The 3D scores are pretty decent as well, but unless your games support widescreen displays you’ll end up with them either being stretched or you won’t be able to take advantage of the whole screen.
Most games should still be playable at close to full screen resolution as long as you’re happy with 30fps. Lower the resolution and you shouldn’t have a problem hitting 50-60fps depending on the game you play. This isn’t the ultimate gaming notebook, but it will be able to handle most current games.
Verdict
The Acer Ferrari 5000 is an impressive machine, but there's that little matter of cost. At around £1,699 this laptop's anything but cheap. It is an exclusive model with top of the range features - and don't forget that sportscar marque - but the price still seems a bit on the high side. But then I'm not a Ferrari fan.
If you are, or you want a laptop that makes you feel like you have something rather exclusive, the Acer Ferrari 5000 is worth taking out for a spin. It's very expensive, but you get a lot of laptop for your money. ®
Acer Ferrari 5000 dual-core AMD laptop
COMMENTS
Reply
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.
