Acer Ferrari One: An AMD Ultraportable
by Vivek Gowri on June 8, 2010 4:12 AM ESTAcer 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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marraco - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Mock iZombies here:"My fruit is more expensive because is Ferrari, and your PC is a bug"
http://joehung.netfirms.com/bug_car.jpg
Edgar_Wibeau - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Previous year's product, previous year's platform.Why don't you review one of the _current_ AMD mobile thin-and-light platform based notebooks? Like eg. from Acer the Aspire 1551 (not on sale in the EU yet, but preorder)? Or the ones maniac5999 posted?
Here's a roadmap from 10/2009:
http://www.planet3dnow.de/photoplog/file.php?n=923...
Ferrari One is "Congo" based (the roadmap uses the funny name "2nd Gen UT" ), current is the "Nile" platform, introduced in May 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_mobile_platform
The current platform is based on the 45nm Athlon IIs and Turion IIs which have higher clock at same TDP, higher performance per clock and lower wattage when idle, because they are K10.5 based, not K8 like the Ferrari One's. And their graphics (Radeon HD 4225) are R700 based, not the aging RS780 which is on the level of what? R600? R500? Either way, one or two generations behind.
You could even have chosen a Ferrari One model with 2G or 4G of ram, so it ran 128bit wide. Can't even buy a 3G ram model in Europe, doesn't make sense anyway.
I call this a biased review.
maniac5999 - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
To be fair, there is only ONE Nile notebook on Newegg, and it's 13.3", not exactly netbook size, like the 12" ones I listed. Also, the 42xx is RV620 instead of RV610 for the 3200. The difference? Dx 10.1 and UVD2, which doesn't make a difference to most people. Also, the 4225 is clocked lower than the 3200, 4200 and 4250, which all have the same 40 shaders running at 500mhz.Unfortunately, for all these reasons the only big difference between Congo and Nile looks like it's going to be in battery life. (which is much needed btw) There will be an IPC bump going from Athlon (K8) to Athlon II (K10.5), as well, judging from the benches, depending on the application it could be anywhere from 0-30%,which is nice as well, but if it's combined with a lesser IGP like the 4225, would ruin it's use as a nice little portable time waster.
Edgar_Wibeau - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Your're probably right, maniac5999(Looks like our last two posts were about the same time)
What bugs me most is that Anand's review the Ferrari One now instead of seven months ago, when it was released. The timing of this review at least smells a bit, wait a month and post reviews of Nile based AMD note/netbooks.
Also, AnandTech (and DailyTech) are the only sites I know that didn't write about AMDs Computex 2010 Fusion demos, at least I didn't see any RSS headlines.
Oh, and Athlon (and Turion) II X2 feature 2x "MByte L2 cache vs. half of that for their predecessors.
To add some infos:
Athlon 64 X2 L310: 1.2 GHz, 13W TDP
Athlon II X2 K325: 1.3 GHz, 12W TDP
The identical Turion II X2s K625 and K665 run with 1.5 and 1.7 GHz respectively, on a 15W TDP.
Of cause AMDs 2010 mobile offerings don't shine, but they're better than 2009's of course. 2011 will be a lot more interesting on the AMD side because of the two upcoming fusion designs, assumingly both of which (Ontario high end and Llano low end) touching the upper netbook / cheap thin-and-light "CULV" segment.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
FWIW, we received several AMD-based notebooks (including the Ferrari One) in late March. AMD sent them to us direct, as the OEMs just aren't interested in seeding reviewers as far as I can see. As noted in the conclusion, there are 45nm parts that look a lot more interesting, though given my testing of the Turion II M600 it won't make a massive difference in battery life. Also note that we're comparing the AMD "Congo" to the Intel "CULV"; the new competition is going to be "Nile" vs. Arrandale ULV. But in the end, we review what we get.Stay tuned for more laptop reviews this week....
Edgar_Wibeau - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Ok, thanks!One point: in the graphs, I'd find it more informative if only machines were shown that are a bit more similar to the tested one. In many graphs the cheap-and-thin-and-light-class just vanishes because there are machines many times more powerful listed. In some, the numbers of the reviewed machine (and similar ones) are simply not readable, because the bars they are printed on are so short.
VivekGowri - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
We didn't choose it specifically, we reviewed what AMD gave us (because it doesn't seem like any of the manufacturers want to give us any AMD based systems). AMD apparently thought the Ferrari One was a good representation of their current mobile platform? Otherwise I don't see why they would have sent it to us.For the record, I did rerun some benches with dual channel 2x 2GB memory, and got insignificant differences in regular benchmarks and right around 1-2fps difference in most games. While that helps, it doesn't make anything really playable - whether you get 10.6 or 11.6 fps in Crysis, it's still a slideshow either way.
Edgar_Wibeau - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
looks like I was wrong regarding Ferrari One's graphics, sorry. Same generation as current ist seems.T2k - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Ferrari One confirmed to be working with Fujitsu's older XGP unit: http://minigaming.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/acer-fe...T2k - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Prices can be found here: http://www.hardware.info/nl-NL/productdb/bGpka5iUm...