From the moment you turn on the Acer Ferrari 4000 notebook, you see and hear the Ferrari license used in full effect. Windows XP begins with a race car whine and is dotted with Ferrari wallpaper, icons and other paraphernalia. Like the Italian carmaker, the Ferrari 4000 also promises to be fleet-footed with a new mobile friendly AMD Turion 64 processor and ATI’s Radeon Mobility graphics.

The chassis for the Ferrari 4000 is special because it’s constructed with a special carbon fiber casing. Still, the resulting weight of the laptop clocks in at 6.3lbs. We wouldn’t exactly call this the lightest notebook. Given its hardware specifications, it could have been a lot bigger, but with the 15.4” widescreen LCD, it cannot be considered the pinnacle of portability.

Our model came bundled the AMD Turion 64 ML-37 (2.00 GHz) with 1GB of RAM. A roomy 100GB hard drive enables users to manipulate large data files including DVD video straight from the machine itself. In addition, there is a slot-loaded dual layer DVD recordable drive, four USB 2.0 ports, LAN, Firewire, SD/xD/MS/MMC flash card readers, PCMCIA expandability, DVI/VGA/S-Video out and a PCI Express powered docking port.

The head and microphone jacks are located at the front of the machine pointing towards the user. Those who have large headphone connectors or fancy volume control pieces that protrude will find it uncomfortable when they plug into the Ferrari 4000. There are also two buttons that can be pushed to toggle Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless on/off. We found ourselves occasionally turning wireless off by accident when we brushed up against the button.

Acer has included its CrystalBrite color TFT LCD technology in this notebook. At 15.4”, this widescreen can handle resolutions up to 1680x1050 and in fact is configured to run at such a resolution by default. In Windows, Acer has changed the default font size to make text more legible but this sometimes causes dialogue boxes to run out of room for text or web pages, causing them to display strangely. This can easily be rectified by the user though. The widescreen is great for DVD movie playback. Brightness and contrast are excellent but cannot be considered the best of all laptops out there. Still, you will have no regrets when viewing crisply rendered text and vivid graphics on this LCD screen.

The keyboard itself has good sized keys that provide decent tactile feedback without giving off loud click-clack sounds. It may depend on how people use the keyboard but we had a hard time getting to the Alt key with our left hand and often pressed the Start/Windows key instead. The keys could be spaced a little farther apart, considering the abundant real estate Acer has to work with in this widescreen notebook. For pointing, a touchpad is included with the system. As if to mimic the extra screen real estate, it’s a little wider than most touchpads, although we had to increase the sensitivity in order to get it to work comfortably at high resolutions. We liked the extra four way scroll button that helps touchpads catch up with mice by providing an alternative to mouse wheels.

In spite of its many display and audio ports, the Ferrari 4000 does not come with any software for audio-video editing. Another strange thing we found was the absence of Windows Media Player 10. We had to install Windows Update and then download it through Microsoft to receive it; a bit strange considering it is a modern SP2 version of the Windows XP operating system.

That said, when we began installing software on it, we found the performance of the Ferrari 4000 to be on par with what we would expect from a mid range desktop PC. The Turion 64 processor and 1GB of memory minimized load times and increased the ability to multi-task. We found ourselves writing a DVD while web browsing with Outlook and a few other applications open in the background without any individual task giving out. For casual day to day use, there is more than enough horsepower included under the hood in the Ferrari 4000.

We cannot talk about the Ferrari 4000 without talking about one of the highlights of this notebook, and that’s the ability to run games based on the ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics chip. We were able to comfortably run a modern game like Call of Duty 2 on the laptop at a 1024x600 resolution under medium quality settings without anti-aliasing turned on. The game did slow down during the most intense sequences but overall, the experience was enjoyable and completely playable with the touchpad that comes with the Ferrari 4000. Acer’s LCD quality rivals some of the LCD monitors being put on desktops these days and it’s responsive enough that you won’t find any ghosting effects here. Those gamers looking to dig into slower paced games such as strategy or RPG titles should find the ATI graphics more than adequate for the task. We ran Age of Empires 3 at the highest display settings without suffering much of a performance penalty.

The Ferrari 4000 will provide some of the best performance you can see in an off the shelf notebook. We ran the Ferrari 4000 through some benchmarks to get the following results: