Acer Ferrari One: An AMD Ultraportable
by Vivek Gowri on June 8, 2010 4:12 AM ESTAcer Ferrari One: Gaming and Graphics
The short story is that this really isn't a suitable gaming laptop unless your demands are very light. We tested the Ferrari One in our usual gaming suite, as well as running 3DMark. You can get gaming results for the other laptops elsewhere; here we're going to just show the scores for the Ferrari One. We should note that the combination of a 1GB and 2GB SO-DIMM in our test laptop forces the Ferrari One to run in single-channel memory mode, which reduces graphics performance relative to dual-channel HD 3200 notebooks. We did some quick testing with 2x2GB in dual-channel and found it improved performance by around 5-10%. The memory in the Ferrari One also runs at DDR2-480, further hindering performance—this despite the memory being rated for up to DDR2-800 speeds.
| Acer Ferrari One Gaming Performance | ||
| Game Title | 800x600 | 1366x768 |
| Batman: Arkham Asylum | 23.0 | 12.0 |
| Crysis: Warhead | 21.0 | 11.5 |
| DiRT 2 | 20.2 | 13.1 |
| Empire: Total War | 34.5 | 19.6 |
| Far Cry 2 | 16.9 | 11.3 |
| Left 4 Dead 2 | 20.8 | 12.9 |
| Mass Effect 2 | 16.9 | 7.1 |
| STALKER: Call of Pripyat | 49.7 | 26.8 |
On the gaming side, things are more encouraging for the Ferrari One. The Radeon HD 3200 is a far better integrated graphics solution than Intel’s GMA 4500MHD. Unfortunately, that doesn't really make most recent games playable, even at 800x600 and minimum details. Of the titles we looked at, only STALKER: Call of Pripyat and Empire: Total War are playable at 800x600, and both frankly look quite poor at minimum detail settings—like games from 2005, which should also run well on the Ferrari One. You’d probably be better off with one of the ION based netbooks, which offer better graphics performance and an HDMI port. With Intel's latest drivers (we'll show this in an upcoming article), the HD Graphics on an i3-330M are actually able to match a higher spec AMD system with HD 4200, and that's the real killer for the graphics equation. Intel still isn't fast by any stretch of the imagination, but on laptops their HD Graphics is now roughly equal to HD 4200 while the CPU performance and battery life are substantially better.
For those that like 3DMark results, you can see where the Ferrari One falls in relation to other laptops. It beats CULV with GMA 4500 and Atom, but that's about it. Atom with ION beats the L310 with HD 3200, and CULV with HD 4330 eclipses the ION laptops.
We also tried the latest Flash 10.1 Release Candidate (RC7 now) and ATI's 10.5 drivers. Unlike earlier releases, initial testing looks like Flash 10.1 is working well with ATI's GPUs now. That's definitely one area where the Ferrari One beats standard Atom netbooks, but then the competition isn't Atom at this price point; CULV and ION are readily available for a similar price. YouTube 720p worked fine with the current Flash 10.1 release and 10.5 drivers, but 1080p was a slideshow with sound dropping out as well. It looks like the L310 just doesn't have quite enough performance to handle 1080p (or the drivers need further optimizations, considering Atom + ION handles 1080p fine). Overall, we'd take any of the new crop of Core i3/i5 laptops with Intel HD Graphics as being a better multimedia solution than the Ferrari One, particularly in light of the missing HDMI port.
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marraco - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Mock iZombies here:"My fruit is more expensive because is Ferrari, and your PC is a bug"
http://joehung.netfirms.com/bug_car.jpg
Edgar_Wibeau - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Previous year's product, previous year's platform.Why don't you review one of the _current_ AMD mobile thin-and-light platform based notebooks? Like eg. from Acer the Aspire 1551 (not on sale in the EU yet, but preorder)? Or the ones maniac5999 posted?
Here's a roadmap from 10/2009:
http://www.planet3dnow.de/photoplog/file.php?n=923...
Ferrari One is "Congo" based (the roadmap uses the funny name "2nd Gen UT" ), current is the "Nile" platform, introduced in May 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_mobile_platform
The current platform is based on the 45nm Athlon IIs and Turion IIs which have higher clock at same TDP, higher performance per clock and lower wattage when idle, because they are K10.5 based, not K8 like the Ferrari One's. And their graphics (Radeon HD 4225) are R700 based, not the aging RS780 which is on the level of what? R600? R500? Either way, one or two generations behind.
You could even have chosen a Ferrari One model with 2G or 4G of ram, so it ran 128bit wide. Can't even buy a 3G ram model in Europe, doesn't make sense anyway.
I call this a biased review.
maniac5999 - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
To be fair, there is only ONE Nile notebook on Newegg, and it's 13.3", not exactly netbook size, like the 12" ones I listed. Also, the 42xx is RV620 instead of RV610 for the 3200. The difference? Dx 10.1 and UVD2, which doesn't make a difference to most people. Also, the 4225 is clocked lower than the 3200, 4200 and 4250, which all have the same 40 shaders running at 500mhz.Unfortunately, for all these reasons the only big difference between Congo and Nile looks like it's going to be in battery life. (which is much needed btw) There will be an IPC bump going from Athlon (K8) to Athlon II (K10.5), as well, judging from the benches, depending on the application it could be anywhere from 0-30%,which is nice as well, but if it's combined with a lesser IGP like the 4225, would ruin it's use as a nice little portable time waster.
Edgar_Wibeau - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Your're probably right, maniac5999(Looks like our last two posts were about the same time)
What bugs me most is that Anand's review the Ferrari One now instead of seven months ago, when it was released. The timing of this review at least smells a bit, wait a month and post reviews of Nile based AMD note/netbooks.
Also, AnandTech (and DailyTech) are the only sites I know that didn't write about AMDs Computex 2010 Fusion demos, at least I didn't see any RSS headlines.
Oh, and Athlon (and Turion) II X2 feature 2x "MByte L2 cache vs. half of that for their predecessors.
To add some infos:
Athlon 64 X2 L310: 1.2 GHz, 13W TDP
Athlon II X2 K325: 1.3 GHz, 12W TDP
The identical Turion II X2s K625 and K665 run with 1.5 and 1.7 GHz respectively, on a 15W TDP.
Of cause AMDs 2010 mobile offerings don't shine, but they're better than 2009's of course. 2011 will be a lot more interesting on the AMD side because of the two upcoming fusion designs, assumingly both of which (Ontario high end and Llano low end) touching the upper netbook / cheap thin-and-light "CULV" segment.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
FWIW, we received several AMD-based notebooks (including the Ferrari One) in late March. AMD sent them to us direct, as the OEMs just aren't interested in seeding reviewers as far as I can see. As noted in the conclusion, there are 45nm parts that look a lot more interesting, though given my testing of the Turion II M600 it won't make a massive difference in battery life. Also note that we're comparing the AMD "Congo" to the Intel "CULV"; the new competition is going to be "Nile" vs. Arrandale ULV. But in the end, we review what we get.Stay tuned for more laptop reviews this week....
Edgar_Wibeau - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Ok, thanks!One point: in the graphs, I'd find it more informative if only machines were shown that are a bit more similar to the tested one. In many graphs the cheap-and-thin-and-light-class just vanishes because there are machines many times more powerful listed. In some, the numbers of the reviewed machine (and similar ones) are simply not readable, because the bars they are printed on are so short.
VivekGowri - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
We didn't choose it specifically, we reviewed what AMD gave us (because it doesn't seem like any of the manufacturers want to give us any AMD based systems). AMD apparently thought the Ferrari One was a good representation of their current mobile platform? Otherwise I don't see why they would have sent it to us.For the record, I did rerun some benches with dual channel 2x 2GB memory, and got insignificant differences in regular benchmarks and right around 1-2fps difference in most games. While that helps, it doesn't make anything really playable - whether you get 10.6 or 11.6 fps in Crysis, it's still a slideshow either way.
Edgar_Wibeau - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
looks like I was wrong regarding Ferrari One's graphics, sorry. Same generation as current ist seems.T2k - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Ferrari One confirmed to be working with Fujitsu's older XGP unit: http://minigaming.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/acer-fe...T2k - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - link
Prices can be found here: http://www.hardware.info/nl-NL/productdb/bGpka5iUm...