In collaboration with Ferrari, Acer has announced the Ferrari 4000 notebook which it claims is the world’s first to use a carbon-fibre construction.

The rugged, yet light, carbon-fibre casing conceals the very latest AMD-64 bit technology, and comes in black and Ferrari-red.

The Ferrari 4000 includes a lluminous 15.4″ TFT wide display supported by the ATI MOBILITY RADEON X700 graphics chipset, with 128MB DDR memory and PCI Express, and this makes it suitable for gaming.

In addition the notebook includes up to 1GB DDR memory and 100GB HDD, as well as a DVD-Super Multi double-layer drive unit and a 5-in-1 card-reader. This is all managed by the powerful AMD architecture which Acer says guarantees top performance.

The Ferrari 4000 also comes with Acer’s SignalUp wireless technology, which it claims boosts wireless signal strength by 25 per cent compared to wireless notebooks from competitors such as Dell and HP/Compaq.

The notebook will initially come in two flavours – the Ferrari 4000WLMi with an AMD Turion 64 1.6GHz processor and 512MB RAM at $2,999 RRP (available August 1st 2005), and the Ferrari 4005WLMi with an AMD Turion 64 2GHz processor and 1GB RAM at $3,999 RRP (available now)

Raymond Vardanega, Acer Oceanic region marketing director, said the new laptop continues two years of successful collaboration with the car manufacturer: “With the Acer Ferrari 4000, Acer has once again designed a truly innovative and exclusive notebook that expresses our firm intention to stay at the forefront of our field. This is an ambition that has always been a key characteristic of both Formula One and the world of information technology.”