By John Lui
28/06/2002
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/notebooks/0,39050488,39004280p,00.htm

The Efio 2616 shows that Twinhead construction quality these days ranks up there with the best. Hinges and seams were tight and nothing creaked or buckled. In addition, the Taiwan-based firm is also going beyond its trademark bread-and-butter machines. The Efio 2616 boasts a shock-protection system, alloy body and a spill-proof keyboard. But take note that it's not full protection that's being offered, just light insurance against small hazards such as split drink, a short drop or dust.

Shock-resistant, water-resistant
Weighing 2.4 kg and 3.5 cm thick, the Twinhead Efio 2616 is a middleweight that ranks just below the beefiest, bulkiest desktop replacement notebooks. There's no floppy drive but there's a bay for a non-swappable optical drive. Also, only one Type II PC card slot is provided.

Our test machine costs S$3,499(US$1,9143), which is on the high side for a budget machine, but it did come with extras such as the DVD-ROM/CD-RW, 30 GB hard disk, a Pentium 4-M 1.6GHz and 256 MB of DDR memory.

The base configuration starts a more budget-friendly S$2,549, for which you get a Pentium 4-M 1.4GHz, 20GB hard disk, 128 MB memory and a plain CD-ROM drive.

Standard in all machines are perks such as three fast USB 2.0 ports, one IEEE1394 (FireWire) port, and four Internet hotkeys. Twinhead also claims that the machine is bump-proof and has a keyboard that resists light spills (not complete submersion) but we did not test their claims.

The LCD screen has a resolution of 1024x768, and is good for normal work, but movie playback showed a lack of contrast and a small viewing angle. The keyboard though, while a little springy, was generally sound.

Less thrilling is the use of a SiS chipset for the main board and a slow S3 graphics card that takes up to 32MB main memory for its own use.

Pokey Graphics
As the performance benchmarks with Sysmark 2001 show, the use of cheaper hardware has affected its scores. The unofficial Quake III Arena test also showed a frame rate of around 25 frames per second, which is not the fastest we've had. We would have expected a machine with a processor as powerful as this one to produce better scores. Battery life was average at 2 hours 10 minutes.

The warranty of one is year is also average for a machine of this price, though they do offer free labour for 2nd and third year repairs. The website doesn't list this model yet, so there's no documentation available nor downloads on it; you might have a wait a few months.

Cool-looking Machine
The Twinhead 2616 is a cool-looking machine with a sturdy build and a price that's reasonable given its added robustness. However, if don't have need of the light armor-plating, then check out similar budget-priced mainstream machines such as the Twinhead Efio 2300, Compaq Presario 2800AP, Dell Inspiron 4650 and the Fosa Elite 8200.