Acer Ferrari One: AMD Congo-powered 11.6” netbook

Marrying supercar brands with personal computing has existed for a while. Asus has produced Lamborghini-branded laptops, whilst Acer has done the same with Ferrari. Now Acer is trying to race ahead of the netbook pack, by launching the Acer Ferrari One.

This 11.6-inch (1366 x 768) netbook is quite different to your typical netbook. Firstly, it is powered by AMD’s recently announced Congo platform. The AMD Athlon X2 L310 is dual-core offering at 1.2GHz clock speed and 1MB cache. It uses the M780G chipset and ATI Radeon 3200 graphics. The latter is certainly quite powerful (in netbook terms), enabling hardware acceleration of HD video.

The Ferrari One also comes with support for Ati’s XGP technology. This means that you can connect external graphics via a port on the netbook. Whilst this sounds promising I can’t see too many people doing this, plus the 1.2GHz CPU will surely be a bottleneck before the need to ramp up graphics horsepower.

Other features include Wi-Fi (Draft-N), Bluetooth, 6-cell 5600mAh battery as well as optional 3G. It will ship with Windows 7 when it launches on October 22nd (the same date that W7 is released), costing €499. It’s not the cheapest netbook, but as well as the Ferrari brand premium, it also has some impressive specs under the hood.

Via Trusted Reviews.