Acer AspireRevo review
By Paul Miller 
posted Apr 28th 2009 9:00AM
posted Apr 28th 2009 9:00AM
Setup
We love us a good out-of-box experience, and were mostly pleasantly surprised at our experience with the Revo -- minus one glaring shortcoming. The device has a small power brick, a helpful (if not incredibly firm) stand, and little else to worry about.
We set it up next to our TV and naturally went for the HDMI port. Unfortunately, on first boot the Revo didn't want to go HDMI, and instead we had to plug in a VGA cable, and then switch to HDMI once it got comfortable. Luckily, the experience post-HDMI is flawless: the computer happily and helpfully pumps surround sound audio out through the HDMI cable, we literally didn't touch a thing to set it up in that regard. We plugged in the Lite-On Blu-ray drive included in our reviewer kit (a standalone product which will be available for $99 this summer), and Revo picked it right away, and before we knew it we were watching a Blu-ray movie with the pre-installed CyberLink PowerDVD 9 software.
Our Revo came with a lot of pre-installed software that was nice for showing off Ion's capabilities, but "perks" like Google Desktop and the ultra-pervasive McAfee (it showed up in our clean install of Firefox in true crapware form) aren't very welcome on a machine that needs all the CPU headroom it can get.
Performance
This is really a tale of two chips: the CPU and the GPU. Sadly, while we were very impressed with NVIDIA Ion's performance (it's basically the GeForce 9400m for cheap and low-power computers), the sluggish Atom 230 processor almost ruins it for everybody. The fact that Ion can run Vista is also a bit of a double-edged sword: accelerated interface elements like Aero Glass and Flip3D are great, and the windowing system is much snappier than traditional netbooks, but they come at the cost of an overall performance hit over running XP -- hopefully Windows 7 will arrive soon to save us from that conundrum.
Startup is fairly quick, but the time to a "usable" desktop can be quite a bit longer -- it took us almost as long to open Firefox as it did to land on the desktop from a cold boot.
Oddly enough, we found web browsing -- the supposed heart of a "net"top experience -- to be the most lacking. Sometimes we felt like we were having connection problems, and in fact Gmail at times would stop working entirely since it thought it was having so much trouble getting its packets through -- we seemed to fare better on Ethernet than with WiFi. Internet Explorer is a complete nightmare, but while we had a better time with Firefox and even better in Chrome, we wouldn't feel comfortable doing "heavy" browsing on the system on a daily basis.
Video playback is the real winner here, with accelerated 1080p video in all sorts of flavors. Unfortunately, you have to know what you're doing. For instance, a 1080p QuickTime movie plays nice and accelerated in PowerDVD, but horribly in actual QuickTime, since it's not GPU-accelerated. Blu-ray movies also work great, but you have to wait through a sluggish start-up time and interface unresponsiveness of PowerDVD.
Despite all of these strains, the Revo was usually the quietest thing in our apartment, making it a prime candidate for the home entertainment jobs it's purposed for. Sadly, we encountered a bug at one point that made it completely mute, somehow shutting off the sound out through HDMI. A restart had us going again.
Wrap-up
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. We're sure the market will solve all this -- there's no denying that it's a lot of bang for the buck -- but we'd say nettop manufacturers should try pairing Ion with higher performance chips as soon as possible, and hopefully they can hit a bit broader of a target.
Note: we experienced occasional crashes during testing. After speaking with NVIDIA, it sounds like there was a glitch with our unit, and they're sending us a replacement to test and see if we can replicate the errors -- we'll let you know if they crop up. The device has been extensively tested by NVIDIA and outside parties in the exact same tasks we performed and no one encountered the problems we had. We're lucky like that.
Okay Engadget, you guys are "in" the industry. Any word on when this thing will get a 330 so that people actually want to buy it?
a 330? you mean the processor? (is that the new 2Ghz?) because then i am with you. But i think anything better then the N270 Atom is enough when its being paired up with i0N.
@Dave
It's the dual core.
Just about to comment on that.
The 330's the dual core Atom. It's already available, so hopefully there will be a nettop with an Ion/Atom 330 combination sooner rather than later.
I don't know how drastic the power gains are for atoms higher in the series. I understand that they want to keep the powersupply unit low and cheap and perhaps the wattage down ( probably not who gives a rats a$$ for a desktop ) Which one of us would buy a unit that couldn't play flash within a browser? These guys don't control flash, who btw have got their hands full at this point with the next big update, iphone flash, cpu and gpu acceleration for amd, nvidia and the rest, their only choice is to step it up in hardware while they can get cheap prices from intel.
ADVICE FOR ACER:
Here's a bench mark.. HD flash from hulu and youtube, fullscreen ( throw in a few graphics intensive web pages in other tabs )
think about it, who even knows this product exists? the pc addicts among us right? addicts need power.
If you want power build your own machine. This isn't supposed to be a powerhouse. Granted it's underpowered but for my purposes it seems to do the job well enough.
What I really want to see is the Revo with the new z550 Atom chip... 2.0 GHz FTW :)
Thanks for the review! One question: do other netbooks with same CPU handle flash (youtube) better?
...and an additional $200 in price. As for the Atom 330, it only uses up around an additional 4 watts or so, iirc.
I currently dual-boot Windows Vista Ultimate and Mac OS 10.5.5 on a custom Atom 330 build (using Intel D945GCLF2) motherboard. It's surprisingly usable and responsive even when Aero is turned on. Hulu is a no-go but Windowed YouTube plays fine. I don't have any anti-virus software running on the computer, though (albeit, I do have an Untangle server).
Still don't understand why they'd release a single-core version. Dual-core has become the norm for quite a while and for the small difference in power consumption and price, dual-core is the way to go for nettops. With netbooks, every watt counts since you're trying to save battery life. Nettops don't really have a similar disadvantage.
Struggling with internet media? What a HUGE disappointment for the first Ion-based computer. Major bummer...
yeh this is pretty old news now.!
Yup pretty old news now. It's a weak processor problem though and not problem with the ION. Basically flash doesn't support graphics cards.
A more detailed review over at HotHardware for those interested, including a full tear down, and more benchmarks than you can shake a stick at:
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Acer-Aspire-Revo-SFF-NVIDIA-Ion-PC/
They even have video of the thing playing Hulu, windowed, and you can see it stutter. They kinda miss the point though, thinking that's perfectly acceptable for a home theatre PC. Sure for a 3 minute YouTube clip, but I'm not watching a lot of shows on Hulu like that. Kinda makes their whole review pointless in my opinion. But the details are still worthwhile.
can anyone say CULV with ION???
CULV with ION
VULVE with ION
VULCION? Damn... I thought I had dyslexia beat. :(
VOLTRON GO!
VULVA GONE
CCCCCCOMBO BREAKKERRR!!!
If it runs Vista ok, then it should run 7 great, right?
Where does it say anything about "running Vista ok"? The mentioned specific apps that run poorly on this setup such as flash. This has nothing to do with the OS. This machine won't bottleneck either Vista or 7.
I've rarely seen Vista running better than OK
SP2 does a much better job.
can you just install the latest build of 7 and give us a new review? or is that a no go?
Dear Acer: Please make this slightly bigger and with a C2D or AMD processor that doesn't suck. I'll buy it.
Or maybe a higher-clocked dual core Via Nano - since Ion supports that one already.
Also, this *really* should have an internal BluRay (or at the very least, DVD) drive imho...
Blu-Ray would knock the price up a bit too much, but a $99 add-on for those that want it isn't so bad.
much ado about nothing...
good thing
I was kinda thinking that.. this might be a good machine to play pretty much everything on gog.com.
I guess I should just box my monsterous NES and SNES collection, I think this could be my emulator machine of choice.
I was thinking the same thing. Would like to run legacy and emulated games on something like this, and use it as a Ventrilo/Teamspeak client box.
Can it run Monkey Island?
How I hate adobe and their yearly software updates which make us buy faster and faster processors and RAM. I mean why can´t I use photoshop cs4 with 1GB? Just look how they managed to kill Flash by not letting it work on "slower" machines. I can´t believe that I once admired that company...
Yeah, I actually hope that Silverlight becomes adopted by a few mainstream sites - fat chance for YouTube of course, but maybe other streaming services are more likely to use SL? That would at least force Adobe to actually work on Flash instead of just updating it with useless crap once every blue moon...
Engadget, could you try Silverlight v3-based HD streaming? It uses the GPU, so it *should* work much better than Flash HD streaming...
I agree, Adobe buying Macromedia was the worst thing for Flash, and it hasn't done much for Dreamweaver either, but I digress.
@L: Take a look at this :)
http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2009/03/19/youtube-using-silverlight.aspx
I'm glad someone realizes the benefits of using Silverlight over Flash.
Hey guys lets all move from one proproetary format that sucks to another one that will suck just as much!!!
seriously modern web browsers are implementing SVG and of course direct video playback via tags (I think the next version of firefox is supposed to have it if it doesn't now that is... kinda hard to test it on dialup XD ) flash and silverlight are built around oblolete business practices mainly the idea that you can't make more money by keeping source code under lock and key which might be true but doesn't make it right or fair
perhaps it is the first googel android systems mini netbook , a680 will start on sale in June , 2009
Sweet. I have been wondering when we would see a basic review of this little beast.
1. XMBC or Boxee tests? I am looking at one for a cheap HTPC.
2. Ubuntu or other linux distro tests?
3. Did this model come with that Wii-like remote?
where's the test with XBMC for Linux w/ VDPAU?
Where's the distro that provides gpu-accelerated decoding out of the box?
It takes 2 clicks in Ubuntu jackass.
Yem,
Seriously, make sure you know what you are talking about before you open your yapper. Out of the box support has been alive and well for about a month. XBMC FTW!
I'm waiting to see how this runs as a Linux media box... This might be nice running as a media server and set top Myth/Boxee. Ever since talk of the eeebox, I've been waiting for a perfect small machine for that task. Obviously the eee didn't cut it.
As someone who had high hopes for the Aspire Revo as a VESA-mounted solution for home video and web browsing, this is disappointing news. Hopefully these CPU problems get solved fast...there is a much bigger market for people who want to use this kind of box for web browsing/video than for those who only want to live in CyberLink PowerDVD.
I really miss a test with the latest XBMC (linux) and VDPAU where you play 1080p x264 MKV's on this device
You didn't miss it, because it wasn't there. ;)
the price is good, but choppy even for hulu? I am disappointed, waiting for an upgraded version. maybe new atom based system will catch up
This already is Atom-based...
But it's not a new atom based one. i.e the new dual core Atom's.
The 230 is a tad long in the tooth.
Awesome for any price point. AspireRevo FTW!
I would love to see how this performs if you guys tried instaling windows 7, or perhaps OSX. I would definitely have to run Windows 7 on this bad boy if I buy it.
honestly i cant see flash hd video's being choppy being a problems for 99% of people.. Maybe hd flash is more popular in USA but its not that common thing in uk. (apart from bbc iplayer is about to get hd) but even with that with a media center. i don't see people going on website to watch videos too common
you've obviously never heard of Youtube or Hulu.
well i did just say Hulu is USA thing, the tv shows on it ain't watchable in uk. and secondly... i cant see people sitting down in front of there tv to watch youtube videos.. fair enough if your at your computer.. but media center? it won't be that common
Dude just cos you don't do it doesn't mean everyone in UK isn't like that. We sit around n pop Youtube n Iplayer up on PS3 a ton of time's.
And Youtube is in HD in UK too, eg - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScHxUopDlKc.
Though non of them are really HD, Youtube's "HD" vid's are only SD resolution, but a room based Media streaming nettop should be able to handle playback of net based video and be able to stream HD video's to it. The fact it plays Blu-Ray at ease but is cruddy at youtube is a bit of a glaring issue.
But yeah, plug your laptop/PS3 or whatever ( desktop's a bit big to lug around) n sit back n watch youtube on a big ass HDTV.
Has the system been tested with XP or Vista 64 bit ?
I understand the 230 and 330 Atom CPU's are 64 bit processors...
Curious if that would make a difference in the performance of CPU intensive applications...
Unfortunately, there is no 64-bit Flash. Renders 64-bit browsing practically useless.
Way to go again, Adobe. Silverlight to the rescue, I hope.
Regardless, Atoms are 32bit only.
LIES!!! O.o ... Linux has had 64 bit flash for a good while now http://lmgtfy.com/?q=64+bit+flash
@AVG how about a google search first huh? sure vista might not have it ... but there are other operating systems you know
As the obvious candidate for this PC is as a Media Center PC, how about a little more on the fan noise when under load such as HD playback or timeshifting?
It looks like it's a promising device. You guys can't blame Acer or Intel for it being slow with flash video, blame Adobe for that. Hulu and YouTube, believe it or not, are very demanding on the system when there is no GPU introduced. It's a pain in the ass, but it's Adobe's fault.
Hopefully, we will see more development in this area and maybe GPU acceleration for all video based applications.
This has the potential to be huge, especially at such a low price point. I can just imagine this thing running Windows 7 Media Center, using plug-ins like MediaBroswer and a Hulu front end that would be a truly amazing experience. My HTPC right now is all my old components from my old PC build. It's big, loud, and slow. The Revo is small, quiet, and decently fast for what I would need.
I just don't know.
This box makes me want to believe in it. It's half the price of a similarly equipped mini.
However, it looks like it will leave me in the paradoxical position of being able to
easily handle bluray rips while falling down on simple YouTube videos. It makes
my brain hurt.
I guess you can't replace a modern PC processor with a block of wood just yet.
"To the Apple Store, Awayyy...."
As it stands, I'm going to wait to see what kind of price/performance the new Eee Box has.
Most of my online media is in the form of video podcasts, so I've been d/loading them to my media server and watching via the Xbox 360 (orb/PlayOn/tversity just not reliable enough quality - though orb is close).
it would be nice to just dial up the HQ web version and hit play. I blame Adobe for being stuck in the stone ages when it comes to hardware acceleration of Flash. They were talking about GPU acceleration a YEAR ago, but it had to be enabled by the person MAKING the content, when there's absolutely no need for it.
Btw, you guys haven't tested it with Windows 7???
Its too bad this test was done with the resource hungry Vista - I've recently built a nice little hackintosh, leopard 10.5.6 using an atom system - a box945gclf2 atom 330 dual core + 2 gig ram, and even though this is running the old 945 chipset, i don't have any problems with hulu or flash.
Obviously Vista + anti virus + anti spyware leaves about 5% cpu left to run unaccellerated video and it chokes.
However of course it can barely play 720p video, and 1080p forget it ;)
but as a general use comp its great (150 cdn for board with atom 330, apex mi-800 case, added in a 20x dvd burner, a decent hd and 2 gig of ram.. whoot for low computing.)
I run Vista fine on similar setups. The resources used by Vista have not been considered high for a while and as far as that other stuff, I just run AVG free and have never gotten a virus or other malware. Just because Windows caches a lot of info in RAM for quick response doesn't mean it is just gobbling up all that RAM. Read up on superfetch and why it makes things run much more smoothly than XP provided you have a gig or two of RAM.
As far as your hackintosh, that's great. Too bad Apple has made it illegal to run their OS on anything but an Apple-branded PC. That kind of bullshit business model isn't welcome in my home.
I might be wrong here, but since I can play Youtube passibly well on my Aspire One, I think the issue here is scaling full screen to a HD resolutions (the phrasing seemed to suggest that the shuttering occured from that). If that's true it's not a decoding bottleneck and yes a scaling bottleneck. On my lower-end PC's I used to run around that using lower resolutions and letting the LCD/CRT sort it out, but it's a much uglier experience, and provably not worthy of a "brand-new PC".
More important is the wireless/ethernet problem. If it isn't a result of McAfee crapware or another "defect" then that means the Ion networking functions are struggling and that's a much bigger issue.
This should also run Leopard since it is using the 9400m chipset. Whether the other components work is another question.
It would be nice to see it reviewed running several different mce programs, Vista/7 MCE, XBMC, Boxee does the Atom allow these things to run ? Most of these reviews I've read of Atom based systems just make me want to buy second hand systems instead, why does anyone want an atom based system that plugs into a wall ? This thing would be alot better with a dual core celeron or dual core pentium (which is what i have in my HTPC) they both run cool and have enough grunt for HD and MCE.
If you could, would you try it out with a current LINUX flavor just to test it? See if the Compiz special effects are smooth, and how it plays videos there.
And please toss World of Warcraft on it! I really would love to know how it performs - since that is my game of choice anyhow!
Does this have an IR receiver? Will a normal remote work with this thing? Or just the weird 3D mouse jazz they marketed?
Also, please update on how it handles Media Center. I have all my videos on a WHS as VIDEO_TS and don't have anything good to actually play them on my TV! Xbox is all lame and doesn't support my format of choice.
I wanted to get one of these but depending on how it handles media center, I might wait until version 2 comes out.
Please test 1080p MKV file with a KMP player next time.
I hate how companies put crapware on pcs. Like look at the taskbar. Its full of things in the quick launch. They have a random google search on the taskbar and the desktop is full of crap. Oh when will manufactures STOP this.
I can see that after reading this article we all came to the same conclusion: it would be great if it worked properly; many of us (me included) would probably buy one too, but sadly we (or better Acer) did'nt yet get it right.
Add computing muscle, RAM, and a little graphic processing power and hopefully it will support Flash like such a device is supposed to do, and will make "Heavy Browsing" an enjoyable experience
If it will also seamlessly stream all major formats over Ndraft WIFI I' ll sure find a place for it in my home.
For the moment, next to my main HTPC screen, I feel no need to replace my Niveus Rainer set up.
Man, if the 300$ Aspire Revo actually outpaced your 3.000$ HTPC, wouldn't you be furious?
The only practical application I see for this product apart from dedicated 1080-player is farming. I lowpower cpu is awesome since it's the gpu that does all the work anyway.
This media box should be tested with windows xp, Then you can determine if this box is too slow for flash videos. Also this should be tested with the playback of x264 high bitrate rips in mvk containers, Coreavc now has cuda support and it would be interesting to see what that 9400m can really do. Im sure alot of people are also interested in xbmc and boxee playback also so while your testing all of the above might aswell test that too eh? :P
It is too slow for flash videos, regardless of OS. Netbooks are too slow for it as flash is CPU limited. Netbooks run XP. This has the same processor as a netbook, therefore it is too slow, and would be with XP or Vista.
but vista eat a unnecessary amount of resource, so everything inside in vista is slow.
Looks like i'll need to reformat this before I use it.
If it does not have a Core Duo then I think I'd wait for the Eee Box B208 to become available. I just hope that it not much more expensive.
Honestly? This review was crap, there is actually nothing new in it, except that it plays blu-rays! What did you do with it all the time? Why didn't you test: a linux distro, xbmc, mythtv, vdpau, the noise it generates, the cpu usage, when playing blu-rays (what about BD+ and aacs decoding? is it done by the cpu or gpu?), there are different HD movies out there with different MB/s rates does it play the ones with > 40 MB/s? What about IR? What about the VESA mounts? What about the boot time (on different OS)? what about the power consumption, how high is it in idle or load?
All you found out was: -it doesnt play flash very well -you cant play high quality games -and vista doesnt work as smooth on it as it does on a high power PC!
As far as I can see this, PC (especially the least expensive one) would be awesome for an htpc. It doesnt need a more powerful CPU, it needs a GPU that draws less power and a very fast SSD!
Apparently Acer will release 4 different models: http://iraklis.ath.cx/Images/ACER_ASPIRE_REVO/acer_aspire_revo_play_com_prices.jpg
i understand that this is small and quiet, but i am looking at HTPC - I just want hulu and to play rips. Will a 360 get this done?
no 360 does not have hulu, ps3 does through it's browser but i wasn't super impressed with it, it doest do full screen right
I blame flash for our troubles. it has killed more than one of my systems, while trying to watch videos online. They still haven't got their act together with flash and I hate that everyone uses it.
I agree. Silverlight is much better for streaming videos, and a lot of people haven't realized this yet.
Its worse than that. Even some people that were using silverlight (NBC during the Olympics, NLB) are moving to Flash, so it doesn't look very likely that the big hitters you're wanting (Hulu, YouTube, etc) would work.
Obviously this is the low bar for a TV-side internet box like this. It has to play internet video, full screen, in the highest quality offered, from these sites.
Hey Engadget, have you tried any non-Flash sites? How about ABC.com for example which uses the Move Networks player.
I wonder what it will take to get Flash working adequately... do we really know if a dual-core 330 will fix the problem? What about a 2GHz Atom? What about just using Windows XP instead of Vista? What about adding another GB of RAM to the sucker? Can you maybe take a shot at what is needed to get this working if anything at all works?
And maybe hit up Adobe while you're at it. Wasn't Flash 10's GPU offload supposed to fix this?
Is the Blu_Ray just an eSATA hookup? I've already got a BluRay drive in my tower, would be nice if I could pull that out, drop it in an eSATA carrier and hook it up directly.
Add optical out, a remote, and resolve the Hulu issue, and this is going to be a killer media streamer in a year when the price drops to $200.
I was originally thinking of getting this, and reading it won't do flash streaming among others, I decided to build my own using a ZOTAC GF9300 mini-itx w/wifi overclocked to 9400 specs, C2D E5200 (2.5GHz), 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD, picoPSU and picoPSU M350 case and windows 7.
DOWNSIDE It's $150 (50%) more and 1" thicker.
UPSIDE It uses ~40 watts at the plug at idle, ~53 watts at the plug when under full load. It'll play hulu HD and flash HD and can play more of todays games if needed.
"I blame Adobe for being stuck in the stone ages when it comes to hardware acceleration of Flash. They were talking about GPU acceleration a YEAR ago, but it had to be enabled by the person MAKING the content, when there's absolutely no need for it."
Dude you are wrong wrong wrong.
I think you can blame Google, blame Apple, blame NBC for serving progressive mp4 files to iphones but EXCLUDING your web client. The hardware accleratable files are alrewady available - just not to you.
Creating industry standard MP4 files that can be hardware acclerated by the latest flash player is TRIVIAL. It's easier than serving VP6 streams but some business like NBC/Hulu do not want you to have mp4 files.
Aye this review definitely needs more detail in the hardware area: noise, heat, power.
But you want engadget to load on XP, xbmc, mythTV, hulu, all that ? They probably only have a certain amount of time to do this review.
Unfortunately it looks like it will be up to the consumer to buy this thing and test out those different scenarios (shame).
I actually have given in and placed an order, after taking back the £150 barebones atom PC I got from Maplin. The Acer may not be as flexible (the CnM had a low profile PCI slot and a 5 1/4" drive bay) but while only a little more expensive, the Acer is smaller, has much better graphics, HDMI output and eSata. The Maplin one also came with an internal DVD drive, but since the vibration noise drove me crazy and it had problems reading my WIndows 7 beta disc I ended up connecting an external drive anyway so no loss there.
Since I'm getting the Linux version I'll probably be playing around with XBMC and the like while trying to make the perfect MKV player to compliment my PS3.
XBMC --> I think the main reason people (Who read Engadget) will want to buy one of these is for watich 1080p video with it. Give us the XBMC/BOXEE test!!
When do we want it?
As soon as you get the time!
Why hasn't it been tested with Vista or Windows 7 Media center? Both support DXVA (accelerated GPU) and that would be an indication of usability. No one is going to use resource hungry products like PowerDVD instead of a nice 10 foot away GUI.
FYI Asus is releasing the B208 with a dual core Atom (330) and NVidia equivalent GPU from ATI around June in a sleekier box (excluding the awful "eee" logo and an additional optical out interface BUT without the eSata port.
I currently use the B202 through Windows 7 media center which is perfect for SD content
What about Windows Vista Media Center? have you tested it in this platform?
I have a question for someone, this might be really stupid but I'm asking anyway.
How connected is the ION and the Atom Processor? Would it be possible to take out the 230 and put in a 330 is what I'm really wondering?