Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3761/acer-ferrari-one



Acer Ferrari One: Overview

Ferrari. The name itself evokes images of supercars and racecars bearing the famed prancing horse logo, of glorious V12 exhaust notes, and red. Oh yes, Rosso Scuderia, quite possibly the most instantly recognizable color in the automotive world.

So when Acer set out to create its latest Ferrari-branded laptop, it naturally decided to make the lid bright red, with the iconic prancing horse shield right in the middle. As with the rest of the Ferrari line, the 11.6" Ferrari One ultraportable has an AMD processor; in this case, it's a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 L310 clocked at a very un-Ferrari-like 1.2GHz. Beyond that, we've got 3GB of RAM, a 250GB 5400RPM hard drive, ATI's Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics chip, Windows 7 Home Premium, a bunch of red accents to match the lid, a faux carbon-fibre palm rest, and a nice Scuderia Ferrari logo under the keyboard.

Acer Ferrari One Specifications
Processor AMD Athlon 64 X2 L310
(1.20GHz, 65nm, 2x512KB L2, 800FSB, 13W)
Chipset AMD M780G
Memory 1x2048MB+1x1024MB DDR2-800
Running @ DDR2-480, 3-4-4-12 Timings
Graphics Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200
Display 11.6" LED Glossy 16:9 WXGA (1366x768)
Hard Drive 2.5" 250GB 5400RPM (Toshiba MK2555GSX)
Networking Atheros AR8131 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet
Atheros AR5B93 802.11a/g/n WiFi
Audio Realtek AL269 2-Channel HD Audio
(2.0 Speakers with headphone/microphone jacks)
Battery 6-Cell, 10.8V, 4400mAh, 48Wh
Front Side None
Left Side 1 x USB 2.0
VGA
ATI XGP Connector
Right Side SD/MMC reader
Microphone/Headphone Jacks
2 x USB 2.0
AC Power Connection
Kensington Lock
Gigabit Ethernet
Back Side None
Operating System Windows 7 Home Premium
Dimensions 11.22" x 8.03" x 1.03" (WxDxH)
Weight 3.31 lbs (with 6-cell battery)
Extras 1.3MP Webcam
Warranty 1-year standard Acer warranty (USA)
Price Red 4GB Ferrari One FO200-1799 at $569

Ignoring the Ferrari branding, this ultraportable is basically the AMD version of the Aspire 1410/1810T that we have come to know and love. The Athlon 64 X2 L310 is one AMD alternative to Intel’s CULV platform (though other 45nm models would likely improve the overall picture). Beyond the 1.20 GHz clock speed, there’s a 333MHz DDR2 on-die memory controller, 800MHz HyperTransport link, and 2 x 512KB L2 cache. It’s manufactured on a 65nm process, and has a power envelope of 13 watts. The closest competitor to it in Intel’s CULV processor lineup is the 1.30 GHz Pentium SU4100, which is built on a 45nm manufacturing process and has a TDP of 10W. Of course, the AMD thin and light platform contains the aforementioned Radeon HD 3200 IGP, which should be faster than the CULV-standard GMA 4500 MHD.

Of note is that our test system is an older model equipped with a 1GB and 2GB SO-DIMM, which means the memory runs in single-channel mode and performance is somewhat lower than the FO200 model with 4GB RAM. The MSRP on this particular model was $549, but it's no longer available online.



In and Around the Acer Ferrari One

As mentioned, the Ferrari One is closely related to the Aspire 1410/1810T, sharing the same basic chassis and nearly identical dimensions. As such, it ends up being pretty familiar in feel, if not in look. The exterior is still glossy plastic and it still isn’t a paragon of industrial design, but in bright red with a Ferrari logo in the middle, you cannot deny that it’s eye-catching. I’d actually argue that compared to the carbon fibre-lidded Acer Ferrari models of years past, the Ferrari One is pretty ostentatious, almost to the point of being garish. However, it’s exactly a third the price of the last Ferrari ultraportable (the gorgeous but flawed and ultimately ill-fated Ferrari 1000 series), so I guess the cost savings had to come from somewhere.

The inside continues the glossy plastic, and shows its roots by following the AS1410’s “faux expensive material” theme. This time, its faux carbon fibre, which isn’t all that bad for a $600 computer, but obviously fake. I’ll take it over the piano black gloss from the Aspire One and the faux-brushed aluminum from the 1410, but I’d definitely prefer the real thing.

The keyboard is identical to the island-style keyboard on the 1410. The accent keys are now red (to keep up the Ferrari theme), and the F10 key has a “Ferrari” function. I thought it’d be something interesting, but it ended up being just a shortcut to the Ferrari website. Thanks guys! I can go to Ferrari.com on my own if I ever have the urge. The keyboard is mediocre; it has a lot of flex and feels kind of mushy in fast typing. My personal Aspire 1410 machine has a lot less flex, and a much better feeling keyboard overall. I’m going to put that down to unit-to-unit variation in a large product run, so YMMV as far as keyboard quality goes.

The touchpad is trapezoid shaped; it works as advertised, though the shape takes a bit of getting used to. It's also nowhere near as large as some other touchpads. It has a single touchpad "rocker" button, which is chrome and has the Ferrari One logo embossed in it.

The ports are nearly identical to the 1410, with one major change. We find the same three USB, VGA, headphone out, line in, Ethernet, Kensington lock, 1.3MP webcam, built-in mic, and memory card reader, but the much-loved HDMI port makes way for an XGP connector. A what? XGP is ATI’s external graphics solution, meant to be paired with Acer’s DynaVivid external graphics dock. Unfortunately, the DynaVivid has mostly been vaporware thus far, and that doesn’t look to be changing any time soon. The only other XGP accessory is the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo GraphicBooster, which was never sold in the US and is basically off the European market as of now. This makes the XGP port, for the time being, useless. I’m not sure why Acer decided to dump the über-useful HDMI port for XGP, especially on a notebook with 1080p capabilities; even if the DynaVivid could be found, we're not sure anyone would really want an external HD 4670 GPU for this sort of system, as we'll see later that the CPU is already a pretty serious bottleneck for graphics.



Acer Ferrari One: General Performance

The Ferrari One starts with a roar, literally. The familiar Windows 7 boot noise has been replaced with a high RPM flyby of a Ferrari Formula 1 car. The performance is far from invoking anything about Ferrari. We'll highlight the single-core and dual-core CULV competition in gold, with Atom in green. Pay attention to the HP Mini 311 as well, which is Atom + ION.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Futuremark PCMark05

Internet Performance

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R10

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R10

Video Encoding - x264

Video Encoding - x264

Futuremark puts the Ferrari One just ahead of my single-core AS1410 (CULV SU3500 + GMA 4500MHD) and at times behind the Asus Eee 1201N (i.e. PCMark05), which has ION paired with a dual-core Atom processor. The encoding tests support the theory that the Ferrari One’s Athlon X2 L310 has just about the same amount of raw computing power as the dual-core Atom 330. Cinebench and Peacekeeper say that the L310 isn’t close to the dual-core CULV machines and falls pretty much square in between them and the Atom N450 systems. Overall performance feels faster than Atom 330, but it's a clear step down from the CULV laptops.



Acer Ferrari One: Gaming and Graphics

The short story is that this really isn't a suitable gaming laptop unless your demands are very light. We tested the Ferrari One in our usual gaming suite, as well as running 3DMark. You can get gaming results for the other laptops elsewhere; here we're going to just show the scores for the Ferrari One. We should note that the combination of a 1GB and 2GB SO-DIMM in our test laptop forces the Ferrari One to run in single-channel memory mode, which reduces graphics performance relative to dual-channel HD 3200 notebooks. We did some quick testing with 2x2GB in dual-channel and found it improved performance by around 5-10%. The memory in the Ferrari One also runs at DDR2-480, further hindering performance—this despite the memory being rated for up to DDR2-800 speeds.

Acer Ferrari One Gaming Performance
Game Title 800x600 1366x768
Batman: Arkham Asylum 23.0 12.0
Crysis: Warhead 21.0 11.5
DiRT 2 20.2 13.1
Empire: Total War 34.5 19.6
Far Cry 2 16.9 11.3
Left 4 Dead 2 20.8 12.9
Mass Effect 2 16.9 7.1
STALKER: Call of Pripyat 49.7 26.8

On the gaming side, things are more encouraging for the Ferrari One. The Radeon HD 3200 is a far better integrated graphics solution than Intel’s GMA 4500MHD. Unfortunately, that doesn't really make most recent games playable, even at 800x600 and minimum details. Of the titles we looked at, only STALKER: Call of Pripyat and Empire: Total War are playable at 800x600, and both frankly look quite poor at minimum detail settings—like games from 2005, which should also run well on the Ferrari One. You’d probably be better off with one of the ION based netbooks, which offer better graphics performance and an HDMI port. With Intel's latest drivers (we'll show this in an upcoming article), the HD Graphics on an i3-330M are actually able to match a higher spec AMD system with HD 4200, and that's the real killer for the graphics equation. Intel still isn't fast by any stretch of the imagination, but on laptops their HD Graphics is now roughly equal to HD 4200 while the CPU performance and battery life are substantially better.

Futuremark 3DMark06

Futuremark 3DMark05

Futuremark 3DMark03

For those that like 3DMark results, you can see where the Ferrari One falls in relation to other laptops. It beats CULV with GMA 4500 and Atom, but that's about it. Atom with ION beats the L310 with HD 3200, and CULV with HD 4330 eclipses the ION laptops.

We also tried the latest Flash 10.1 Release Candidate (RC7 now) and ATI's 10.5 drivers. Unlike earlier releases, initial testing looks like Flash 10.1 is working well with ATI's GPUs now. That's definitely one area where the Ferrari One beats standard Atom netbooks, but then the competition isn't Atom at this price point; CULV and ION are readily available for a similar price. YouTube 720p worked fine with the current Flash 10.1 release and 10.5 drivers, but 1080p was a slideshow with sound dropping out as well. It looks like the L310 just doesn't have quite enough performance to handle 1080p (or the drivers need further optimizations, considering Atom + ION handles 1080p fine). Overall, we'd take any of the new crop of Core i3/i5 laptops with Intel HD Graphics as being a better multimedia solution than the Ferrari One, particularly in light of the missing HDMI port.



Acer Ferrari One: Battery Life

The Athlon X2/Radeon HD3200 combo sucks up power like no tomorrow, as we'll get to in a minute, but first let's talk about heat. More power draw means more heat output, which means higher temperatures. The Ferrari One can get pretty toasty, especially if you're doing any kind of intensive task—benchmarking, gaming, Skype video chats, HD video, HD Flash, etc. The fan will run, and it will make itself heard. More than a couple of times, I tried muting the speakers only to find that the speakers were off and it was the fan making the noise. Okay, let's see the battery life charts.

Battery Life - Idle

Battery Life - Internet

Battery Life - x264 720p

Relative Battery Life

Ouch, this one’s painful. The Ferrari One is one power-hungry beast considering its size and performance. It uses significantly more power than the Acer 1410, and 1810T, as well as anything else running an Intel CULV processor—even the ones with dedicated graphics. (We'll see that in a review later this week.) Heck, it’s barely beating the Asus N61Jv, a legitimate entry-level gaming notebook with a full voltage Core i5-430M and NVIDIA GT325M graphics coupled to a 16" LCD.

The Ferrari One lasts under 5 hours sitting idle, just breaks 3.5 hours in the internet benchmark, and less than 2.5 hours while playing x264 video. That’d be acceptable for an ultraportable—in 2006. These days we’re a bit farther along, and anything that can’t break six hours of real-world usage on a 6-cell battery is a poor choice for an "ultraportable". And on that scale, the Ferrari One is very weak. The 48Wh battery doesn't help, obviously, but the identical chassis 1410/1810T draw an average of 9W and 8W respectively in our Internet test, compared to 13W for the Ferrari One.

Another note is that the Ferrari One takes a long time to charge, especially if it's powered up while charging. If you're doing anything CPU intensive during that time (i.e. benchmarking or running a Skype video chat), expect it to charge at roughly 2% an hour. I noticed this with my AS1410 as well, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the Ferrari One (and is easily explained due to the AS1410's 30W AC adapter). Considering the Ferrari One has a 65W adapter, it's weird that charging is so slow.



Acer Ferrari One: Display Analysis

Laptop LCD Quality - Contrast

Laptop LCD Quality - White

Laptop LCD Quality - Black

Laptop LCD Quality - Color Accuracy

Laptop LCD Quality - Color Gamut



The Ferrari One has a similar display to the AS1410/1810T, so the quality is not great to say the least. It's grainy when viewed off-center, though it's not as bad in that regard as the 1410. The same holds for the viewing angles, which are poor (like every other TN panel). Cheap laptops have cheap displays, which is all fine (well, not really, but it's sadly the industry norm and doesn't look to be changing anytime soon). In the $400 AS1410, I didn't have many complaints with this display, but on a supposedly higher-end product, the grainy nature of the screen is disappointing. Other than that, the mediocre quality panel is pretty much to be expected in any laptop at this price point.



Acer Ferrari One: Looks Nice, but Unimpressive

Unfortunately, our time with Acer's latest Ferrari-branded creation ends in disappointment. The combination of mediocre performance, poor battery life (relative to the competition), high price, and unremarkable design/build quality is more than enough to sink this one. For the majority of this review, we've stayed away from making price comparisons, because the Ferrari logo definitely adds a price premium to this otherwise unremarkable notebook. At the $569 street price (much less the $599 MSRP), this is not a good laptop to buy. If you have a burning desire to buy a supercar-branded ultraportable for less than $600, I'd rather go buy a used Acer Ferrari 1000, or wait for the new Asus Lamborghini VX6 (12", dual-core Atom N525, and ION 2 graphics).

If you just want a cheap ultraportable, you can find the 1810T for $529 right now and get much better performance and battery life, and not terribly worse graphics. What's more, AMD has now released details of their Vision 2 platform and Intel has the new Arrandale ULV products; both should be showing up any time now, with improved CPU and GPU performance, hopefully at a similar price point. The Ferrari One just can't win; processing performance lags far behind CULV, gaming performance lags behind ION, power consumption and heat are worse than anything with an Intel sticker, dedicated GPU or not, and the price isn't any better either. If you really, really need better graphics than what the standard Intel platform can give you, I'd rather go with the Asus Eee 1201N—the dual-core Atom roughly matches the Athlon 64 X2 L310, and the 9400M is much faster than the HD 3200. But let's face it: no $600 ultraportable is going to be a gaming machine; if you want a real gaming ultraportable, the base Alienware M11x at $799 is your best bet.

As a car nerd and Ferrari fan, I really wanted to like the Ferrari One, but it can't live up to the standards of the previous Acer Ferrari models. They were never world class, but they looked great and had a decent amount of power under the hood. I know AMD sponsors Ferrari and so every Acer Ferrari has AMD processors by necessity, but AMD's processors are difficult to recommend over Intel's offerings, particularly in the ultraportable market at the moment; hopefully that will change next year with Bobcat. It's also possible that a 45nm version of the L310 (i.e. the K325) could make a better showing, but it will have difficulty surpassing the current CULV and upcoming i3/i5 ULV platforms.

If we can get something that can match current CULV power/battery life levels, offer a similar level of performance, and still manage to hit the Atom/ION price points, then we'll have something worth considering. As for the Ferrari One, it's impossible to recommend this AMD-based ultraportable with the current specs. At $449, the Ferrari One would be decent and would at least merit consideration over the 1410 due to the dual-core processor and increased graphics performance. At $499, the proposition gets more questionable, and at anything above that, the math just doesn't add up.

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