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The Acer Ferrari 1000 Part 1: Drama
Posted December 28th, 2006 at 8:17pm by Electronic Punk
Like other featured community representatives, I have received a laptop from a choice of several laptops, mine arrived yesterday.
Back in October/November Aaron, the guy that deals with everything we throw at Microsoft, worked with AMD and some of Microsoft’s other hardware partners to organise some hardware for us to review and blog about.
I chose the Ferrari 1000 as it is small and powerful; the 5000 certainly does seem to be a lot more powerful but also a fair amount larger. The laptop came in the retail casing and preloaded with Windows x64 as well as several pre-release Acer applications and drivers to get us started.
Its review will most likely be ongoing over the next month or so, originally a potential two parts, but now three with the addition of “Why we received these?” which I will start with now.
Firstly, Long’s post pretty much has things covered: http://www.istartedsomething.com/200...-free-ferrari/ and as usual Robert McLaws has put into words what I cannot: http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/rob...nd-Ethics.aspx
It seems a lot of the Anti-Microsoft sites have been going berserk over this, with what can only be jealousy or what they see as their chance to flame Microsoft and/or Vista? Technology sites get sent hardware to review all the time. I always thought disclosure was good for advertising not to satisfy the Slashdot hordes.
As far as its future goes, I am pretty sure I will be keeping it. The only other laptop I have is a work laptop that must weigh twice as much as its carbon-fibre replacement, so I don’t actually own my own laptop, it is also my first dual core system with my main rig instead being the fastest single core system ever available (although I may upgrade that at some point too!). Does this make me a bad person? I don’t think so, living in the UK I am not so available to many of the freebies or even general review hardware I might be if I lived in the states. So there you have it, some review hardware I will be keeping. [Shock/horror]
The next parts will cover the laptop itself and my experiences with the 64bit version of Windows, a version I gave up on during the betas when it became clear vendors were not going to support Windows XP x64 edition properly – hopefully my mind will be changed, after all I can’t stay 32-bit forever!
Here is something to leave you with for now; the Windows Experience Index is actually quite good at giving an overall rating. Firstly my main rig let down by its single FX-57 processor, something that defines depreciation:
Here is a shot of Brandon LeBlanc’s Ferrari 5000, which beats my own rig because of that poor CPU score.
Finally a shot of the results on my Ferrari 1000, substantially lower as you can see, very much let down by both graphics and gaming graphics.
The Ferrari comes with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1150 chipset with integrated 3D graphics, whereas the 5000 comes with the same chipset but also an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. Maybe its low score will be improved with newer drivers, but speed is not the only factor. The 1000 is tiny and the fact that it can quite happily play Half-life 2: Episode One on Vista x64 is no small feat! More later!
Back in October/November Aaron, the guy that deals with everything we throw at Microsoft, worked with AMD and some of Microsoft’s other hardware partners to organise some hardware for us to review and blog about.
I chose the Ferrari 1000 as it is small and powerful; the 5000 certainly does seem to be a lot more powerful but also a fair amount larger. The laptop came in the retail casing and preloaded with Windows x64 as well as several pre-release Acer applications and drivers to get us started.
Its review will most likely be ongoing over the next month or so, originally a potential two parts, but now three with the addition of “Why we received these?” which I will start with now.
Firstly, Long’s post pretty much has things covered: http://www.istartedsomething.com/200...-free-ferrari/ and as usual Robert McLaws has put into words what I cannot: http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/rob...nd-Ethics.aspx
It seems a lot of the Anti-Microsoft sites have been going berserk over this, with what can only be jealousy or what they see as their chance to flame Microsoft and/or Vista? Technology sites get sent hardware to review all the time. I always thought disclosure was good for advertising not to satisfy the Slashdot hordes.
As far as its future goes, I am pretty sure I will be keeping it. The only other laptop I have is a work laptop that must weigh twice as much as its carbon-fibre replacement, so I don’t actually own my own laptop, it is also my first dual core system with my main rig instead being the fastest single core system ever available (although I may upgrade that at some point too!). Does this make me a bad person? I don’t think so, living in the UK I am not so available to many of the freebies or even general review hardware I might be if I lived in the states. So there you have it, some review hardware I will be keeping. [Shock/horror]
The next parts will cover the laptop itself and my experiences with the 64bit version of Windows, a version I gave up on during the betas when it became clear vendors were not going to support Windows XP x64 edition properly – hopefully my mind will be changed, after all I can’t stay 32-bit forever!
Here is something to leave you with for now; the Windows Experience Index is actually quite good at giving an overall rating. Firstly my main rig let down by its single FX-57 processor, something that defines depreciation:
Here is a shot of Brandon LeBlanc’s Ferrari 5000, which beats my own rig because of that poor CPU score.
Finally a shot of the results on my Ferrari 1000, substantially lower as you can see, very much let down by both graphics and gaming graphics.
The Ferrari comes with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1150 chipset with integrated 3D graphics, whereas the 5000 comes with the same chipset but also an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. Maybe its low score will be improved with newer drivers, but speed is not the only factor. The 1000 is tiny and the fact that it can quite happily play Half-life 2: Episode One on Vista x64 is no small feat! More later!
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