Sharp Actius PC-MM20

Fueled by Transmeta’s new Efficeon CPU, this ultra-light mini-laptop still gets outperformed by Centrino

Month Reviewed: August 2004
Verdict: 8
URL: www.sharpusa.com

If you’ve followed our on-and-off love affair with Transmeta CPUs you know the relationship hasn’t been so passionate since Intel’s lovely Pentium M caught our eye. In fact, we wondered whether Transmeta’s procs would ever capture our hearts again—at least until we saw Sharp’s sexy Actius PC-MM20 notebook featuring Transmeta’s new 1GHz Efficeon CPU.

The Actius definitely has the looks—and the size. At its thickest section, it measures less than an inch. With its standard battery, the Actius tips the scale at two pounds and makes even the diminutive Sony PCG-TR2A we reviewed in May feel bulky. The price of such a dainty profile is storage—the Actius eschews an optical drive and floppy in favor of minimal size and weight. Its lone hard drive is a 20GB Travelstar, which is simply too small for modern computing.

Ergonomically speaking, the keyboard is a tad cramped and certainly not as comfortable as Sony’s PCG-TR2A, but there are no horribly misplaced keys like on Fujitsu’s P5020 series. We were dismayed by the presence of a switch above the keyboard that lets you toggle between two different performance speeds—mobile and normal—as a way of dictating power consumption. We guess this feature will appeal to some folks, but to us a switch seems silly when modern CPUs should be capable of intelligently adjusting power settings. We’d rather have seen a switch for turning off and on Wi-Fi.

We are pleased, however, with Sharp’s unique Connection Cradle. With the included SharpSync software you can sync files between your desktop and portable automatically. This makes the lack of an optical drive more tolerable. Still, power users are going to find themselves bumping up against the Actius’ 20GB hard drive ceiling in no time.

And what about performance? Transmeta says Efficeon offers 50 percent more performance in most applications, and as much as 80 percent in multimedia apps when compared with its older Crusoe CPU. This jibes with our experience, as the 1GHz TM5800 Crusoe could barely run Windows XP. But the Efficeon’s competition isn’t the Crusoe, it’s the ultra-low voltage version of Intel’s Pentium M—known as Centrino.

While it’s impossible for us to isolate the CPU and chipsets from their respective notebooks, we can say that the Efficeon/Actius PC-MM20 is inferior to the 1GHz Centrino/Sony TR2A we reviewed in May. The Actius ran about 14 percent slower in our applications test, SYSmark 2002. The Actius also trailed Sony’s TR2A by about 20 percent in Adobe Premiere 6.0 and Photoshop 7.0 benchmarks. In gaming, the Actius MM20 barely pushes the five-year-old Quake III Arena, despite the notebook’s ATI graphics badge.

In terms of battery life, the Efficeon was good but not fantastic. Because the unit doesn’t ship with an external optical drive, we tested battery life by playing back a ripped DVD from the hard drive. The Actius’ ultra-slim battery provided about 95 minutes, which is decent, but we expect more. When we switched to the bulkier extended battery, however, we could watch 289 minutes of movie, which is great until you heft the big battery.

The Efficeon may not be the fastest mobile CPU, but this doesn’t mean it’s not highly advanced. To wit, Transmeta was the first to introduce an x86 CPU with an on-die memory controller, not AMD. The Efficeon builds on this development by also integrating a 4x AGP controller directly into the processor. With the memory and AGP controller in the CPU, Transmeta eliminates the necessity of a traditional north bridge chip. This allows some performance gain, but the primary objective is to save power, space, and cost.

That’s all fine and dandy but where does it leave the wafer-thin Actius PC-MM20? As an ultra-portable, it does the job of cramming a lot of computing into a wee package for a reasonable amount of cash. The performance won’t floor you, but with this formfactor, performance takes a back seat to portability. --Gordon Mah Ung

+ Bullseye sauce: It doesn’t get much thinner or lighter than this.

- Bulimia: No onboard modem. Requires the use of too many dongles.

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