Acer and AMD are both sponsors of the Ferrari F1 team, and the relationship extends well beyond simply slapping each others logos on respective products. Both tech companies assist Ferrari with technology, and apparently Ferrari had an active hand in the design of the latest Acer Ferrari laptop.

This season’s Acer Ferrari is a powerhouse worthy of the prancing stallion badge. It’s not merely a highly-spec’ed piece of kit, the design is clever and stylish and it would certainly do justice to the most image-conscious of road warriors. Banished is the all-red case Acer used in their last Ferrari laptop, which was a little too ostentatious, even for Ferrari. Red racing stripes still feature as side trim, and the Windows startup sound is a wickedly conspicuous sample of a F1 Ferrari at great speed.

The design’s ace in the hole is unmistakably the genuine carbon-fibre lid. It looks stunning, and legitimately contributes to the unit’s light weight and sturdy feel. A rubberised surface around the smiley-face keyboard rounds off the design emphasis. It looks and feels nice, but holds fingerprints a little too easily. Topping off the aesthetics is the optional Bluetooth mouse, also Ferrari-themed – it looks stunning as a matched pair with the laptop.

Under the hood is near-enough the best of everything. While this laptop could comfortably serve any purpose, it has almost unmatched abilities as a games machine, and is equally adept as a portable media centre. It’s the first laptop to come through the PCA labs to use AMD’s new Turion64 CPU, which is paired with ATI’s Mobility RADEON X700 GPU. It’s a combination that can do comfortable justice to the latest DirectX9.0c games and deliver the smoothest DVD playback. In testing it scored 2350 in 3DMark05 and 3799 in PCMark04, which is in-line with performance desktop systems.

128MB of dedicated RAM helps the X700 deliver rich gaming, and it’s piped through a PCI-E bus so you know the performance isn’t being bottlenecked. It’s a pity the screen (while large) bucks the trend for a gloss finish, then, as movies don’t look quite as nice on a matte finished screen.

Acer didn’t skimp on internals. There’s a monster 100GB hard drive and a full 1GB of system RAM. Plenty of room for all the entertainment a road warrior could ever need. Whatever that can’t hold you can burn to the 8x Dual Layer DVDS drive. The 802.11b/g wireless is boosted by Acer’s proprietary SignalUp technology, which places an omni-directional antenna at the top of the lid for improved signal reception.

Testing showed performance to be strong, and it found and held signals with reassuring tenacity.

There are cheaper laptops out there offering similar performance, but the style and flair of this baby is unmatched, and that comes at a premium Ferrari price.