Acer Ferrari 3000LMi (AMD)
Red with a prancing horse badge, need we say more?
Our immediate impression when unpacking this notebook was that it would go very well in a company IT department that had also bought the Watchguard X firewalls we reviewed last month. Who says us geeks need to be fixated on beige and black? Perhaps red is the new beige.
Any self-respecting executive honestly could not go past this notebook and the Ferrari livery is just the beginning. We were very pleased to see Acer had not just whacked the logo on any old notebook and painted it red. This machine really has some very impressive features, such as the inclusion of CD-RW/DVD+RW, Bluetooth, 802.11g wireless LAN, 10/100 Ethernet, infrared, modem, and support for just about every flavour of flash memory cards. The only things missing are a serial port and built-in camera, also gigabit Ethernet would have been nice.
The unit is based on a Mobile AMD Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, with 512MB DDR333 RAM, a 60GB HDD unit, and a CD-RW/DVD+RW combo optical drive unit. The graphics are displayed on a 15in screen and are powered by an ATI Radeon 9200 with 128MB RAM.
The keyboard is virtually identical to the TravelMate 800 including its slightly bowed layout, the pointing device is a trackpad.
Kudos to the mastermind in the Acer marketing department who hatched the deal with Ferrari. At $3299, it is possibly set at a premium price due to the badging, however the feature set is certainly the richest of any notebook in this review. While the notebook isn't quite as good a performer as the Ferrari name suggests, the overall package is still worthy of investigation. Now we can sit here and wonder what these features would be like with an AMD Athlon 64 processor.
| Product | Acer Ferrari 3000LMi |
| Price | AU$3299 |
| Vendor | Acer |
| Phone | 1300 366 567 |
| Web | www.acer.com.au |
| Interoperability |  ½ |
| This is one notebook with almost the lot. | |
| Futureproofing |  |
| Very good expansion potential. | |
| ROI |  ½ |
| Very well priced, performance is slightly above the average on some tests. | |
| Service |  ½ |
| One-year warranty is average, but includes a two-hour service. | |
| Rating |  |
I'm surprised that in a 'high-end desktop replacement notebook' category Dell didn't think to submit their new Inspiron 9100.
To quote from Reuben Lee, ZDNet, 04 March 2004
'The Inspiron 9100 is probably one of the best notebooks around that can truly replace the desktop PC, offering speed and excellent 3D graphics performance.'
Having just purchased one I would have to agree.
I would have truly liked to have seen this cat set amongst these pigeons.
What was Dell thinking?