The battery life was very good, although this will depend on the power profile you use. The Ferrari 5000 managed 162 minutes in the DVD playback test, not quite enough for a 3h movie, but not bad. It faired much better in the standard battery test where it managed no less than 201 minutes, that’s 3h and 21 minutes, which is pretty decent considering the components. The Ferrari 5000 isn’t a road warrior’s first choice, but it still offers decent enough battery life for a few hours away from a power socket.
General performance was also very good, although the overall MobileMark 2005 performance score of 199 won’t be able to beat the faster Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors from Intel. Nonetheless, it’s a good sign of where AMD is taking its mobile platform and the Ferrari 5000 is by no means slow, no matter if it’s running on battery power or plugged into the mains. The PCMark 2005 scores are also more than acceptable, but the hard drive score seemed to be on the low side.
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Thanks for your comments.
It's not easy getting hold of old kit to compare against new, so doing a comparison against the old version wasn't possible. And yes, Core or Core 2 Duo is a lot faster than AMD's mobile processors, there's no doubt about that. We've got a Core 2 Duo notebook on its way, so expect a review up as soon as we're allowed to publish the results.
The quality from the web camera was ok during the 3 seconds it did work before the software locked up...
Noting like the nostalgia of a 3000LMi.
I'm posting this using a Ferrari 3000LMi, the first one ever bought out by Acer. It has a crap screen, had the slowest HDD(until I updated to a 7200rpm model) and it creaks when you touch type on it, but, it's sexy as all hell being splattered in 'Ferrari red' unlike the overpriced new stuff which is non descript carbon fibre - people whom sometimes think the CF looks unfinished in appearance.
There's also something about the HDD's that Acer insist on using, if you change the drive over to a more up to date model the laptop runs cooler with the venting fan coming on less than original/stock setups.
What can I say about the new Acer Ferrari... next laptop I get will be a whitebox jobby, no more marketing/label/branding billboard for me. Oh how I've evolved.
2.0 GHz Turion TL-60 disappoints
Just today, there was a test of four "Yonah"-based notebooks at www.mobilityguru.com, more precisely at: http://www.mobilityguru.com/2006/08/02/four_notebooks_ready_for_business/
The performance charts can be found here:
http://www.mobilityguru.com/picturegalleries/gallery-200607315.html
The Lenovo Thinkpad T60 notebook eqipped with a 2.0 Core Duo "Yonah" processor scored a Mobilemark 2005 score of 227 and a PCmark05 CPU score of 4604, compared to 199 and 4073, respectively, for the Acer Ferrari 5000 featuring a Turion X2 TL-60 at 2.0 GHz.
In other words, "Yonah" 2.0 GHz is about 15% faster than Turion X2 2.0 GHz.
Adding insult to injury, "Yonah" is the "old" processor, to be replaced this very August by its successor "Merom" (Core 2 Duo).
Now, Merom is rumored to be another 10% to 15% faster than Yonah at the same clock frequency.
Conclusion: AMD has never achieved better performance than Intel in the notebook sector, not with the Turion and also not with the brand new Turion X2.
If you're in the market for a fast notebook computer, wait four weeks and get yourself a "Merom"-based one.
webcam and pictures
well it's unfortunate the webcam didn't work at the time of the review. i think this is one of the important features aside from the dual-core that sets it apart from the 4000 series.
review seemed like it was too short and the lack of pictures didn't help either. it would've been nice if there was a comparison between the 4000 and 5000 series in terms of performance.
