Acer Ferrari 4006

The Acer Ferrari 4006 has a superior build quality to the manufacturer's other notebook models. It uses carbon fibre for the chassis and a rubberised coating, which gives it an almost leather-like feel.

Under the bonnet is an impressive line-up of hardware. Leading the charge is a 2.2GHz AMD Turion 64 Mobile processor with 1GB DDR333 SDRAM, and a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics processor. This gives the Ferrari plenty of oomph and this showed in its benchmark results. The Ferrari 4006 scored 93 in PC WorldBench 5 and 16539 in 3DMark 2001 SE, which placed it among the top performing single-core Pentium M-based notebooks for business application performance and 3-D capabilities.

Its display offers a widescreen aspect and, despite only being 15.4in, it has a native resolution of 1680x1050. This means icons appear quite small, but there is just so much screen real estate that it is easily capable of displaying two Web browsers, for example, side-by-side.

The $4000 Ferrari illustrates exactly what the Ferrari factor delivers. In our tests it recorded slower scores in productivity tasks and 3-D applications, but its battery life was 20min longer (it reached 266min in MobileMark 2002) than the TravelMate. The inclusion of the 64-bit AMD Turion CPU means you can upgrade to the Windows Vista operating system, when it is released.