I figured it was about that time to upgrade my crusty 6 moth old Dell Inspiron 9200 for something a little more flashy, tech rich, and lighter. So after a few days of searching, I came across the newly released Acer Ferrari 4000 (4005WLMi). After reading a few quality reviews from PC Mag, Toms Hardware, and Notebook Review (great photos), I knew that I had to own one. Tom's really takes it through the paces, though they were only given the 1.8ghz model for review not the 2ghz model that I purchased. So here goes my mini review:
The pros that set this apart from other notebooks are first, the looks! You won't find a better looking laptop from a mainstream manufacturer. The only other notebooks I liked that were comparable in looks came from boutique shops like VoodooPc and Falcon NW, both of which were too expensive or too beefy for my needs. Aside from the carbon fiber Ferrari exterior, it has a few other aesthetic features worth noting; it has an ergonomic keyboard, brightly lit and easily accessible switches for turning on both bluetooth and 802.11 transceivers, a slot loading dvd/cd burner, a 5 in 1 media card reader on the front of the unit, and finally a Ferrari branded and matching wireless bluetooth mouse.
Now, on to the guts...It has the new AMD Turion 64 mobile processor running at 2.0ghz, which is certified and has drivers to run either XP 32bit or XP 64 bit edition (I opted for 32 bit). It runs on the new Radeon Xpress 200m mobile chipset that brings along with it the latest and greatest Radeon X700 Pci-x 128mb graphics card...which gives me the pleasure of saying that this is the first laptop I've ever owned (and I've owned a few) that can truly game. It scored nearly double that of my 9200 (2.0ghz Pentium m & Radeon 9700 128mb) on the AquaMark 3d bench mark, putting it in the company of middle of the road desktop gaming rigs! It's nice to finally be able to play games like WoW on the road without lugging around a 10lb desktop replacement rig...did I mention that this notebook weighs only 6.5 lbs! So, as if that wasn't enough, it also packs a very bright 15.4 lcd at 1680x1050, 1 gb of DDR333 ram, and a 100gb 5200rpm hard drive...for a complete laundry list check out Acers site here.
So, needless to say, this is a very positive review...however, I do have a few gripes. On the longevity front, this notebook could use a little work. The average run time on battery has been roughly 2.5 hours with brightness at 75% and normal wireless use (web browser, email, etc) and about 3.5 with brightness at 33% and normal use. When in battery mode the bios will automatically dim the monitor to 33% if the auto-dim option is selected. This is not horrible performance for an 8 cell lion, but I was hoping for more...it would be nice if they had a 9-12 cell battery option for those of us who like to stay unplugged or like the brightness at a respectable level. My final 2 gripes are less of a big deal but certainly worth noting. First, there are no media buttons...I find that I've become accustomed to changing music tracks, pausing, muting, and so on via these useful buttons. And second, the included matching wireless mouse is close to worthless when it comes to performance. With a mouse pad it is somewhat usable in a pinch or if you want to show it off, but, for normal use, the tracking is so bad that I would rather just a usb mouse instead...without a mouse pad its completely un-usable.
Overall, this is an outstanding notebook...so, if you're in the market for a thin and light with ballz, I would seriously recommend checking out the Ferrari 4000
