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forces with AMD and Scuderia Ferrari to create the Ferrari 3000 notebook back in
October 2003, they had an immediate winner on their hands. A year later, Acer blew
the industry away with the Ferrari 3200 and 3400 notebooks. They were a tough act
to follow, but like all true champions who never rest on their laurels, Acer went back
to the drawing board in their never-ending quest to perfect their racing-heritage
notebook. On May 26, 2005, the Acer Ferrari 4000 4005WLMi Notebook was
born—lighter, faster, more powerful and feature-packed than any of its
predecessors. Today, we'll take a look at this race-bred beauty to see if it's truly
worthy of its namesake.
Whether on the racetrack or in business, strategic partnerships are crucial to
success; so the partnership between the Scuderia Ferrari F1 Team, the FIA
(Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile)—the governing body of international
motor sports, AMD and Acer was a natural and logical choice. Cutting edge
technology is crucial to the advancement of auto racing, and you'd be hard pressed
to find a more cutting-edge company than AMD, whose award-winning Athlon™ 64
Processors made them a force to be reckoned with against long-time rival Intel.
Acer immediately recognized that the high profile relationship between one of the
world's top racing organizations and a company who was seriously challenging Intel's
dominance and winning, was a unique opportunity to increase their name recognition
and market share. Unlike their competitors who either dismissed or ignored the AMD
and Ferrari partnership, Acer knew a good thing when they saw it, and got on board
immediately. The rest, as they say, is history.
All trademarks used are properties of their respective owners.
Acer Ferrari 4000 4005WLMi Notebook
Reviewed by Barry Little - September 21, 2005
Manufacturer: Acer, Inc.
Model: LX.FR406.035
Few names personify the word legend in the world of
Formula One racing and exotic dream cars as Ferrari. When
Acer, one of the world's top five PC manufacturers, joined
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Copyright © 2003-2007 by Barry Little. All Rights Reserved.
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Summary of Contents for Acer BRnR 4000 4005WLMi
- Page 1 Acer Ferrari 4000 4005WLMi Notebook Reviewed by Barry Little - September 21, 2005 Manufacturer: Acer, Inc. Model: LX.FR406.035 Few names personify the word legend in the world of Formula One racing and exotic dream cars as Ferrari. When Acer, one of the world’s top five PC manufacturers, joined forces with AMD and Scuderia Ferrari to create the Ferrari 3000 notebook back in October 2003, they had an immediate winner on their hands.
- Page 2 Now a little about Acer from their website: About Acer Acer ranks among the world's top five branded PC vendors, designing and marketing easy, dependable IT solutions that empower people to reach their goals and enhance their lives. In 2000, Acer spun-off its manufacturing operation to focus on globally marketing its brand-name products: desktop and mobile PCs, servers and storage, displays, peripherals, and e-business solutions for business, government, education, and home users.
- Page 3 Series Processor processor 3000+ 3400 Ferrari AMD Turion ª 64 ML-37 or ML-30 Mobile Technology 4000 The Ferrari 4000 This attention- arrived in a larger grabbing design box with additional would look just as packing to protect it much at home on the during shipping.
- Page 4 The first thing that Let's get this thing greets you when you unpacked. open the box is this Quick-Start fold-out As you can see, the Acer Ferrari Notebook has evolved quite a bit over the years. Let's see just how much... Packaging FedEx delivered the notebook in a large box filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts.
- Page 5 places two PIFAs (Planar Inverted F-Antennas) inside the top of the Ferrari 4000’s LCD display, creating a perfect omni-directional signal sphere for enhanced wireless network reception even in low-reception areas, as indicated by the SignalUp logo on the red styling strip running along the upper edge of the LCD display. WHOA! Unlike the previous Ferrari notebooks,...
- Page 6 Ferrari 4000’s integrated Broadcom NetLink 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet adapter and an RJ-11 port for the built-in Agere Systems AC’97 56K ITU V.92 modem; a USB 2.0 port; a 4-pin IEEE 1394 “Micro” Firewire port; and one PC Card Slot that accepts any standard Type II PCMCIA card.
- Page 7 71w Li-ion (Lithium Ion) Battery Pack snaps in the rear of the notebook, takes 2.5 hours to fully charge, and holds that charge for an average of 3.5 hours under normal use. Carefully turn the notebook over, and you’ll find the latches that release the battery and Matshita optical drive, as well as compartments containing the Wireless LAN, hard drive, and memory.
- Page 8 native resolution of 1680 x 1050; Acer’s 89-key ergonomic FineTouch™ keyboard, and a generous-sized touch pad framed in aluminum-colored plastic with matching mouse buttons and a neat scroll pad button in the center. To the right once again, is the Ferrari’s Prancing Horse crest, and on the left are OEM logos displayed like sponsor decals, of the primary components that power this race and sports car- inspired beauty: the AMD Turion™...
- Page 9 Here's the Ferrari A close look at Acer's crest again. 89-key FineTouch ergonomic keyboard. As you might expect, it may take a brief adjustment period to get used to, and you'll either love it or hate it (I love it). Ferrari World's The Acer Ferrari wallpaper applet...
- Page 10 program of your choice. All of the Easy-launch buttons can be reconfigured to your liking with Acer’s Launch Manager software. As with most notebook keyboards, engaging the <Num Lock> key or pressing the <Fn> + <F11> keys changes the keys to on the right-hand side of the keyboard to a numeric keypad for numeric data entry.
- Page 11 ...like so. Now let's The Acer Ferrari 4000 reboot and check out uses the ever-popular the Ferrari 4000's and widely-used BIOS. Phoenix BIOS. This is the Information Screen which gives a peek at what's under the Ferrari 4000's impressive hood. The engine beneath the Acer Ferrari 4000’s hood is a fast and energy-efficient 2.0 GHz AMD Turion™...
- Page 12 You'll probably want to leave this enabled. This enables or Here, you can select disables the the boot order the password protection Ferrari 4000's on the hard drive for available bootable the aforementioned devices. D2D utility which is run from a special hidden partition on the hard drive, or Acer Recovery...
- Page 13 Pressing the third Acer ePresentation Easy-launch button provides a fast and (with the "e" on it) simple way of setting brings up Acer's the Ferrari's screen eManager Menu, resolution when it's which groups the connected to a Ferrari 4000's most projector, without commonly used Acer having to dig through...
- Page 14 Pay attention to this The first option lets warning if you don't you create backups have the AC adapter and change the plugged in before utility's default starting eRecovery—it password. will save you a lot of grief. Note the options The "Acer System here.
- Page 15 The Acer Ferrari 4000 ships with four CDs; a three-disc recovery CD set consisting of a bootable System CD that loads Symantec’s Ghost, and two Recovery CDs containing the actual Ghost image of the factory OS, driver and utility install. In spite the Acer OEM Windows XP Start Here booklet, there is no CD with the actual Windows XP OS included—an unfortunate but growing trend followed by many OEM PC and Notebook manufacturers these days to rein in costs.
- Page 16 Acer eRecovery—although the Ferrari 4000 ships with a set of recovery CDs, eRecovery lets you make an additional set quickly and easily, allowing you to bring your Ferrari 4000 back to life after a crash-n-burn. Backups can be performed to the hard drive, or to CDs and DVDs.
- Page 17 Now let's check out The most commonly Boot Options. changed settings normally performed through the BIOS on system boot-up can quickly and easily be made here. The changes will be in effect the next time you reboot the Ferrari 4000. Here's a summary of Details on the Ferrari the laptop's...
- Page 18 Battery Life Designing a notebook has always been a delicate balancing act between size, weight, performance, heat, and battery life. It’s nearly impossible to maximize one area without making compromises in others to achieve that balance. While the Acer Ferrari 4000 is no exception, it does strike a reasonable balance between power and power usage for a laptop chocked with hi-performance components, while running fairly cool, even under full load.
- Page 19 To see how long it really takes a battery to discharge and recharge, I used the Battery Eater 05 Utility. All power saving options and hibernation were disabled during the test. The notebook’s default power saving scheme Portable/Laptop was used to insure that the processor would automatically scale its speed accordingly to the workload imposed by Battery Eater Pro, as it would if the Ferrari 4000 were used while on battery power under normal circumstances.
- Page 20 Unique ID Chemistry Temperature Designed Capacity Full Charged Capacity Designed Voltage Current Voltage Manufacture Date Cycles Count Cells count Force charge support Force discharge support CPU BEmarks GPU BEmarks RAM BEmarks HDD BEmarks Pi calculations HDD read\write Fames Rendered Resolution FullScreen Mode Total time...
- Page 21 Well, the results speak for themselves. It took 84 minutes for the battery to be fully depleted by Battery Eater 05. It also took 3 hours, 27 minutes and 51 seconds for the battery to fully charge again. Keep in mind that Battery Eater is designed to completely drain a battery by running an endless loop of vigorous processor, video and hard drive routines that typically do not occur under normal use—but it is useful in determining just how well your battery will hold up and recover under the most extreme conditions.
- Page 22 1.20, was used for the test. The default settings for the benchmark were used, and the video driver control panel settings were left at the default “Application Preference” for all quality settings. Page 22 of 22 Barry’s Rigs ‘n Reviews http://www.barrys-rigs-n-reviews.com All trademarks used are properties of their respective owners.
- Page 23 Page 23 of 23 Barry’s Rigs ‘n Reviews http://www.barrys-rigs-n-reviews.com All trademarks used are properties of their respective owners. Copyright © 2003-2007 by Barry Little. All Rights Reserved.
- Page 24 No surprises here for the Mobility Radeon X700 with its 128MB of RAM and the Turion 64 ML-37 processor, as the results are pretty much what you’d expect them to be. DOOM id Software’s remake of the classic first-person shooter that started it all, powered by a spectacular new graphics engine with incredible lighting effects and near- photorealistic visuals.
- Page 25 Two separate maps were used for the benchmark. The first is Demo_1, which is the default DOOM benchmark, and consists of the Mars City Underground level right after the demonic invasion, where you confront a number of Imps and UAC personnel turned into Zombies.
- Page 26 As you can see from the chart, the 800x600 resolution gives the best overall frame rates. At 1024x728 the game is still playable, but you can expect some hitching and slowdowns with multiple enemies on the screen. With only 128MB of video memory on-tap, at 1280x1024, DOOM played, not surprisingly, more like a slide show than a first-person shooter, even with antialiasing turned off (although 1600x1200 was...
- Page 27 The highest resolution supported for Half-Life 2 on the Acer Ferrari 4000, is 1400x1050—a resolution high enough to get by with, without using antialiasing and with Trilinear filtering enabled—if it wasn’t for some very distracting driver-version related visual anomalies related to the HUD (Heads Up Display) and some seriously sluggish frame rates, particularly during the larger firefights with Gordon Freeman and the Resistance against the Combine troops.
- Page 28 higher resolutions and antialiasing settings, it also would have added to the cost of an already expensive notebook that was designed for general all-around use and not specifically for gaming. But look at the bright side: there are a number of laptops in the Ferrari 4000’s class that can barely run games like DOOM and Half-Life 2—if at all.
- Page 29 File Compression File Encryption File Decompression Image Processing Virus Scanning Grammar Check File Decryption Audio Conversion Web Page Rendering WMV Video Compression DivX Video Compression Physics Calculation and 3D Graphics Memory - 64 lines Again, the results are what you would expect for a laptop of this type. For general- purpose use, the Acer Ferrari 4000 should have no problems handling a wide variety of business and entertainment tasks, satisfying all but the most extreme power users.
- Page 30 Toshiba laptop, whose layout was a bit too cramped for me (in fact, I’m typing this review on the 4000 now). I permitted a colleague of mine to try the Ferrari 4000.
- Page 31 performance, she preferred the keyboard of her IBM ThinkPad over the Ferrari 4000 keyboard. The touch pad on the Ferrari 4000 was the most responsive I’ve ever used, but for doing any work for an extended period of time, a mouse is still a better choice— which is why Acer included the Bluetooth wireless mouse with the Ferrari 4000.
- Page 32 The Acer Ferrari Here you can select 4000's Realtek AC'97 headphones or the Audio Control panel built-in 16-bit stereo thankfully lacks the speakers. gaudy-looking skins used by other OEMs, using the default Windows theme instead. Microphone settings This is the General are adjusted here.
- Page 33 While this issue wouldn’t be a problem for the most part, people who use software to create and manage websites and publish their sites to web servers that have case- sensitive operating systems should avoid using NTI’s Backup NOW! to backup their work.
- Page 34 Because there's only NTI CD & DVD-Maker one optical drive and can also burn and burner in the Acer play audio discs, and Ferrari 4000, you'll has a Wave Editor. have to copy the source disc to a temporary file on the hard drive, then onto a blank CD or DVD disc afterwards.
- Page 35 unreasonable to expect. There are a number of extended warranty options available, but if you want the extra peace of mind, you’ll have to pay for it. The Acer Ferrari 4000 ’s styling has been toned down quite a bit from the previous 3000-series notebooks (although some folks will still find it a bit too flashy for their tastes), but its performance, functionality and quality hasn’t—in fact they’ve gotten better.
- Page 36 Final Score: Summary: Highs: Acer takes their series of Scuderia Ferrari-sponsored laptops to the next level with the Ferrari 4000 4005WLMi Notebook. Powered by AMD's Turion 64 ML-37 mobile processor, ATI's Mobility RADEON X700 PCI Express graphics processor and RADEON XPRESS 200P Motherboard chipset, with 1GB RAM, 100GB hard drive, a gorgeous 15.4"...
- Page 37 Acer Ferrari 4000 4005WLMi Notebook Manufactured by: Acer, Inc. Distributed by: Various retailers Specifications: Operating system - Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition - Microsoft Windows XP Professional Platform - Processor: AMD Turion 64 ML-37 processor (2.0 GHz) - Chipset: ATI RADEON XPRESS 200P Memory - 1 GB of DDR333 memory, upgradeable to 2 GB using two soDIMM modules...
- Page 38 Communication - Modem: 56K ITU V.92 with PTT approval; - Wake-on-Ring ready - LAN: gigabit Ethernet; Wake-on-LAN ready - WLAN: integrated Acer InviLink™ 802.11b/g Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ solution; supporting Acer SignalUp wireless technology - WPAN: integrated Bluetooth Size and weight - 363 (W) x 265.7 (D) x 30.5/34.3 (H) mm - (14.29 x 10.46 x 1.2/1.36 inches) - 2.86 kg (6.3 lbs.) Power...
- Page 39 - Mobile PC 2001 - ACPI 1.0b - DMI 2.0 - Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX) Warranty - One-year International Travelers Warranty (ITW) Page 39 of 39 Barry’s Rigs ‘n Reviews http://www.barrys-rigs-n-reviews.com All trademarks used are properties of their respective owners. Copyright ©...