Acer Ferrari One: An AMD Ultraportable
by Vivek Gowri on June 8, 2010 4:12 AM ESTAcer Ferrari One: Battery Life
The Athlon X2/Radeon HD3200 combo sucks up power like no tomorrow, as we'll get to in a minute, but first let's talk about heat. More power draw means more heat output, which means higher temperatures. The Ferrari One can get pretty toasty, especially if you're doing any kind of intensive task—benchmarking, gaming, Skype video chats, HD video, HD Flash, etc. The fan will run, and it will make itself heard. More than a couple of times, I tried muting the speakers only to find that the speakers were off and it was the fan making the noise. Okay, let's see the battery life charts.
Ouch, this one’s painful. The Ferrari One is one power-hungry beast considering its size and performance. It uses significantly more power than the Acer 1410, and 1810T, as well as anything else running an Intel CULV processor—even the ones with dedicated graphics. (We'll see that in a review later this week.) Heck, it’s barely beating the Asus N61Jv, a legitimate entry-level gaming notebook with a full voltage Core i5-430M and NVIDIA GT325M graphics coupled to a 16" LCD.
The Ferrari One lasts under 5 hours sitting idle, just breaks 3.5 hours in the internet benchmark, and less than 2.5 hours while playing x264 video. That’d be acceptable for an ultraportable—in 2006. These days we’re a bit farther along, and anything that can’t break six hours of real-world usage on a 6-cell battery is a poor choice for an "ultraportable". And on that scale, the Ferrari One is very weak. The 48Wh battery doesn't help, obviously, but the identical chassis 1410/1810T draw an average of 9W and 8W respectively in our Internet test, compared to 13W for the Ferrari One.
Another note is that the Ferrari One takes a long time to charge, especially if it's powered up while charging. If you're doing anything CPU intensive during that time (i.e. benchmarking or running a Skype video chat), expect it to charge at roughly 2% an hour. I noticed this with my AS1410 as well, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the Ferrari One (and is easily explained due to the AS1410's 30W AC adapter). Considering the Ferrari One has a 65W adapter, it's weird that charging is so slow.
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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...