Reviewing Acer Ferrari 5005WLMi Laptop Magazine gives it 4 out of 5 stars rating and writes, “A sports car is a blast, but on a long drive its tight confines and sacrifices in creature comforts make a sporty luxury car more alluring. The same line of thinking is behind the $2,399 Acer Ferrari 5005WLMi (a Windows Vista Ultimate version is available for $2,699). It delivers the sharp looks of the ultraportable Acer Ferrari 1000 but in a scaled-up package that’s more comfortable to use in the home, office, or dorm.

With its glossy carbon-fiber-patterned lid, red accents, and yellow prancing-horse logo, the 5005WLMi stands out from the field of gray and silver notebooks, without being as outlandish as the Alienware Aurora or Asus Lamborghini models. At 6.6 pounds and an inch thick at its leading edge, the unit is manageable to carry.

If the 5005WLMi disappoints at all, it’s in overall performance. It’s powerful enough for typical business and even light gaming duties. It’s just that with a name like Ferrari, we expected this system to be in the front of the pack. Instead, the 5005WLMi’s 2-GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 CPU, married to 2GB of RAM, delivered an okay score of 219 on MobileMark 2005. That’s merely average and well behind performance leaders that reside in the mid to high 200s.

Gaming and 3D performance from the 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU were good, with a score of 7,515 on 3DMark03 and a playable 42 fps on F.E.A.R. (at 1024 x 768-pixel resolution). At 3 hours and 26 minutes, battery life was typical for a machine in this class. Wireless throughput from the unit’s integrated 802.11b/g radio was low, however: 7.9 Mbps at 15 feet from the access point, and just 6 Mbps at 50 feet.”

PROS & CONS of the Acer Ferrari 5005WLMi

• Eye-catching style
• VoIP phone included
• Good graphics
• Big hard drive
• Relatively low MobileMark score
• No dedicated multimedia keys
• Webcam images prone to blurring

Read more reviews of the Acer Ferrari series notebooks

This entry was posted on February 11, 2007 and is filed under Acer America Corp..