Racing your laptop

Darius Chang | Nov 28, 2005

From Acer's Ferrari notebook to the upcoming Intel-Lamborghini laptop, Nascar has joined the free-for-all by branding the Cisnet-made laptop with its distinctive trademark. Powering on an AMD Turion 64 ML-30 chip and 80GB hard drive, the two partners have jointly designed the first Nascar notebook.

Available only to the US market, the laptop was launched in October and can be purchased through CompUSA and Target.com. It costs US$899.99 (S$1523.81) after rebate and comes with a Nascar-themed Logitech mouse, customized Media Player and Nascar-inspired screensaver. If fans are hoping to race virtually with Nascar 2005 on this system, they will probably not get past the starting line. Unlike its namesake, the Nascar laptop has to depend on the poky and slow integrated graphics card to render animations. Gaming on this system is about as fast and as enjoyable as watching a race with the safety car on the track.

And unlike the cutting-edge technologies found in racing vehicles, this mobile makes do with yesterday's specifications. 80GB of storage, integrated graphics and PCMCIA slots may still allow it to make it past the qualifying round this year, but we expect the Nascar notebook to be retired in short notice with next year's lineup. We hope to see better systems from the other 200 licensees bearing the stock car auto race logo.

Filed under: Notebooks
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