by Galina Sudareva
01/18/2005 | 05:40 PM
Formula 1 racing fans will agree that this is a very exciting, spectacular and beautiful sport. To win an F1 race and the whole championship efficient teamwork is as important as a skillful pilot and a fast car. You may know that the Ferrari team has been the leader in F1 racing for five years in a row (2000-2004), winning the Constructors’ Cup, while Michael Schumacher, their first driver, has been winning the driver championship over the same time. I am personally a fan of McLaren Mercedes (these two teams once were desperate rivals, and the cars of the McLaren team were called “silver arrows”), but I can’t help acknowledging the professionalism and skillfulness of the people from Ferrari. Of course, there are other worthy teams in Formula One, but I guess I should be moving closer to the subject of the review now.
<%BANNER[article]%>Today I will compare two notebooks from Acer and ASUS which differ in their design, dimensions, weight and price, but have similar configurations. So, the “red baron” Acer Ferrari 3200 and the “silver arrow” ASUS A4S00K are ready for the race, waiting for the green lights.
I guess it’s not a secret to you (even if you distaste F1 racing) that the words “Schumacher” and “Ferrari” have long become symbols of speed, power, stability and… well, of course, of the color red! So, the red coloration of the Acer Ferrari 3200 should go without questioning, but what about the other factors? Let’s see who wins this race of two notebooks!
The drivers take their positions at the start of a race according to the place they have taken during the qualification, and now is the right time to take a look at the design and the aerodynamic properties of the cars… I mean notebooks.
Red is a bright, eye-catching color. This is the color of the cars of the Ferrari team, and this is also the color of the Acer Ferrari 3200 notebook. More precisely, the notebook combines red and silvery. The lid is made of bright red plastic with a sleek and glossy surface (yes, it looks cool, but it’s not very practical since your fingerprints are perfectly visible on the lid, and your trying to wipe them off would only lead to microscopic scratches which are not good, either). The Ferrari label, a prancing horse, embellishes the bottom right corner of the notebook’s lid. An oval silvery insertion with the name of the manufacturer of the notebook is placed into the center of the lid. The sides of the computer are red with a silver edging. The bottom of the case is all silvery. The lid open, you don’t see any trace of the red color on the top panel, but it doesn’t spoil the impression – the Ferrari 3200 does stand out of the crowd of standard black-gray models.
The design of the Acer Ferrari 3200 resembles the TravelMate 6003LCi model I described in an earlier article (please, see our article called Acer TravelMate Notebooks: Similar Looks, Different Contents for details). We’ve got the same power-on button here and four keys to launch frequently used applications (e-mail client and Internet browser, and two keys are defined by the user) above the top line of the keyboard. The hole of the integrated microphone is located in the top right corner, next to the screen hinge.
The system status indicators are split into two groups on this notebook. The first group is placed to the right, above the keyboard, and consists of HDD activity, Num Lock and Caps Lock indicators (all highlighted with bright green). The second group is found on the front panel and is visible irrespective of the position of the notebook’s lid. This group includes power-on and battery charge indictors (the latter is green when the battery is fully charged and orange when the battery is being recharged), an InviLink WLAN indicator (it goes alight when the integrated adapter is receiving or sending network packets), and a Bluetooth connection indicator.
The keyboard of the Ferrari 3200 deviates from the standard: it is slightly curved and the corner buttons are canted a little. The edging is round at the corners too, adding a kind of streamlined look to the computer. The black keys are full-sized, but the top row of functional keys have a diminished size. A numeric pad and two Windows keys are available here. The cursor-controlling keys are rather unhandy since the arrow right and left buttons are smaller than the others, and there’re Page Up/Home and Page Down/End buttons on the sides which can be accidentally pressed upon. The letters are white, the functional keys are blue (press and hold [Fn] to use them).
A few useful keyboard combinations are available: Fn+F6 turns the screen off to save power; Fn+F7 turns the touchpad on and off to avoid an accidental touch when you’re typing text; Fn+F8 disables/enables the sound.
The touchpad matches the keyboard’s design and has rounded corners and a frame, too. Besides the two standard buttons that replace the mouse’s ones, there’s also an oval-shaped 4-position joystick for vertical and horizontal scrolling.
The 15” screen with a diagonal of 15 inches and a maximum resolution of 1400x1050 is sufficiently bright, with good color reproduction and viewing angles. To control the brightness of the screen you use appropriate functional keys (there’s no scale or something that would appear to show you the current setting, but one does appear when you’re adjusting the sound volume). The brightness range isn’t very big, and you can comfortably read text having set the screen to its minimal brightness.
Besides the lid latch the front panel of this notebook carries the following: a Bluetooth connection button, an InviLink (WLAN) connection button, an IrDA port, a card-reader (supports Smart Media, Memory Stick, MultiMedia and SecureDigital formats), and two stereo speakers on the sides.
The following components are found on the left panel of the notebook:
A network connector and the slit of a trayless DVD-RW drive are located at the right panel of the notebook. For me, it’s much easier to work with an optical drive of this design, but there’s one minor drawback to that – you can’t use mini-discs.
The following ports and connectors are located at the rear panel of the notebook:
At the back side of the case of the Ferrari 3200 you can find the covers of the HDD, memory, WLAN miniPCI card and accumulator battery compartments, a pocket for the owner's personal card, the logo of the DASP technology (it protects the hard disk drive against shocks and vibrations), and vent holes.
The ASUS A4S00K looks massive and cumbersome. The lid of this computer is dark-silvery and the area between the touchpad and the keyboard on the top panel has the same color. The bezel around the screen is black, like the bottom panel. A light-silvery edging goes along the sides of the computer. The design of the A4S00K resembles the A4B00L and A4S00G models from the same manufacturer I have reviewed earlier on our site. This notebook just cannot match the appearance of the gorgeous Ferrari 3200; I would characterize its looks with two words: simplicity and bulkiness.
On the top panel, above the keyboard, there is a power-on button and a group of instant-launch buttons):
The system status indicators of the ASUS A4S00K are divided into two groups, one of which is placed above the instant-launch buttons and includes a hard disk drive activity LED, Num Lock and Caps Lock indicators. The second group of indicators is found under the touchpad - not very handy, since you cover them with your right hand when working with the keyboard, and, moreover, these indicators are not visible with the lid closed. This group consists of an Audio DJ indicator, a power indicator (alight when power is attached), a battery charge indicator, an incoming mail indicator (alight when you have received new e-mail messages), and a WLAN connection indicator (it lights up when the integrated adapter is sending or receiving data packets).
Next to the second group of indicators, there are an Audio DJ button with the accompanying player buttons (the Audio DJ function allows listening to CD discs without booting the OS up; you just attach the notebook to the wall outlet or install a charged battery, then press the Audio DJ button and insert an audio CD; the playback is controlled with the player buttons).
The ASUS A4S00K has a full-size keyboard made of black plastic. The letters are white, the functional keys are labeled in blue. The Print Screen, Pause, Insert and Delete keys are in the same row with the functional keys; the Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys are placed in a vertical column on the right. A numeric pad and two Windows keys are available here. The keys have a clear response to the touch and an appropriate sink depth.
The touchpad has two buttons that replace the mouse ones. There is no special scroll button as you can use the right part of the touchpad instead - there is a special ruler there.
The widescreen display with a diagonal of 15.4"± and a max resolution of 1680x1050 is bright and good at reproducing colors. The brightness is controlled with functional keys - a scale-like window will appear to show you the current setting. The adjustment range is rather wide; at the minimal screen brightness it is almost impossible to see anything on the screen. A very sensitive microphone is built into the top left corner of the screen bezel. The lid latch and two stereo speakers are the only things on the front panel of the notebook.
The following is located on the left panel of the notebook:
On the right panel:
The following components are found on the rear panel of the ASUS A4S00K:
At the bottom of both notebooks, there is a big cover with a pocket for the owner's personal card. This cover conceals two memory slots, a hard disk drive, a WLAN miniPCI card, an optical drive and a battery which can all be easily accessed if necessary. This large cover is very useful as it makes upgrading the notebook much easier.
The following table compares the input-output capabilities and physical characteristics of the notebooks.
When on the race, the cars come to pit stop to refuel or to replace a damaged spoiler. Notebooks, too, need some additional things like power adapters or documentation to do their job right. So, the Acer Ferrari 3200 comes to you with the following stuff: an external power adapter, a phone cable, a Ferrari-style optical mouse, a special napkin for keeping the screen clean, necessary documentation, a user manual, a booklet with a list of Acer's authorized service centers, a bundle of necessary drivers and utilities, and system restore discs. I found no bag, regrettably (made in the Ferrari style, it would make the notebook truly complete).
The A4S00K comes with the same accessories as other notebooks from ASUS: a rather big external power adapter, a phone cable, an S-Video-to-RCA adapter, an optical mouse, a pack of installation CDs, documentation, a user manual, cards with Web-addresses of tech service and phones of service centers around the world, and a transportation bag.
The above-mentioned CDs include system restore discs, drivers and utilities, a Nero disc, video-editing, slideshow-creation and DVD-playback software.
The bag you receive as an accessory is made of black cloth with gray insertions on the front. It has a few compartments (for the notebook, its accessories and other things) and a few zipper pockets.
A series of qualifications goes on before the actual race to determine what place the car will take at the start. The success in a qualification largely depends on the right configuration of the car. Let's see then how the reviewed notebooks are configured.
The Acer Ferrari 3200 and the ASUS A4S00K have similar configurations, so it will be the more interesting to compare their results in our tests. The notebooks are both based on the AMD Mobile Athlon 64 2800+ (1.6GHz frequency, 0.13-micron ClawHammer core, 800MHz HyperTransport, 512KB L2 cache).
As a disk subsystem, the Ferrari 3200 uses an IC25N080ATMR04-0 HDD from Hitachi (4200rpm, 8MB cache buffer, 80GB capacity), while the ASUS A4S00K employs a Hitachi HTS548080M9AT00 drive (5400rpm, 8MB cache buffer, 80GB capacity).
Where these notebooks differ the most is in their chipsets: the Acer Ferrari 3200 is based on the VIA VT8383/5 Apollo K8T800(M) chipset, and the ASUS features the NVIDIA nForce3 150.
Each notebook has two memory slots. These are occupied with two 256MB PC2700 modules in the Acer Ferrari 3200 (the maximum supported amount of memory is 2048MB for both notebooks). One of the slots is located at the bottom of the case, under a special cover. The other slot is under the keyboard and you have to loosen the two fastening screws at the bottom and remove the decorative panel with the power-on button to access it. The decorative panel is held with four more screws which should also be unscrewed.
In the ASUS A4S00K one slot is already occupied with a 512MB module of PC2700 DDR SDRAM. To access it, you should remove the bottom cover of the notebook.
Both notebooks make use of discrete graphics processors with dedicated graphics memory and thus allow the user to enjoy modern 3D games with all their special effects. The graphics processor is the same in these computers (the ATI Radeon Mobility 9700), but the amount of the graphics memory differs - 128MB on the Ferrari 3200, and 64MB on the A4S00K.
The configurations of these notebooks use integrated DVD-RW drives with the following speed formulas: 24x CD read, 4x DVD read, 8x CD rewrite, 2x DVD rewrite, 16x CD write, 4x DVD write (Ferrari 3200), and 24x CD read, 8x DVD read, 10x CD rewrite, 4x DVD rewrite, 16x CD write, 4x DVD write (ASUS A4S00K).
The Ferrari 3200 uses a network controller from Broadcom, while the ASUS ¨C from Marvell. Acer's notebook also boasts the support of the Bluetooth interface.
As for the efficiency of the cooling systems, I measured the temperatures of the notebooks with an infrared thermometer as they were passing through the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test:
The next table summarizes the technical characteristics of the reviewed notebooks:
The lights go green, so we can get to the competition. A few words about the conditions of the race:
I tested the notebooks in Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with DirectX 9.0a. I disabled network services, audio subsystems, power-saving services, antivirus software, screensavers and error messages before the tests. The computers were tested at the maximum resolution of the LCD matrix.
I used two power modes in my tests. First, I selected the Always On power mode for the maximum performance and the shortest battery run-down time, and then I switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.
Our tests:
The results of the synthetic tests SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004 are presented below. Note that both notebooks reduce their performance in more than two times when they are powered by their own batteries.
The results differ rather greatly despite the similarity between the two configurations. The performance of the A4S00L in the CPU and memory tests is 16-18% and 14%, respectively, higher than that of the Ferrari 3200 ¨C although they have the same CPUs and the same amount of memory! I guess the difference in the chipsets may account for this divergence. The use of a faster hard disk drive in the ASUS A4S00K brings its fruit, as this notebook is about 14 percent faster in the HDD performance test than the Ferrari 3200.
No wonder we have almost the same situation in Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 as these benchmarks use scripts of office and multimedia applications. The ASUS A4S00K offers about 12 percent more performance than the Ferrari 3200 in Business Winstone 2004, and about 15 percent more in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004. The only strange thing is the value of the difference which is too big.
For the readers who prefer diagrams, here they are:
It is getting stranger in gaming benchmarks. As I mentioned above, both notebooks makes use of a discrete ATI Mobility Radeon 9700, but the A4S00K has 64MB of dedicated graphics memory, while the Acer Ferrari 3200 is equipped with 128 megabytes of it. You would suppose the latter is going to win in games, but it is the ASUS that becomes a leader in Unreal Tournament 2003:
As you see, the ASUS is 6-13 percent faster than the Acer Ferrari 3200 in this test. When the notebooks are powered by their batteries, their results become nearly the same as is made perfectly clear by the following diagrams:
The performance of the notebooks is practically the same in 3DMark 2001SE Pro with low quality settings (1024x768 resolution, 16-bit color, Z-buffer and textures), but the ASUS A4S00K is a little better at high settings (1024x768, 32-bit color and textures, 24-bit Z-buffer).
Things are rather strange in Quake 3, too: in the first test mode (640x480; 16 bit; Lighting:Vertex; Detail:Low; Texture Quality:16 bit; Texture Filter:Bilinear) the performance of the ASUS A4S00K is higher than that of the Acer Ferrari 3200 by 17 percent. In the second mode (1024x768; 32 bit; Lighting:Lightmap; Detail:High; Texture Quality:32 bit; Texture Filter:Trilinear) their results are similar as you can see from the next table:
The following diagram is based on the data from the table:
The results of the tests are quite mysterious - the difference is too big for two so similar configurations!
Next, I measured the battery run-down time of the notebooks with the help of Battery Eater Pro 2.30 at the highest and lowest screen brightness settings, and in three test modes:
The results of the test are presented below:
I won't call that a record-breaking performance, but after all these are not small sub-notebooks specifically targeted at a longest possible battery life time.
So who is the winner of this Grand Prix? The ASUS A4S00K has been faster in more tests and it is also preferable from the price/performance ratio standpoint. The Acer, however, boasts a high performance, too, and its ergonomic properties and wide functionality match those of the ASUS. What's especially good about the Acer is of course its looks, but this exclusive Ferrari design comes at a high price - you have to pay for the brand. I have no doubts the admirers of the Ferrari team that follow the Ferrari lifestyle will enjoy the Ferrari 3200 notebook from Acer.
Overall, these two notebooks can be used at home, as a desktop workstation, in office or at a presentation, and can also be taken on trips (they deliver a high performance even when powered by their batteries).