It's an odd gambit business-wise: align your own brand with that of another. But for Acer, the one-off team-up with Ferrari to brand and produce the Acer Ferrari 3000 notebook has resulted in a stunning product.
Ignoring the ostentatious Ferrari red cover, the Ferrari badging and the Ferrari engine roar as Windows XP loads up, the Ferrari 3000 notebook is actually quite decently specced for its price.
Inside it's running an AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+ processor alongside 512MB of DDR SDRAM and a 60GB hard drive. It also expands this with 128MB ATI Mobility RADEON 9200 graphics, a 15in 1,450 x 1,050 TFT screen, a DVD burner (+R/+RW/-R/-RW) combo drive, 802.11G wireless and Bluetooth plus heaps of FireWire and USB ports everywhere. It's more than just well configured -- the Ferrari 3000 is also solidly constructed, and is more robust than most similar notebooks.
The Ferrari cover on the lid is more than the cheap powder-coated metal you might expect; it's actually really solid and polished like a Ferrari's bonnet, and just like that bonnet it also has a disturbingly supernatural ability to attract fingerprints.
In the time that we had the notebook we were unable to complete a full SYSmark2002 benchmark run, but were able to get PCmark04 and 3Dmark2001 SE scores.
It's certainly a high-performance/high-entertainment notebook, but one can't help feeling more than a little conspicuous bringing it out in public, although we guess that's part of the whole Ferrari allure. This notebook's for those that either have or aspire to own a Ferrari and don't mind standing out in the crowd.
To add to its allure and exclusivity, this notebook is only available through Dick Smith Electronics stores and from Ferrari dealerships.
