Acer Ferrari 3200

The chance to race with Scuderia Ferrari (Team Ferrari) may never come your way, but Acer's offering a consolation prize: the opportunity to own an official team notebook. The sleek, thin-and-light Acer Ferrari 3200 sports the same colour and logo as the team cars. Like its namesake, the notebook offers premium internal parts, including an AMD Mobile Athlon 64 2800+ processor, a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics chip, and 802.11b/g wireless. Unfortunately, the Acer Ferrari 3200 performed more like a Ford Escort in our tests, while its battery scores proved equally mediocre. This slick notebook will undoubtedly turn heads, but if speed and performance on the go is your ultimate goal, look elsewhere.

Design
As far as design is concerned, the Acer Ferrari 3200 lives up to its name. At 33cm wide by 27.2cm deep by 3.1cm high, the modest-sized, 3kg Ferrari 3200 boasts a distinctive red lid that promises to remain smooth and shiny, thanks to its scratch-resistant coating. The inside of the case is made of a tough, silver-magnesium alloy. Ferrari's official logo sits conspicuously in the bottom-right corner of the lid and by the wrist rest, but the comfortable, smile-shaped keyboard is pure Acer. A standard touchpad and two mouse buttons sit under the keyboard, along with a handy third button for perpendicular or horizontal scrolling. Four convenient, user-programmable application buttons reside above the board, and the Ferrari 3200's big 15in. display offers a fine 1,400 by 1,050 native resolution. The sides of the Acer Ferrari 3200 accommodate an impressive assortment of drives, ports and slots. The left edge offers four USB 2.0 ports, one Type II PC Card slot, a FireWire port and three audio-related jacks. The DVD+RW drive on the right side is a particularly cool and unique touch: instead of the usual sliding, flimsy disc tray, it's a simple slot that smoothly accepts and ejects discs. The Ferrari 3200's front edge features two typically tinny notebook speakers, an infrared port, two on/off buttons for the integrated 802.11b/g and Bluetooth adapters, and a four-in-one card reader that's compatible with Memory Stick, MultiMedia, Secure Digital and SmartMedia flash memory cards. The rear of the system hosts parallel, VGA, 56Kbps modem, S-Video out and Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Features
Unlike many major manufacturers that let you custom configure their laptops, Acer offers just one version of the Ferrari 3200. It runs a low-voltage Mobile AMD Athlon 64 2800+ processor running at 1.8GHz and has 512MB of 333MHz DDR memory, an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics chip with 128MB of dedicated video RAM, and a 4,200rpm hard drive with a generous 80GB of storage space. In light of the system's slow showing in our mobile performance, we wish Acer provided the freedom to add memory and choose a faster processor, graphics chip or hard drive. Also onboard the Ferrari 3200 is a cutting-edge DVD-rewritable drive that supports -RW, +RW, and -RAM formats; a large 15in. screen with a high 1,400 by 1,050 native resolution that displays graphics in fine detail; 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapters are also integrated. If you're looking for a similar design at a lower price, consider the first model in the Ferrari series -- the Acer Ferrari 3000LMi, which is still available. But beware: the Ferrari 3000's performance was even slower than the 3200's. Also worth noting: the 3000's lid lacks a scratch-resistant coating, requiring extra care if you want to avoid marring its glossy surface. The only configuration choice you get with the Acer Ferrari 3200 is the operating system -- you can have either Windows XP Professional or XP Home (we had the latter). The bundled software is also sparse; the highlights are CyberLink's PowerDVD for DVD playback and NTI's CD-Maker for disc burning. We wish that Acer had at least included a productivity mini-suite such as Microsoft's Works.

Performance & battery life
Performance
Acer might want to rethink the Ferrari 3200's name. The system delivered a thoroughly mediocre mobile performance in our benchmarks, although a couple of factors bear explanation. First, the Ferrari 3200 carries AMD's Mobile Athlon 64 2800+ processor, which AMD rates at approximately 1.8GHz; many of the applications from Microsoft, Adobe and others in our MobileMark 2002 tests were developed with Intel processors in mind. In addition, our tests measure a notebook's speed in the real world -- that is, unplugged. And many notebooks, including the Acer Ferrari 3200, automatically instruct their CPUs to slow down when running on battery power. We acknowledge that the Ferrari 3200 would probably see a performance boost when it's plugged in and running applications that are optimised for the Athlon 64. Nevertheless, the Ferrari 3200's MobileMark 2002 score of 156 is a long way behind the fastest we've recorded to date -- 216 from the Dell Inspiron 8600c and the Acer Apsire 1502LMi (the latter, incidentally, is based on AMD's 2GHz Athlon 64 3200+ processor). Battery life
Even though the Ferrari 3200 has a hefty 14.8V, 4,400mAh (65.12WHr) battery, it lasted only a paltry 2 hours 26 minutes in MobileMark 2002's rundown test. Compare that to the 5 hours 43 minutes delivered by NEC's Versa M340, and you'll appreciate why we were unimpressed with the Ferrari 3200's roadworthiness (as it were).

Service & support
The Ferrari 3200's one-year International Traveller's warranty falls in line with most of the competition. You can extend the warranty via the AcerAdvantage program if need be -- albeit at a price. Telephone support is available from 9am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday, at a cost of 50p per minute. You can also get email support, driver downloads utilities and user guides via Acer's Web site.

Specifications