner realised something was wrong with its own Ferrari line-up. Previous incarnations didn't offer the exclusivity of Ferrari's image, rather being powerful, AMD-powered notebooks with shiny, cheap-looking red plastics. The decision has been made - make a product worthy of Ferrari name - in true Formula 1 manner, a new model was created in record time. The Ferrari 4000 series was born.

The Notebook
CPU: AMD Turion ML-37, 2 GHz 1MB L2 cache
VGA: ATi Mobility Radeon X700 128MB
RAM: 2x 512 MB Hyundai PC2700 (DDR333)
HDD: 100GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2, 8MB
Monitor: 15,4" WSXGA+ (1680x1050), 16ms
Size (WxDxH): 363 x 267 x 31 mm
Weight: 2.86 kg
Pro: Excellent finish quality, WiFi reception, keyboard, touchpad, Ethernet performance. ET Contra: Saving on wrong end - two sticks of DDR333, sluggish 5400 rpm HDD, default 1-yr warranty.

Even the retail protective box is designed with a touch of style. However, the best thing happens when you unwrap the box. The 4005WLMi looks better in the real world than it does in the pictures, which is a rare thing these days. The shiny carbon-fibre hood of the notebook sports a distinctive Ferrari logo in the middle, with a very discreet manufacturer's logo in upper part of the carbon hood, in almost invisible matted chrome paint.

The Top of the hood features a red stripe with a logo "PowerUp". Beneath the strip, you'll find two dual-inverted antennas, which really help your WiFi reception. The rest of the notebook is padded with high-quality rubber, which gave us a more comfortable feeling during testing, and looked more durable than painted plastic.

4005 also carries the flag of most feature packed side-pods of all notebooks I've tested so far: you'll find both DVI and analogue D-SUB connectors (paired with an S-VHS put), four tactically positioned USB ports, FireWire port, and a high quality slot-in DVD-RAM device.

Once you open the bonnet, you will see an unusually angled keyboard which sparked positive and negative comments. My personal opinion is that if you use several computers, a same-shape keyboard is the best choice - but if this is your primary rig, you'll adapt in no time.

The keyboard deserves our highest mark, because you'll experience no user-unprovoked changes during typing - you will not find yourselves suddenly typing the text in the 50th row, and you typed in the 70th, which is something we noticed on many notebooks out there. If you consider yourself to be a fast typist, Ferrari 4005 won't give you a nervous breakdown.

The touchpad is very sensitive and surprisingly responsive, but those users who don't feel comfortable when using it can use provided Bluetooth mouse, Ferrari-branded of course. The biggest shortcoming of the mouse is very aggressive battery-saving setting. Also, a lack of any indicator of battery life is annoying, but the included 1600 mAh batteries are usually found in digital cameras, not mice. In three weeks of testing, the batteries did not show any signs of tiredness, and that involved more than several LAN parties and a dozen WoW sessions. Charging is done by USB cable, during which you can use your mouse with no problems.

The front part of the notebook features a function panel - you can find a 5-in-1 card reader, microphone, microphone/headphone jacks and Bluetooth/WiFi switches. Although I was sceptical of the front panel positioning, the keys weren't accidentally switched at any time.

I was doubtful it was real carbon-fibre and that it does not serve anything more than "nice" feature, but I was wrong. The carbon fibre bonnet enhances the rigidity of the top part of the notebook and gives extra screen protection. Our stability test is quite reproducible on any notebook: knock on the rear side of the screen and see whether the screen trembles or the picture become unequal at the point of impact. If it does, a notebook has very weak protection and broken pixels are just a matter of time, and stronger stress, even if in a bag, can result in a broken screen. The Ferrari 4005WLMi passed this test with flying colours, which wasn't the case for the 3200.

After the boot procedure starts, the first thing you'll see is Michael's Ferrari F2005 in rain-soaked Melbourne qualifying. Unlike many 300-something pixels bootscreens, this one is a fully fledged high-quality image - booting into Windows takes merely a couple of seconds, and then you'll hear the sound which will spur life in your red blood cells - Formula 1 V10 engine at its full revs. The Desktop features Ferrari F1 car and monthly calendar. However, I cannot believe that Ferrari was such a cheapskate and did not bundle a yearly membership to its FerrariWorld site. Acer can't be blamed for this, but that FerrariWorld shortcut on a desktop is really annoying if you need to pay for it. Imagine if you just bought a Ferrari car, and the company wanted a fee to be able to use the radio. However, a shift+delete action on icon solves the problem once and for all.

The unusual thing with the Acer factory setting is that everything on the desktop was enlarged to 125% scale, which Windows will tidily warn you about. However, for a top-notch 15.4" panel blessed with a 1680x1050 resolution, that font enlargement was really a good move. The screen is one which wasn't too hard on reviewer's eyes even after intensive usage.

Connectivity
Since Intel touts the Centrino platform as the ultimate connectivity solution, and AMD's Turion 64 platform is mere a processor, we were especially interested to see which components will Acer pick for its prime. To say the least, Acer leaves a far better taste in mouth than generic Centrinos: for cable connectivity, the company opted for BroadCom: PCI Express-based NetLink Extreme blows the Centrino's Intel by a mile both in terms of bandwidth and CPU utilisation, while 802.11b/g chip worked flawlessly while changing airports. Besides typical Ethernet, there is also a possibility for a link with another device via Texas Instruments Bluetooth chip or Fast infra-red port.

The Test
3D Synthetic Tests
3D Download (MB/s) 441.26
3DMark2001SE, default 16295
3DMark2001SE, native (1680x1050) 11099
3DMark05, default 2364
3DMark05, native (1680x1050) 1394
Fill Rate, Single / MultiTexturing 1201.6 / 2852.6
Pixel Shader 53.2
Vertex Shader Simple / Complex 32.1 / 32.9

System Synthetic Tests
Everest RAM Read/Write (MB/s) 2501 / 899
Everest RAM Latency (ns) 64.1
HDTach 32MB test 33.2
HDTach Burst mode 90.8
PCMark05 2657
PCMark05, CPU score 2834
PCMark05, RAM score 2557
PCMark05, VGA Score 2659
PCMark05, HDD score 3015
Performance Test 5 321.7
RightMark RAM Real Bandwidth (MB/s) 1305.07
RightMark RAM Real Latency (ns) 42.75
SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU ALU Dhrystone 8408
SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU FPU Whetstone 3156
SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU iSSE2 Whetstone 4084
SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU MM x16 iSSE2 19055
SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU MM FP x8 iSSE2 20504
SiSoft Sandra Hard disk test 29
SiSoft Sandra 2005 RAM ALU (MB/s) 2241
SiSoft Sandra 2005 RAM FPU (MB/s) 2239

Real-world Tests
Doom III, 1024x768 demo1 43.5
Doom III, native (1680x1050) demo1 20.8
Far Cry, 1024x768 Training 48.01
Far Cry, native (1680x1050) Training 26,55
HDTV: H.264 test, CPU Load % 100
HDTV: H.264 test (fps) 38524
HDTV: WMV-HD Test, CPU Load % 41
HDTV: WMV-HD Test (fps) 11.8
Multitasking test, compressing (MB/s) 3.98
Multitasking test, encryption (MB/s) 18.95
Picture decompressing (Mpixel/s) 22.90

In the next couple of months, here at The INQ we'll be redefining the notebook review standards, so if you feel something missing from the tests, feel free to drop us an e-mail.

Regarding 3D tests, you will note that we have benchmarked in two resolutions only: in near future, you'll see the reviews of notebooks ranging from entry level to high-end, so a resolution of 1024x768 was taken as a reference mark. The second resolution is the native resolution of LCD screen on given model, so you'll see does the tested model has enough power to run the apps in native res, of a fallback is required as soon as you buy the 'book.

Radeon X700 is by no mean a sluggish card, but if you want to play some game, such as the popular World of WarCraft in native resolution, it was required to tune down the details to medium setting, with no AntiAliasing and Aniso set to 4x.

However, the game shows wide-screen advantages to the maximum extent. I have also tried running Doom III, but performance was unacceptable. However, FIA: GTR and Need for Speed: Underground 2 showed playable framerate in this high resolution, and same thing happened with Far Cry, albeit in medium quality settings.

The HDTV tests are actually trailers for the upcoming Sci-Fi hit movie, Serenity: we have downloaded 720p and 1080p versions of the same trailer in WMV-HD and QuickTime 7 H.264 formats, and it was obvious that single-core CPU, not assisted by a graphics card just cannot hold the candle for extremely resource-intensive HD content.

However, we feel that the primary reason why the sluggish frame rate occurred was the fault of 5400 rpm HDD, since a similarly equipped desktop configuration (Athlon 64 3200+ Socket 754 at 2GHz, 1GB single-channel DDR333 using three sticks, and an 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda hard drive) produced far less amount of stuttering than was the case with the Ferrari.

In the end, we can only conclude that the 4005 is the best Ferrari made in 2005, but there are still things left to be desired. At least the rubber on the notebook will last longer than the Bridgestones on the Ferrari F2005. µ