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 Acer Ferrari 4000A speedy and stylish thin-and-light notebook that will get your pulse racing. Price: $2,199
True to its sports car branding and Italian high styling, the Ferrari 4000 from Acer is an extremely fast notebook with a killer redesign. Instead of sticking with its loud all-red chassis, this system scores style points with a more subdued, but sexy checkered black carbon fiber casing and rubberized material surrounding the keyboard (don’t worry, some Ferrari-red accents remain).
The engine is a 2-GHz Turion 64 processor from AMD. The 4000 uses a more efficient 64-bit CPU than the Mobile Athlon 64 in its predecessor, the Ferrari 3400. The Turion is what gives the 4000 its speed and power. We opened several applications at once, including PowerDVD to watch American Splendor, and this 6.3-pound portable blazed through them with ease. The 4000 is loaded with all of the ports and slots you’ll need, starting with a DVI port and dock connector that are ingeniously placed on the back of the system. There are three USB 2.0 ports on the right side, next to the double-layer DVD burner. The fourth USB is on the left along with the PC Card slot, FireWire, Ethernet, modem, and VGA ports. On the front, you’ll find the 5-in-1 memory card reader, infrared, headphone and mic jacks, plus buttons to turn the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections on and off. The keyboard is large and full-sized, so all the important keys are accessible. The keyboard’s ergonomic design curves like a smile. Besides four shortcut buttons at the top, the layout is simple. The touchpad is small, but responsive, even when playing an intense game. Between the two buttons is a four-way scroll button that didn’t work all that well in our tests. A notebook this powerful demands games. We played Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 at its highest setting of 1680 x 1050. The graphics looked stunning, thanks to ATI’s Mobilty Radeon X700 card, but the Ferrari started to choke during fast-moving sequences. When we brought the display settings down to the default levels, the 4000 had no problems at all. What makes the Turion 64 even more remarkable is its efficiency. Throughout our testing the fan rarely came on. When it did turn on, it was more of a hush, and the notebook did not become uncomfortably warm. The 4000’s 3 hours and 15 minutes of battery life isn’t stellar, but it’s good enough for a fair amount of unplugged work and play. The 15.4-inch widescreen display makes watching movies and playing games a delight. It isn’t as bright as what we’ve seen on other notebooks, yet the brightness and contrast levels are quite good. Fonts were crisp and detailed, and in-game graphics were some of the best we’ve seen on an LCD. The built-in speakers, were fairly weak and are an insult to an otherwise perfect machine. We highly recommend connecting high-end PC speakers to the S/PDIF port. The Ferrari 4000 connected to our Wi-Fi access point easily. At 5 feet, the notebook achieved a decent data rate of 10.9 Mbps, dropping a bit to 7 Mbps when we moved out to 50 feet. The Bluetooth software recognized our Sony Ericsson phone instantly, and we had no problem uploading pictures wirelessly to the notebook. Although the 4000 is souped up in terms of specs, there isn’t much in the way of software. Acer throws in a few of its own utilities, plus PowerDVD, NTI CD-Maker, and Norton AntiVirus. Aside from a few minor flaws, the Acer Ferrari 4000 is an incredible value given everything that’s under the hood. It’s cool-looking without being in your face about its sports car genes, yet does laps around the competition when it comes to horsepower and graphics. This high-performance notebook takes the checkered flag. Compare Prices | Acer Ferrari 4000 Specifications
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