The good: Excellent looks and design; good performance; HDMI output.

The bad: Flaky peripherals; screen could have been better; expensive.

The bottom line: The Ferrari 5000 is the best-looking and performing notebook Acer has released, but it's pricey and not without its quirks.

Read full review of the Acer Ferrari 5000 series »

By Ty Pendlebury
Apr 12, 2007

The Acer Ferrari 5000 is the company's latest performance notebook--itself an update from the popular Ferrari 4000 released 18 months ago. ItÂ’s a black-and-red laptop, which is quite stylish in a subdued way--subdued for a car tie-in that is.

Editors' note : This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com.au. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some of other products in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia. Please check directly with your local distributor for details.

Design
The Ferrari 5000 certainly looks less gaudy than the Asus Lamborghini VX2, which is quite welcome, as though that notebook is quite the performer it’s almost noxiously ostentatious. The Acer has some carbon-fiber sections, though it appears to be mostly decorative.

The palm rest is a matte-black plastic and also quite sexy, though it does get quite greasy with fingerprints--Acer’s supplied Ferrari cloth comes in handy here.

Though the notebook looks virtually identical to its predecessor at first glance, the ports and optical drives have been moved around--with the optical drive now at the left, alongside both an ExpressCard and PCMCIA port.

Features
One of the disappointments we encountered with the Ferrari 5000 is its lack of an HD-DVD drive--the specifications list tantalized us with the promise of one, but once opened we found it was simply a dual-layer DVD burner. HD-DVD drives cost about AU$600 (S$751.89) by themselves, so this is quite a savings for the company, obviously. It's not the only company to pull features at the 11th hour--as Sony did with the release of its PlayStation 3.

The Ferrari 5000 boasts some obvious upgrades over the previous model: The processor is a dual-core AMD Turion running at 2GHz; there’s 2GB of RAM, which is almost compulsory for a performance Vista machine; a 160GB hard drive; and an AMD Radeon X1600.

	The two-tone theme gives the Ferrari 5000 a sleek look. (Click for larger image)

The previous version's DVI port has been upgraded to an HDMI connection, though it is still a video-only connection. To get digital audio you'll need to connect via the front-mounted SPDIF connection. A nice addition, though a little perplexing, was the inclusion of a HDMI-to-DVI cable. We would have expected an HDMI-to-HDMI cable to come in more handy.

Given the Ferrari’s entertainment focus, we were somewhat perplexed that it comes preinstalled with Windows Vista Business rather than Premium. The Media Center features of the Premium Edition should have been a shoo-in.

The bundled mouse is something of a shocker, with an uncomfortably bulbous midsection, and we noticed a bit of lag when using within Windows. To test the fidelity of the Bluetooth connection we installed the first-person shooter Call of Juarez, but there was no noticeable lag within the game--it's a seemingly intermittent issue. We did notice that it operates a lot better with the USB charge cable connected, so it could be power related.

Other accessories include a Bluetooth VoIP phone, which fits in the PCMCIA port when not in use, and the 1.3-megapixel Orbicam which can rotate back on itself if you really want it to.

One "feature" we could have done without is the loud "vroom" noise the laptop makes when you turn it on--thankfully, you can turn it off after galumphing through the Acer Empowering Technology menus. Nifty, however, is the related calendar desktop which updates once a day with a Ferrari racing theme.

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