Now that the
Ion-based cat is out of the bag, Acer's
Aspire Revo has reared its pretty head on UK retailer Play.com's website. While all four packages sport the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N230, from what we can tell there's two distinct hardware configurations here. The base price is £180 (US $267), and with that you'll get 1GB RAM, 8GB SSD, and Linux. The £300 model boasts 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, and Windows Vista Home Premium. Tack on £50 more for a 3D controller and ten games, and for £330 ($440) you can have the full package along with a wireless keyboard / mouse. The listed release date is May 18th for all of them, and with any luck Acer'll go with that date and bring the nettop stateside sometime around then.
posted Apr 13th 2009 11:22PM
Nice- pleasantly surprised at the pricing! This will make an awesome HTC, as it can play 1080P content.
Hell yes, and it might be even cheaper: One Stop PC Shop have the low end version going for £151.
Potential awesome win on the horizon here.
Can't wait to put OS X on it.
can't wait to put porn on it
Easy, guys. You can also have the best of both worlds: OS X *and* porn on it.
Umm leopard porn...
I am curious to see how smooth (or chunky) Vista MCE will run on it. Crosses finger hoping Hulu HD will run on it =(
Doubt it without flash GPU support.
For that price you can count me in as an early adopter. I'm so tired of dragging the laptop and all it's cables to the television when I want to watch an HD movie. There's a nice spot between the 360 and the Wii for this guy. Also can't wait to see how the Ion handles CS3.
Something doesn't seem right. I have a laptop, with Core2 Duo T5800, 4GB of RAM. Windows Vista premium runs kinda slow. I have a digital tuner to record OTA HD broadcasts. Sometimes when I'm watching HD in a window and web browsing the tv app stuters. How will run on this?
You probably have integrated Intel graphics in your laptop. Even though your CPU is a lot quicker than this Atom processor, the graphics chipset (based on the 9400M) is much more powerful in the Revo.
I have a low end duo core t2330 at 1.6 GHz with the 8400m gs graphics and vista ran just fine. I switched to XP because I heard it would run quicker but it seems about the same to me. It must be your graphics chip and maybe you need more ram,.
x-ney on the ram. I didn't notice you had 4gb.
IMMA REVO'IN MY GPU!!
Price is awesome - the cheap one will make a great MythTV Frontend!
A little disappointed that it doesn't have GbE or 802.11n, but that probably helps keep the price low.
Indeed. I think this very well could by my next MythTV Frontend!
The only problem is that the version with the best GPU (i.e. the one most likely to handle HD) comes with Vista, which adds to the price. Take that model, put linux on it and take £50 off, and it'll be fantastic.
I'm looking forward to sticking one of these in my multi-touch table :)
All NVIDIA ion platforms use the same GeForce 9400M (MCP79) GPU.
If the low end desktop is almost 300, I hate to think what the netbooks will go for.
remember this is UK pricing. (we get screwed) you probably have it for $200-$300.
only think I wish this had was a config for like Linux 160gb hdd + 2gb ram . Put it around the £200 and that would be the one for me :D
$200-$250 i meant :/
beware of the Acer SSD which is just a horrible drive that you almost can't even use. Its really that bad, its 10 times worse than a 4200rpm external usb drive.
wait, so i'm confused. is this the same thing as the hornet?
Yeah, just a name change. There's probably some reason behind it.
I'm confused about your pricing Engadget.. You say the £300 model doesn't have the 3D controller, yet in the picture, it does. And that it costs an extra £50 to add the 3D controller and 10 games, yet the full package comes with all that plus wireless keyboard and mouse for £20 cheaper? *head explodes..*
Can you see the picture and understand the picture? Do you know what a typo is? This is a case of a typo, they meant the £250 one doesn't have a controller and for £50 more you get the controller and 10 games. £30 more you get wireless keyboard and mouse. Now was that hard to just look at the picture/website they got the info from?
anyone who knows about these things could comment on how this would handle games?
it runs crysis.
If anyone cares, this should eventually handle full 1080p X264 with XBMC on linux using VDPAU (GPU accel.) with very low CPU usage. Betas using vdpau are already out, but pretty buggy so far.
Or MPC-HC!!
Yes indeed. good timing for XBMC to start supporting hardware acceleration
I was sold up until I saw that there was no gigabit Ethernet. That's the dealbreaker for me. It's strange that they left it out, since they are competing against existing non-Ion nettops such as the EeeBox (who's B208 revision may still become my new XBMC machine) and MSI Wind, both of which have gig-e. In fact, I haven't seen any Atom boards that didn't have gig-e. Oh well, maybe they'll be a new model.
Do you have over 100 mega bit internet, if not it won't matter. 1 giga bit will only be any use for internal network data transfer and anywoo 100 is fine, i just use my external hdd anyway. if you use an external hdd all your files are in one place and if you use firewire or e sata its supa fast too! giga bit is just marketing buzz...
@Tim
That's ridiculous. These boxes will more than likely be used as some form of media box, therefore data transfer rate within the network is crucial, and Gig-e is obviously much fasterthan the lame 10/100; and the internet connection speeds are irrelevant. If I have 1080p content somewhere on my network, and I want to get it to my TV without stuttering, then the cpu, gpu, AND the internal networking better be able to handle it -- and 10/100 ain't gonna cut it.
Gig ethernet is standard these days. I'm shocked to see it left out...
@palehorse
Just how much network bandwidth do you think you need for your streaming HD content? Over the air MPEG2-2 1080i runs you about 15Mbps. I've read that the most aggressive, insanely encoded Blu-ray will run at MOST around 40Mbps because you're essentially doubling your data with 1080p, but actual movies come in at a much more conservative 8-15 Mbps because the blu-ray AVC codec is much more efficient than MPEG-2. Besides your physical hard drive probably maxes out at 300Mbps (40MB/s) anyways and the hard drives included in these Atom devices are probably much less. So the moral of the story is 100Mb connections are more than adequate for multiple HD/Blu-ray streams and gigabit network is really overkill for these Atom devices and probably most full powered desktops as well. I don't really see how this is a deal breaker if you do the math. You're just fighting your own prejudices as to what you percieve as "better".
@palehorse
Thank you. It wasn't letting me reply for some reason.
@omegahelix
I don't know what you're getting so heated about. I can notice a drastic difference between 100Mbit and 1Gbit ethernet connections. 100Mbit actually is NOT adequate for my purposes. Yes it can handle streaming a single HD stream, but good luck doing anything else at the same time. I won't be storing anything other than the OS on the internal drive, as everything is located on a NAS, so bandwidth is one of the primary factors.
palehorse @
100 is plenty. I have a media pc box sitting in spare room on 100mb conneciton my whole network of 4/5 pcs is 100mbps and i can stream 1080i (as thats all i download) to a couple computers at same time. infact using my wireless 54mbps still works fine with 1080i content
Gigabit ethernet is built into the GF9400 from what I understand so to have only 100 on the cheaper models would require adding an extra ethernet controller which wouldn't make sense.
I was hoping that this device could replace my htpc but there are a few things what i am not sure about:
Will it be possible to stream Blu-Ray iso from your NAS because there isn't a gigabit connection?
Will there be enough memory to run vista and run for example powerdvd to play bluray-iso without stuttering?
I don't believe 100mb can handle streaming raw BluRay data, but it can handle h.264 encoded rips. It will just be the only thing you do. That's why gigabit is my minimum requirement since I will often be streaming an HD video while copying files to/from my NAS.
Well, loads of people have successfully tested (see basically any Revo review) where they've played Blu-Rays over a USB 2.0 connection - which has a theoretical max speed of 480 mbs (half that of gbe). but in practice tends to max out at around 150-200 mbps. And as others have stated at various points in this thread, Blu-Ray itself maxes out at 40-45 mpbs bit rate, so in theory a standard 10/100 netwrk conneciton could stream two Blu-Rays at once.
But, for those who need more proof... Got my Revo hooked up to my Vista Home Premium PC and it streams HD-DVD and Blu-Ray rips just fine. As long as you play it in (the bundled) PowerDVD - gotta let that Ion GPU take things over remember! Oh yeah, and that's over G band wi-fi.
Streams standard DVD rips brilliantly while doing other stuff too - downloaded Windws 7 RC1 and that Bill Bailey Orchestra thing off BBC iPlayer at the same time without nary a hiccup.
If/when Acer release a dual core Atom version, my early adopter one will go upstairs and be replaced - the games I want to play are just a little too jerky right now, but all the benchmarks seem to point to the dual core letting the Ion GPU spread its wings properly.
Bummer, that this system is a single core box.
http://ark.intel.com/cpu.aspx?groupID=35635
I was hoping for a dual core atom...
http://ark.intel.com/cpu.aspx?groupID=35641
From Acer website:
"Furnished with a rich endowment of portals, the AspireRevo can be connected with ease to a wide variety of devices. The 802.11b/g (and /Draft-N on selected models) wireless or Gigabyte Ethernet network connection guarantees an ultrafast network connection into the network of other home computers. while the HDMI™ portal allows a true-to-life reproduction of Full HD video."
Interesting it says OR between the wireless and gigabit networking.
Perhaps it is simply a mini-pcie card option. :P
Way too much for that stuff. I'd prefer Popcorn Hour instead. :(
Thanks a lot for the tip credit guys :/
http://www.netbooknow.net/acer/aspire-revo-release/
I’m in the dark as to how emulators (gba, snes, psx, etc…) perform in relation to a system’s GPU. Would emulators necessarily perform better on the ion platform or would the Atom CPU do all of the work?
i've noticed that alot of emulators just rely on the CPU
If anyone whines about there not being DVI output. You will die a painful death.
HDMI is compatible with DVI and vice versus. Just grab an adapter.
Now that seeing that a single core Atom plus a 9400 can pull nice benches.
I might actually put my single core itx booard to work for my mythtv frontend, with a 8400GS pci card.
Anyone know if the the onboand GPU is useing the PCIE lanes?
XBMC Live loaded on this will make it be the ultimate media tank, the linux builds of XBMC are testing GPU decoding support so it should be able to handle 1080p MKV videos no problem.
Why the others dont fair so well
PopcornHour has great codec support but crude & ugly GUI
WDTV has great codec support, okay but slow GUI, no network support, crappy remote etc
AppleTV has limited codec support but great GUI however is underpowered so cant handle 1080p
PS3/360 have great UI but limited codec support
XBMC has fantastic UI which is also skinable so you can find something you like
XBMC has great codec support
XBMC has built in metadata scraper for all your media
I have a concern that from all of the pictures I've seen of this thing there is no optical audio output.
Which would mean that the only way you are going to get true surround sound out of this is through the HDMI port. Which would mean you must have a newer receiver with HDMI in/out. Otherwise you are limited to 2 channel sound through the headphone jack. (well unless you shell out for one of those external USB connected sound cards)
Seems like they missed the mark here.