Hardware Acer Aspire Revo Review

[Sifter3000]

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/pcs...-revo-review/1

Acer's Revo is the first product we've seen that uses Nvidia's Ion platform, combining GeForce graphics with Intel's cheap and cheerful Atom CPU. It promises smooth 1080p video playback and playable game frame rates for £250 - join us as we find out of whether the Revo is able to deliver.

[tejas]

I really think the lack of GPU accelerated flash kills the Internet browsing experience on the Revo. Purchased one for a relative and they enjoy it as it does the basic things fine.

Until the monopoly Adobe pull their finger out of their a**, it seems that Internet interactive content will need a solid CPU. With the push to Compute shader and OpenCL you would have thought that someone would have enabled GPU browser acceleration? Hmm that gives me an idea!! Of course there is HTML5 from Google which should make Adobe Flash irrelevant and redundant.. here's hoping anyway

Good review Harry!

[Blademrk]

would the performance be any bettter with Win7:RC installed ratehr than the bloated vista install?

[Tim S]

GPU accelerated web browsing is coming, but who knows when it's actually going to be a reality

[Jipa]

Something like that might well be the ideal choice for my energy-efficiency-aware mom... Would save space and electricity compared to a low-spec desktop, and be a pleasure to use with proper mouse+keyboard+screen when compared to a laptop.

Looking forward to the next gen of such things.

[i7lova]

What the hell happened to this article? I was in the middle of reading it and and went to click over to the next page and now it's suddenly vanished saying none of the pages are available!

[Baz]

Originally Posted by Blademrk

would the performance be any bettter with Win7:RC installed ratehr than the bloated vista install?

For SD content, yes, for HD content no - support for MKV and various other HD codecs has yet to make it into the RC.

[Claave]

Originally Posted by i7lova

What the hell happened to this article? I was in the middle of reading it and and went to click over to the next page and now it's suddenly vanished saying none of the pages are available!

Seems to be working now - we'll look into what happened though, thanks for flagging it.

[Tyrmot]

Originally Posted by Claave

Seems to be working now - we'll look into what happened though, thanks for flagging it.

I had same problem coming from the RSS feed - it seems to have moved from the 'laptops' section (which your RSS points to) of the site to the 'pcs' - perhaps it was moved as you were reading?

[tron]

Nice PC.

The problem with a lot of these miniature PCs is that most people that walk into a high street store and see these, fall in love with the small cuteness and energy saving factors, but then after they bring it home and use for a few weeks, reality starts to set in: This is when they begin to notice how frustrated they are getting with the system speeds. For example, they run a full indepth virus scan and while it's running, they try to open a few other applications and then notice how the system hardware is brought to its knees.

These kinds of devices should be sold with a performance frustration WARNING sticker. People should only buy these if the size and energy saving is absolutely necessary. The thing is that most high street consumers underestimate what CPU intensive things they intend to do with a new PC. At the same time, they don't research the benchmark performance of the cute PC that they want to buy, before they buy it.

[Jipa]

There will always be stupid customers, and the whole of USA should prove that a warning sticker isn't going to save them.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Well, I just picked up a Zotac Ion N330 (dual core Atom 1.6GHz) mobo with intent to built a low-power HTPC with it. Let's hope it does better than this little Revo does - the duallie will probably help a bit there.

Mine won't need to play Blu-ray's, but it does need to be able to cope with 720p MKV files so here's hoping that the fact that it's dual core and won't be running tons of manufacturer bloatware will help it. I'll probably also stick with XP rather than Vista... although Win 7 is a possibility.

All in all, the Ion will be a good platform for media once there are GPU-accelerated codecs out there that can handle all the HD possibilities.

[Saivert]

Sure PowerDVD isn't what I would consider proper media playback software, but Media Player Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC for short) is decent and has enough options to work with most setup. I find it odd that the people here at Bit-tech can't work that software right when so many others can regardless of what hardware they are running it on.
Maybe the Hardware decoding silicon in the 9400M isn't as good as it's full blown counterparts or you just didn't set up MPC-HC right.

Also MPC-HC doesn't support every codec under the sun, but it supports a lot of current and common video codecs and most important l Xvid and H.264. And H.264 content should only be packed in a MKV or MP4 container.
I would really like a list of the sample clips you guys used, what container format and what video/audio codecs they are encoded in.

[Icy EyeG]

Originally Posted by Blademrk

would the performance be any bettter with Win7:RC installed ratehr than the bloated vista install?

I'm thinking about buying the Linux version and put a spare Windows XP license I have. It would be much cheaper and it will probably run faster (come think of it, could be a nice way to perform a review, bit-tech ).
My only problem is that the linux version isn't for sale here in Portugal. Anyone know an on line store that sells the Acer Revo Linux and ships to the European Union? I can't find any....

[vinfromuk]

I'm eagerly awaiting someone installing XBMC Live on either model and checking it with 720p and 1080p video. Seems like an ideal "second system" for the bedroom, or even my kitchen, where 720p and a smaller screen are perfectly fine.

[dolphin-promotions]

I was planning on getting a revo for a htpc but I have heard a lot of bad things about it's performance due to the poor cpu.
An alternative maybe ASRock's Ion 330-BD. It has the dual core Atom 330 and is only a little bigger than the Wii
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/17/a...gets-reviewed/

[Combatus]

Originally Posted by tron

Nice PC.

The problem with a lot of these miniature PCs is that most people that walk into a high street store and see these, fall in love with the small cuteness and energy saving factors, but then after they bring it home and use for a few weeks, reality starts to set in: This is when they begin to notice how frustrated they are getting with the system speeds. For example, they run a full indepth virus scan and while it's running, they try to open a few other applications and then notice how the system hardware is brought to its knees.

These kinds of devices should be sold with a performance frustration WARNING sticker. People should only buy these if the size and energy saving is absolutely necessary. The thing is that most high street consumers underestimate what CPU intensive things they intend to do with a new PC. At the same time, they don't research the benchmark performance of the cute PC that they want to buy, before they buy it.

So it's not actually a nice pc then? he he!

[docodine]

So it absolutely will not play TF2? Could you try the phong-free packs?

http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/35108
http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/35110
http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/35148

Makes the game look like garbage, but vastly improves performance.. If TF2 can be made playable on this thing, I'm buying four.

[Rocket_Knight64]

Ah well. Such a missed oppertunity to storm the market. Maybe a 330 duel core would have given it the extra umph it needs to be non intrusive?

A quick 'Round 2' using a Win7 RC1 install would be very interesting. This could have been the perfect foil for the home use iMac.

[HourBeforeDawn]

Well I have the 1000he, 2gb Ram, Win 7 RC1, and Im able to run 720p HD content fine but ya anything more then that is a no go for sure but hell the res is so low anyways it doesnt matter all that much so 720 is a ok on my system. It take a while and some tweaking around but I was able to get 720p to play with out needing to OC any of the hardware other then setting it to Super Performance and using a couple programs. The only thing I cant do is watch HD content online but after downloading it onto my system it will run fine. So I dont think it will take much from Intel to make that happen and Im sure they will. The 1000HV is running the Atom and the ATI 3450 (something like that cant remember the exact number but its from the 3k series) so it has no issues with any playback involving HD content on the system or online .