Hands-on Review: Acer Ferrari 1100

Acer's Ferrari laptop line has long offered a good blend of performance and exceptionally nice looks. With carbon fiber shells, tasteful accents, and smoothly rounded corners, the machines aren't just for car enthusiasts. They perform well and they look good in just about any environment.

Acer's latest takes the Ferrari further into the ultraportable world, upgrading its Ferrari 1000 with a brighter, 12.1-inch screen that weighs in at 4.4 pounds. 4GB of RAM and a huge 250GB hard drive are now under the hood, giving the 1100 some of the beefiest specs in the ultraportable world today. A slot-loading DVD burner is icing on the cake.

All that is great... but under benchmarking fire, the 1100 was a tiny bit of a letdown. I got surprisingly good results on general business application tests (though nothing all that out of the ordinary), but gaming performance, usually a hallmark of the Ferrari line, was disappointing. In my Quake 4 test I got just 32.6 frames per second. That's just barely passable for gaming, but awfully low for a machine with discrete graphics, in this case an ATI Radeon X1270. Considering I can get close to 20 frames per second on some machines with Intel's cheap integrated graphics, I'd hoped for better gaming ability out of the unit. That said, compared to other machines in the sub-five-pound space, the 1100 is on top of them all, as none I've seen can even hit 30 fps.

At $1,999, the 1100 isn't cheap, but the Ferrari line never has been high on affordability. Most of the specs justify the cost, but with just a tiny graphics upgrade the 1100 would be a flat-out winner.

LINK: Acer Ferrari 1100