Acer Ferrari 5000 review

You can output the image to another screen using the S-Video, VGA or HDMI connectors, and while this laptop supports HDCP, our review sample had a standard dual-layer DVD drive, rather than the HD DVD option. Still, you get an ample 160GB hard drive to stash your MP3s and whatnot.

The keyboard is solid and feels good, but we had the occasional mis-key, where we had to press slightly harder than expected to get the result we wanted. Audio is provided by a Realtek HD controller, but the integrated speakers were fairly tinny and we might as well have been listening to the inferior AC'97 audio technology.

Acer supplies a neat gimmick in the shape of a Bluetooth VoIP phone that you charge in the PC Card slot. Pop it out and turn it on and provided your Ferrari is linked to the Internet, you can use the Bluetooth connection to make VoIP calls as you lounge back in your office chair. Well, that's the theory, but in practice we couldn't make the Bluetooth connection, and yes, we did have Bluetooth enabled.

While we're complaining, the Orbicam seemed to have a few glitches and didn't behave. Finally, we were staggered to see that the 5000 uses an ageing FAT32 hard drive partition instead of the newer NTFS variety. This will likely hamper the laptop's disk performance.

The software package is fairly minuscule and is limited to Cyberlink PowerDVD and NTI CD and DVD Maker, but Acer includes a full set of its own utilities so you can, for instance, tell the power management what battery life you need and it'll do its best to juggle the power settings to accommodate you.

Performance
The Ferrari 5000 delivers in terms of processor, memory and graphics performance and the high-resolution, mid-sized screen is a superb compromise between size and readability.

Overall performance figures gained from running PCMark 2005 were impressive. The laptop returned a figure of 4,200, which is about right given its specification. It's slightly faster than the near-identical Asus A7Tc, but its we'd expect that given the Ferrari costs nearly £600 more. Gaming performance was solid, too. It clocked up 2,000 in 3DMark 2006, ran Doom 3 at 57 frames per second (fps), and Far Cry at 71fps.

The laptop failed to run our MobileMark test, for unknown reasons, but we tortured it by repeatedly running PCMark 2005 until the battery died. It lasted a respectable 2 hours 42 minutes, which is impressive considering its powerful components.

Edited by Rory Reid
Additional editing by Nick Hide