AMD: Acer Ferrari 1000 Notebook

Our platform of choice was an Acer Ferrari notebook, which we consider a state-of-the-art subnotebook. The model we got was a Ferrari 1000 WTMI, which is powered by an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL56 running at 1.8 GHz. Despite being extremely compact, this 12" widescreen notebook doesn't use a performance-constraining 1.8" hard drive, but rather a fully featured 2.5" model. In addition, it offers two SO-DIMM slots, which allows us to install two 214-pin DDR2 memory modules. The Ferrari 1000 uses ATI's Radeon Xpress 1150 chipset, which includes an integrated DirectX 9.0 engine and HyperMemory support (main memory shared for graphics).

We had to improvise to provide maximum hard drive performance: Using a Serial ATA extension cable, we were able to hook up a Western Digital WD1500 Raptor to the Acer Ferrari 1000 notebook. Since 2.5" SATA hard drives do not require 12 V power, we had to supply power to the hard drive separately.

Corsair provided two 1 GB DDR2-667 SO-DIMMs, which can be used for either AMD or Intel powered notebooks.

Despite being a tiny companion, the Ferrari 1000 offers two fully featured DDR2 SO-DIMM sockets.