Acer unveiled the Acer AspireRevo earlier this month. The NVIDIA ION based Acer AspireRevo is no bigger than a hardcover book and is advertised as being able to run Windows Vista Home Premium and deliver 1080p HD video and 7.1 audio.
Engadget got their hands on an Acer AspireRevo and published a detailed review. Their verdict is rather mixed as for some apps low priced Acer AspireRevo is performing great and for others not.
Quote from the review: “The Revo is a really odd mix, a device that can excel at “enthusiast” applications like video transcoding and gaming, but struggles with a basic web app or YouTube. It seems Joe consumer — the supposed target of such a device — will gravitate to the Revo for its low price, but might be a bit disappointed by the seeming inconsistency in performance, or confused by the need to buy an external disc drive. High-end users will know exactly how to put the Revo to good use, but for a couple more hundies they could get a lot more CPU power in perhaps a Dell Studio Hybrid or Mac mini. ”
Read the full Acer Aspire Revo review on Engadget.
At a recent press launch in London we confirmed that Acer’s upcoming Revo, which is based on Nvidia’s Ion platform, should be easily upgradable. How did we confirm this exactly? By taking it apart, naturally.
The Revo “Nettop” is based on Intel Atom technology, but combines it with an Nvidia 9400M MCP instead of the usual, more limited Intel 945GC and ICH7 chipset. As we previously discovered, Acer is launching three models – the first just £180 and which runs Linux, but only comes with a very basic 1GB of memory and 8GB SSD, but does manage to cram in 802.11g Wireless, and hard wired connectivity like eSATA, HDMI, VGA and plenty of USB 2.0 ports.
While a little short changed, we expect this inexpensive model will be the perfect base for a media centre – drop on the latest XBMC with Nvidia’ most recent 182.xx linux drivers and you should get GPU acceleration to take advantage of the more powerful 9400M GPU for all HD media. Acer demonstrated a Blu-ray disk being played back over USB 2.0 at an impressive 40MBit/s and, while we respect this is just one example, the playback software and OS are two other limiting factors worth keeping in mind. The example set-up we saw was using Vista and Cyberlink PowerDVD 9, so hardly a “slim client” though.
Read more @ www.bit-tech.net
