Acer Ferrari 1000 ZH3 Notebook

Last month, we reviewed the the Asus VX3, a notebook officially licensed by
Lamborghini. The smoking hot yellow design, an insanely expensive price tag and
the neck breaking high performance were some of its key features. And after
Lamborghini's raging bull, it's Ferrari's prancing horse dressed as an Acer
that's been put to test this time. Powered by the AMD Turion X2 processor, the
Acer notebook is slim and lightweight. The notebook's looks though are somewhat
boring and share nothing with the super fast and super expensive sports cars
that Ferrari makes.

It disappoints with features as well. For starters, it doesn't have an
optical drive on board but comes with an external one. There is no fingerprint
reader as an additional security feature. Connectivity ports include USB 2.0,
VGA and a FireWire 400 but ports like HDMI and DVI are missing. The notebook has
a dock connector for plugging it into a docking station and also a rotating
webcam. The ZH3 is easy to use as it has intelligently placed keys and a big
enough and responsive touch pad. Though the ZH3 has a powerful processor and
dedicated graphics from ATI, it has only 1 GB of RAM. The PC Mark 05 score on
this notebook was 3083, which is just about average. The 3D Mark score was even
worse at 151. The notebook comes with two battery options: 4-cell and the bigger
6-cell. The 4-cell battery died at a mere 47 minutes whereas the six cell
battery extended it to 2 hours and 19 minutes.

Bottom Line: Average looks, performance and features at
a higher than average price. You sure have better options!