A word of warning: if you buy this notebook, expect to get attention. As well as having a bright red lid, Acer's 3200 is endorsed by Ferrari. OK, so a notebook computer may not have the same kudos as a Testarossa, but relative speed comparisons can still be made.
The processor is an AMD Athlon64 2800+ running at 1.59GHz. This is backed up by 512Mb of memory, which will ensure multiple programs operate smoothly and system-hungry applications, such as audio or video-editing software, will run without a hitch.
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The graphics are also extremely powerful thanks to the ATi Mobility Radeon 9700. This graphics chip does not share any memory with the rest of the computer, resulting in some impressive scores in our tests. It flew through our test game Unreal Tournament and even did well in Far Cry - a game renowned for pushing computer graphics to their limits. In fact, the Acer Ferrari 3200 achieved the best graphics score we've yet seen on a notebook.
Opening the flashy lid reveals a stylish grey interior with a Ferrari logo beneath the keyboard. The next thing you will notice is that the keyboard is slightly curved, which makes typing more comfortable than on a regular keyboard. The touchpad has a four-way cursor button for scrolling through documents and web pages. Above the keyboard are four shortcut buttons. Two are for internet and email and two are customisable. A Ferrari-branded mouse is also included.
The 15in display can support a screen resolution of 1400 x 1050, which is high for a notebook of this size and will give crisp images of movies and games. There is a VGA socket on the back of the notebook so you can attach an extra monitor.
The sound was as good as we've heard from a notebook, but for the best sound quality you will need to attach external speakers.
Notebooks may not be able to squeeze in the 200Gb hard disks that some of their desktop counterparts enjoy but the Acer Ferrari comes with a very generous 80Gb. There's a slot-loading recordable DVD drive that will write to every CD and DVD format apart from DVD-RAM.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are built in and there are buttons on the front to turn them off if required. This is a useful touch, especially as it will help to save energy. The 3200+ did extremely well in our battery endurance test, lasting nearly three hours. This is good going for any notebook but especially for one with such good system performance.
The Acer has four USB 2 ports, normally rather scarce on notebooks. A mini-FireWire is included for connecting to digital video cameras and other peripherals. The software supplied is enough to get you started but there's no word processor, so you will have to fork out a little more for this. In addition to Acer's package of useful utilities there is CyberLink PowerDVD, NTI CD-Maker and a trial of Norton AntiVirus. The Acer Ferrari also comes with a one-year international travellers' warranty.
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