Ferrari 5000 - fast like a racing car

The Acer Ferrari 5000 is the company's latest fast-running laptop series, succeeding the Ferrari 4000 series launched 18 months ago. It harmoniously blends from red and black, inspired by the famous Italian racing car with distinctive red color.

Not too flashy, dazzling like the laptop also comes from the Formula 1 racing car inspiration, ASUS Lamborghini VX2, Ferrari 5000 is eye-catching enough to make users stand out in the crowd. It uses carbon fiber material, which is often used only as a race car shell or in a plane case.

The armrests with matte black plastic look quite attractive although it is easy to leave fingerprints. The Ferrari 5000 looks a lot like its predecessor at a glance, but the ports and optical drives have been relocated, with the optical drive now on the left flank with ExpressCard and PCMCIA port ports.

Function

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Except for the non-HD-DVD optical drive, the Ferrari 5000 is upgraded to a comprehensive configuration compared to the Ferrari 4000 predecessor.

One of the disappointments of the Ferrari 5000 is that it lacks a high-definition HD-DVD optical drive, but is only equipped with a double-layer DVD burner. On the other hand, the Ferrari 5000 is clearly upgraded to its predecessor with a 2 GHz AMD Turion dual-core processor; RAM up to 2 GB, one of the almost mandatory features for running Vista, 160GB hard drive and AMD Radeon X1600 graphics card.

The Ferrari 4000 DVI port has been upgraded to HDMI, although it is still a video port, not digital audio. To receive digital audio you need to connect the speaker to the front SPDIF port. The only problem is that it only has HDMI-to-DVI cable instead of HDMI-to-HDMI.

Apparently, Ferrari aims to entertain, but it has preinstalled Windows Vista Business, not Vista Premium. Meanwhile Media Center on the fully-featured Premium version is stronger.

The computer mouse is quite erratic and somewhat lethargic when using Windows and Bluetooth. However, when controlling the Call of Juarez game, there is no problem. After trying to retry with the power supply cable via USB, this phenomenon is explained that may be related to the source. Other accessories, such as a Bluetooth VoIP phone, allow it to be hidden into the PCMCIA slot when not in use, and the 1.3 Megapixel Orbicam webcam allows for quite flexible rotation. In addition, Acer also has the feature to limit noise when the machine starts up and works.

Enforcement and battery life

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There is an HDMI port instead of DVI

Acer laptop is more about entertainment, with anti-glare screen coating and therefore has less work support compared to applications to "play". Stylish and comfortable keyboard for operation. It has its own Euro key name that provides enough information about the common European currency. The slightly fuzzy screen is the weakest point of the machine. Ferrari 4000 meets the phenomenon of DVD optical drive causing noise, but fortunately this problem no longer exists in the Ferrari 5000.

Acer provides an exclusive ePower utility to control the power modes for the device, but also causes annoyances. For example, you cannot increase the maximum brightness and max processing speed when opening this function, you must turn it off.

The manufacturer from Taiwan made a step back when Ferrari battery life was only 3 hours while the previous life was 3.5 hours. In fact, it only reached 2 hours 44 minutes when using the BatteryEater Pro test program. This is a respectable result for a desktop replacement laptop.

Advantages : Beautiful appearance design, fast execution, HDMI port.
Cons : Less peripheral accessories, screens should have been better, expensive.
Review score: 7/10.

Another benchmark score equivalent to PCMark05 was tested to test the performance of this laptop, in that it can evaluate a computer with Vista installed. The Acer Ferrari 5000 has reached 4,276 points, which is also a commendable achievement, not to mention the famous Italian racing car.