Acer Ferrari 4005 questions

Hi:

I am a computer programmer and I set my eyes on the Acer Ferrari 4005. Could someone answer me the following questions:

1. Is this laptop fast? I currently have a toshiba satellite 2.2 ghz laptop which is a bit sluggish with the new development tools. Switching back and forth between design mode and source code takes sometimes a good few seconds.

2. Can I keep this laptop on for more than 10 hours? Does it overheat?

3. How is the hdd performance? I noticed it comes with a 5400rpm hdd and I am bit worried about performance.

4. I also considered buying a compaq http://www.hp.ca/products/static/presario-notebooks/R4225CA/index.php . It is almost 1000$ cheaper but probably I would spend another 300$ to buy a faster hdd.

Thanks in advance

 

1. I don't know how it compares to your old computer. I would dig up some benchmarks in reviews and compare them. I find it fairly fast, but computing

2. The fan is constantly running, but it doesn't overheat. I had it on continuously for up to 48 hours crunching numbers.

3. Mine came with the Seagate and its nice. I guess a 7200 would increase performance, but it would also increase heat and noise.

4. If you don't care so much about looks, sth else might be better value. the Ferrari looks cool and I am sure parts of the price are paying for this coolness. I think the Asus Z70va gives you a better performance-price ratio, but you won't get as many "Wow that is a cool laptop."

 

I would prefer the Acer as well. It has a better case. As noted, a faster hard drive will help performance. The Hitachi 7k100 has better performance and is less expensive, but the Seagate runs cooler and quieter.

 

The Hitachi is not faster than many 5400RPM drives, I would steer clear of it. The 7200RPM drive to get is the Seagate Momentus. You can read a review here comparing a variety of 5400RPM drives as well as the only two 7200RPM drives in existence, the Hitachi and Seagate.

The Seagate Momentus with a 5400RPM spindle speed actually manages to win over the Hitachi 7200RPM in many cases.

Also, if you are having trouble with the applications you are running now, I highly doubt you will gain anything (I presume it is Pentium M you currently have). In fact, the AMD64 based processor in the Ferrari is going to be slower.

I would wait until the end of January, as there is going to be a big leap in performance. We are going to see Dual-Core processors (Intel's Yonah) and much better graphics.

 

Thank you for your replies.

Pressure, you are right, my current harddrive is a Hitachi at 7200RPM. I run the hdtune test and the performance is the same as the one for a Ferrari 4005 listed on the Hdd Performance Numbers forum. Seagate Momentus seems the way to go

I am curios about something though. My current computer is a Pentium 4 M at 2.20Ghz (it is not a centrino). Why do you say the AMD64 processor would be slower? It kind of worries me. I haven't had a chance to find someone with a better laptop to see the performance of the ide environments that I use. For instance, I use eclipse ( www.eclipse.org) at work and I have some ui editors for reports. When I drag stuff around the movement is sluggish. I would have thought that a better cpu would be faster. What CPU would you recommend?

Ferrari caught my eye also for the screen resolution. I really need a bigger resolution. Is the screen the brightview type? Other laptops on mid or lower end don't have that.

Thanks again.

 

The screen is not one of those glossy type screens, but a mate screen (at least mine is).

Speedwise I would say a AMD Turion64 2GHz is about the same as an Intel Pentium M 1.73 GHz.

I have no idea what kind of software eclipse is. If it needs more "raw" computing power it might be better to go with an Intel right now. If the slugishness is more of a graphical problem, it might not matter too much what kind of CPU but rather what kind of GPU you get. In case of the GPU, the X700 in the Ferrari is pretty much as good as it gets in notebooks right now.

Like Pressure said, if you really need max performance you should wait another month or two for new CPU's and GPU's to hit the market.

 

The 2.0GHzTurion64 is more or less equal to a 2.0GHz Pentium M(Centrino). This review should give you a good idea about the performance and the battery life of the Ferrari 4005...
http://www.laptoplogic.com/resources/detail.php?id=17&page=1

The Turion will be much faster than your current Pentium 4M. If you want to compare it to a P4 then it should be in the same range as a 3.0 - 3.2GHz Pentium 4.

 

Thanks again. The link from laptoplogic was very good.

From looking around I came to the conclusion that the Acer Ferrari 4005 is overpriced. The cheapest I could find in Canada is around 2300$CDN + 14% taxes. It doesn't have the glassy screen and it could have had the 7200rpm hdd. According to a review it is a bit too much noisy. I don't pay money for a computer to look good. For now, I am going to wait for another month or two for the perfect laptop

 

Im a computer programmer as well and my Ferrari 4005 serves me very well. Regarless of what most reviews say about the Segate 100gb being as good a drive as the Hitachi 80gb 7200rpm. It's not true. I noticed much faster load time with the hitachi.

 

its not over priced!
It's the Ferrari Name we are paying 500 extra.
If you are going to think of it that way than you shouldn't buy it.
This laptop gives you a very good performance with bling factor.

 

I am sorry, I was under the impression that you had a Pentium M (Banias derived) processor.

The AMD64 processor will of course be a far better performer compared to a Pentium 4-M.

Sorry for the misunderstanding