Acer Ferrari 1005WTMi Notebook Review


We would like to introduce to you another member of the Ferrari racing team from Acer. This time it is going to be an ultra-compact solution based on AMD Turion 64 X2 TL60 processor running at 2.0GHz that proved very functional, very fast, and... very expensive. Read more in our review!

Package, Accessories

Acer’s Ferrari notebooks come in black boxes with an addition of the red color of the Scuderia. Instead of two isometric images of the notebook, like on the Ferrari 4005WLMi box, you can see the side radiator of the Ferrari 1005WTMi here. Unlike to Formula 1 cars, it serves to exhaust hot air from the machine’s internals rather than to take in cool air from the outside. Anyway, this is a cooling solution all the same. The manufacturer’s name is printed in bold white in the bottom right while the opposite corner is occupied by the prancing stallion, the emblem of Scuderia Ferrari. The name of the series is printed above the “radiator grid” in bright red. Box handling instructions are printed at the top of each side.

A rare thing with Acer notebooks, the box contains virtually everything you may ever want to use with your notebook. This is a special product series, after all. So, besides the notebook proper, we found the following in the box: one 3-cell 2000mAh battery and one 6-cell 5200mAh battery, a power adapter with a LED indicator and a cord brace, a modem cable (RJ-11), a Bluetooth mouse with two Duracell batteries, a Ferrari 1000 series box, an external optical drive, four leather cases with the manufacturer’s insignia to carry the notebook and its accessories, a Bluetooth VoIP Phone, a cleaning napkin in a kind of a powder-box, and a Quick Guide for the Ferrari 1000 series.

The Bluetooth mouse is noticeably different from the mice that used to come together with earlier “racing” notebooks from Acer-Ferrari. It looks more aggressive, demanding that you turn on the ignition (located on the other side of the mouse case together with the optical element and a Bluetooth activation button) and drive up to the start line. The mouse is decorated with a picture of the prancing stallion and with an Acer logo. There is also a Bluetooth activity indicator on it (the manual promises a battery charge indicator as well, but we didn’t find one). The mouse wheel bears a pressed-out name of Ferrari whose rough surface prevents your finger from slipping off. To access the batteries, you pull the back part of the mouse away from it. The battery sockets are painted red. Unfortunately, this mouse cannot be powered or recharged via a USB cord as the mice included with the 4000 and 5000 series could.


Bluetooth mouse

The laptop being small and slim, it is logical that its optical drive is external, although there exist even smaller laptops that have an integrated DVD drive. There’s a stallion emblem in the center of the drive case. An activity indicator and an eject button can be found on the front panel. The DVD drive stands on three rubber feet which suppress vibration when reading bad-quality DVD media. The cord the drive is connected to the notebook with is rather stiff, so you cannot place the two close to each other. This is an inconvenience since the small size of the notebook suggests that it should require as little space as possible.


External optical drive

The above-mentioned accessories are often included with expensive enough notebooks, but the Bluetooth VoIP Phone is a special thing. It looks like a folding cell phone with an active flip. Connected to the notebook by means of Bluetooth and included software, it greatly enhances the notebook’s functionality. The phone has a Turn-on button, sound controls, buttons to enable Bluetooth and the speakerphone feature, and Power and Bluetooth indicators. On closer inspection, this phone proves to be an ordinary PC Card with a PCMCIA connector in the butt-end. This Bluetooth headset is recharged by being plugged into an appropriate slot with this connector.


Bluetooth VoIP Phone

Besides everything else, the Ferrari 1005WTMi offers Acer Empowering Technology for quick access to the most frequently used functions of the notebook. It is a panel (you can minimize it into a tiny window if necessary) providing access to the following utilities:

  • Acer ePower Management allows to increase the battery life by creating and managing power settings profiles
  • Acer ePresentation Management allows to connect to a projector and adjust image parameters
  • Acer eDataSecurity Management (TPM-based) protects your information with passwords and sophisticated encryption algorithms using the TPM chip
  • Acer eRecovery Management is a data backup and recovery utility with flexible setup options
  • Acer eSettings Management provides access to system information and settings
  • Acer ePerformance Management improves system performance by optimizing disk and system memory usage and choosing optimal registry settings

Design and Ergonomics

Acer’s designers and engineers have managed to convey the sports spirit of racing cars in their Ferrari 1000 series using strict yet smooth lines instead of wavy curves. The carbon fiber case, like that of the Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi, has a glossy coating of the lid (it means the lid gets soiled easily) under which a finish-flag checkerboard pattern can be seen. The face part of the notebook looks like the nose of a racing car with a spoiler.

Placed in the center of the lid is the Scuderia Ferrari emblem. A non-chrome logo of the laptop manufacturer is in the top right corner. The rear part of the “hood” is separated from the glossy surface with a thin red molding. Such moldings go along the two sides of the display, too.

The Acer Ferrari 1005WTMi is a rather small computer and there are few connectors and switches on its front panel (from left to right):

  • Line audio input
  • Microphone input
  • S/PDIF output combined with a line audio output (for headphones or external speakers)
  • Bluetooth switch (this switch enables/disables the integrated Bluetooth interface; when enabled, the appropriate indicator begins to shine)
  • WLAN switch
  • IrDA port

This group is bracketed within two stereo speakers, which are oriented upward at the user.

On the left there is a 5-in-1card-reader that supports Memory Stick/Memory Stick Pro/MultiMediaCard/Secure Digital/xD-Picture Card.

A 1.3-megapixel Acer OrbiCam camera is centered above the screen. There are two wheels on both sides of it, stylized to look like car tyres, to turn the camera about.

This OrbiCam can be turned around within an angle of 225 degrees, thus allowing to shoot objects both ahead and behind the LCD panel. The camera turns around counterclockwise and captures images at an angle of 45 degrees. An activity indicator is located to the right of the camera eye.




Configuration

The Acer Ferrari 1005WTMi notebook features the AMD Turion 64 X2 TL60 processor with a clock rate of 2.00GHz. This CPU is based on the 90nm Taylor core and has a separate 512MB L2 cache for each of its execution cores.

This is a classic approach to making a dual-core CPU: each execution core has its own L2 cache and the two cores communicate with each other via an internal bus. The Turion 64 X2 is somewhat inferior to Intel’s Core Duo which has a larger and shared L2 cache that facilitates data exchanges between the cores and is capable of disabling unused cache segments to save power.

The Turion 64 X2 allows its cores to be managed independently. This technology is called Multi-core Power Management. AMD Digital Media XPress technology means that this CPU supports MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 instruction sets (the same sets as are supported by Intel’s CPUs except for AMD’s proprietary 3DNow!). The memory controller can work with DDR2 SDRAM with clock rates ranging from 400MHz to 667MHz and supports dual-channel memory access. Like single-core Turion 64, this CPU supports PowerNow! technology for flexibly adjusting the frequency and voltage to save power. This technology features an additional power-saving mode called Deeper Sleep. For more information on the AMD Turion 64 X2, refer to the manufacturer’s website.

The Acer Ferrari 1005WTMi uses a Mobility Radeon Xpress 1150 chipset from ATI. It doesn’t differ much from its precursor Mobility Radeon Xpress 200. The RS480M North Bridge and the SB400 South Bridge have been replaced with the RS485M and SB460 chips, respectively. ATI claims that the use of a thinner tech process helped reduce power consumption of the chipset. The North Bridge incorporates an integrated graphics core equivalent to ATI Radeon X300. It is clocked at 400MHz and can be allotted up to 512 megabytes from system memory by means of HyperMemory technology. The integrated graphics core supports ATI’s exclusive power-saving technologies.

Besides AMD Sempron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX and Turion 64, the Mobility Radeon Xpress 1150 supports dual-core AMD Turion 64 X2 processors. The HyperTransport frequency is now 1000MHz. The South Bridge is pin-compatible with the SB600 (a kind of reserve for the future), but its functionality corresponds to the Mobility Radeon Xpress 200: one PCI Express x16 slot, up to four PCI Express x1 slots, up to eight USB 2.0 ports, up to four Serial ATA ports with RAID 0, 1 functionality, and two ATA/133 channels.

The notebook comes with a Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 hard disk drive (2.5” form-factor, 5400rpm spindle rotation speed, 160GB capacity, Serial ATA interface) and a Matshita UJ-85JS DVD-drive with the following speed formula:

Reading:

  • CD-ROM – 24x
  • CD-R – 24x
  • CD-RW – 24x
  • DVD-ROM – 8x
  • DVD-R – 8x
  • DVD+R – 8x
  • DVD-R DL (double-layer) – 6x
  • DVD+R DL (double-layer) – 6x
  • DVD-RW – 6x
  • DVD+RW – 6x
  • DVD-RAM – 5x

Writing:

  • CD-R – 24x
  • CD-RW – 16x
  • DVD-R – 8x
  • DVD+R – 8x
  • DVD+RW – 8x
  • DVD-RW – 6x
  • DVD-RAM – 5x
  • DVD-R DL (double-layer) – 4x
  • DVD+R DL (double-layer) – 4x

The notebook comes with DDR2-667 SDRAM, the fastest memory type available today. Both slots are easily accessible, and each is occupied by a 1024MB module. The maximum supported amount of memory is 4096MB.

We measured the temperature of the hottest spots on the notebook’s surfaces with an infrared thermometer after it had worked for half an hour in the Classic test mode of Battery Eater Pro 2.60 (the ambient temperature remained constant at 23°C during this test) and got the following numbers:

  • LCD panel (at the bottom) – 39°C
  • Keyboard (the touchpad, to be exact) – 36°C
  • Bottom panel (the exhaust hole) – 41°C

The next table lists detailed technical specs of the tested notebook in comparison with its opponent Dell Inspiron XPS M1210:

Test Methods

The notebook’s hard drive was formatted in NTFS before the tests. Then we installed Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c, system drivers (downloaded from the manufacturer’s website), and Windows Media Encoder 9.0 with Windows Media Player 9.0. We also installed Windows Media Player 10.0 for such tests as PCMark 2005.

The following settings were used for the tests:

  • Power-saving services – Off
  • Audio subsystem – Off
  • Network services – Off
  • Maximum screen brightness
  • Maximum display resolution (1280x800)
  • Windows Taskbar is Unlocked
  • Windows Taskbar hides automatically
  • Classic Desktop theme
  • No background image on the Desktop
  • No screensaver
  • Low security level
  • Pop-ups blocking disabled

There were two exceptions: we returned to the Windows XP desktop theme for PCMark 2005 since the program required that. And for SYSMark 2004 SE to work normally, we had to roll each parameter back to its default (as they are set right after you install Windows).

Two power modes were used. First, we selected the Always On power mode for maximum performance and the shortest battery life. Then we switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.

Our tests:

  1. Performance benchmarks: synthetic (SiSoftware Sandra 2005, SiSoftware Sandra 2007, PCMark 2004 1.3.0, PCMark 2005 1.2.0), office and multimedia (SYSMark 2004 SE, Business Winstone 2004, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), and games (3DMark 2001 SE Pro, 3DMark 2003 3.6.0, 3DMark 2005 1.2.0, 3DMark 2006 1.1.0, Quake 3)
  2. Battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.60)

There are three test modes in Battery Eater:

  • Classic (the system is under a high and evenly distributed load)
  • Reader’s test (the pages are browsed through each 15 seconds)
  • Idle mode

We used the first two modes as they are in Battery Eater, but in the Idle mode (when the test utility doesn’t put any load of its own on the notebook) we played a DVD movie.

The notebook wouldn’t run Quake 4 and would have very low results in Unreal Tournament 2003, so these gaming applications were excluded from our test program.


Performance

As usual, we will first run synthetic benchmarks.

The SiSoftware 2007 suite features an updated enhanced-functionality interface, runs on three platforms (Win32 x86, Win64 x64, WinCE ARM), contains 13 tests and 34 informational modules, and supports a large range of devices thanks to the developer’s collaboration with Intel, AMD, ATI, SiS and VIA. The program is supported in six languages and has a free Lite version for personal and educational purposes. SiSoftware Sandra measures overall performance of the system as well as that of each of its subsystems.

PCMark benchmarks computer performance in office and office-related applications and also produces performance scores for the main subsystems (CPU, memory, graphical, and disk subsystem). PCMark 2005 carries on the tradition of complex benchmarks of the series and uses fragments of real-life applications as tests. This makes it somewhat more relevant for end-users as opposed to fully synthetic benchmarks. After running a series of 11 tests on the different components of the system, the program calculates an overall performance score in units called PCMarks. PCMark 2005 can check a computer out at processing HD video and encoding audio, and offers enhanced tests of the CPU and hard disk under multi-threaded load. The overall score is calculated by the formula: PCMark Score = 87 x (the geometric mean of the basic tests), where the geometric mean is calculated as (Result 1 x Result 2 x…)/the number of results.

A 0.33GHz advantage in the clock rate is not the only factor why the Intel Core 2 Duo is superior to the dual-core processor from AMD. The Turion 64 X2’s separate L2 caches perform slower than the shared cache of the Intel CPU and its total amount of cache memory is only one fourth of the Intel processor’s cache. The Turion 64 X2 fails the multimedia tests from SiSoftware Sandra completely. When the notebook switches to its battery, PowerNow! technology lowers the CPU clock rate to 800MHz as opposed to the Core 2 Duo’s 1GHz. The Turion would be slower anyway even if their clock rates were the same. Intel’s CPU delivers a higher performance-per-megahertz ratio.

The memory and hard disk tests produce expectable results. The integrated graphics core from the Mobility Radeon Xpress 1150 chipset is comparable to Intel’s Graphics Media Accelerator 950 when powered from the mains. When the notebook switches to the battery, the graphics subsystem suffers a threefold performance hit. This will be even more conspicuous in the gaming tests below.

The Business Winstone 2004 test runs scripts of the following real-life office applications, several scripts at a time to simulate multi-tasking: Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, Project, PowerPoint, FrontPage, WinZip, and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition.

The Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test evaluates performance of a computer in the following multimedia applications: Windows Media Encoder, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere, NewTek LightWave 3D, Steinberg WaveLab, Micromedia Dreamweaver MX, and Micromedia Director MX.

The following table and diagrams show the outcome of these tests:

It’s no secret that PC Magazine ’s benchmarks put most of their load on the CPU, so the results are expectable. When working on the batteries, the notebooks suffer a twofold performance hit roughly proportional to the CPU frequency drop.


Conclusion

Acer has brought the spirit of Formula 1 racing into the sector of ultra-compact laptops. The robust and stylish carbon case of the 1005WTMi contains a fast and functional configuration. Ferrari admirers are going to be crazy about this machine, even though it is far more expensive than ordinary products from the same class.

It was not easy to take engineering and design ideas from the two famous companies working in the fields of microelectronics and cars and embody them all in the Acer Ferrari 1005WTMi. Formula 1 is an example of a continuous introduction of new technologies and innovations which is the way to achieve new heights in every area. Engineers from each F1 team are trying to find the optimal balance between speed, power, weight, cabin robustness, fuel consumption, etc, but Ferrari somehow manages to do it better.

Highs:

  • Ferrari-style exterior design
  • Good performance in office applications
  • Wide wireless capabilities including the Bluetooth VoIP Phone
  • Acer’s exclusive technologies and software
  • Integrated 1.3-megapixel web-camera turnable by 225 degrees
  • Modern engineering materials used to make the case
  • Handy keyboard and touchpad
  • Rich accessories
  • Low weight and small dimensions
  • Port-replicator connector

Lows:

  • Easily soiled lid and internal rubberized surface
  • Short battery life
  • Weak graphics performance when powered by the battery
  • Stiff cord of the optical drive
  • Expensive

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