A year ago you would have been laughed at for dreaming of a notebook clocking in at 1GHz. But the 1GHz mobile processor duly arrived midyear, leaving us pondering what the next step was. That step arrived in the form of the Mobile Pentium III (Tualatin-class) CPU, running marginally faster in clock speed, being significantly less power-hungry and significantly cooler than previous Mobile Pentium III CPUs. The best example of this new breed (and new branding exercise for Intel) of CPU is the Dell Inspiron 8100 (reviewed October 2001, page 71), an extraordinary machine which truly represented a quantum leap by conventional benchmarking standards.

For the older, original 1GHz Mobile Pentium III (not the 1.13GHz Mobile Pentium III), price pressure saw it lose its premium status. These older processors acquire a new meaning, not as the ultimate mobile powerplant, but as highly regarded journeyman CPUs. The excitement may have passed but 1GHz is still nothing to scoff at, and certainly not in a mobile form.
Looking at the exterior of the notebook, theres an 8x DVD-ROM drive and floppy drive on the left side and PC Card slots on the right. Twinhead has provided integrated sound, networking and an analog modem, which is expected these days. The SiS chipset is responsible for sound, modem and graphics, and another SiS chip takes care of the Ethernet adaptor.

The efio!3200 uses a trackpad pointing device placed in the middle of the wristrest. This proved very annoying when we were testing the notebook. At some stage it developed the yips as far as pointer control was concerned. Its happened with other notebooks too the pointer develops a mind of its own and will move inaccurately across the screen, opening windows that havent been clicked seemingly at random. I flirted with the idea of reformatting and reinstalling Windows Me after other efforts at fixing the problem had been exhausted, but the lack of a recovery CD restricted my ability to restore the efio! to factory settings. Not even using an external mouse remedied the device pointer problem.

As a result, the rest of the time spent testing the efio! proved very frustrating, as any task attempted took twice or three times as long as usual.

At least the screen was a decent display. The 14.1in TFT isnt the best of its kind, but it comes close to being the ideal notebook display, with even brightness across every corner and good definition. No dead or stuck pixels were detected.

The efio! is promoted as a desktop replacement notebook, and the claim is justified when you look at some of the specifications. Often a notebook will skimp on specs by offering a 10GB hard disk, but the efio! has a 20GB drive. The optical drive is interchangeable with other options like a CD-ROM or CD-RW drive. Only one PC Card slot is offered. In terms of a FireWire port, I wasnt completely convinced of their value in a notebook when they first appeared, but have since warmed to the idea. If the efio! seriously wants to take a hit at the major brands as a desktop replacement, then an integrated FireWire adaptor is rapidly becoming a necessary requirement.

Although the 1GHz CPU and SiS chipset is not exactly sizzling speed-wise, the efio! shows a clean pair of heels to some similarly specified machines from the better known brands. The results were achieved with benchmark software before the problem with the glidepoint manifested. A 2D score of 2.33 is excellent, even against the 3.42 scored by the Dell Inspiron 8100. Unfortunately, the 3D score was less encouraging. 3DMark2001 would not run, because the 128MB memory was shared and the program requires a full 128MB of system RAM to run. The score of 922 3DMarks still ranks it above the Panasonic Toughbook (reviewed page 80), but still below the comfort level for anyone entertaining 3D gameplay.