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Acer Aspire Revo R3600 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £236
inc VAT

Small and quiet, the Revo will play HD video and has WiFi, eSATA and a card reader. If you don't need peripherals, it's great value.

Specifications

1.6GHz Intel Atom 230, 2.000000 RAM, N/A display, Windows Vista Home Premium

http://www.simplyacer.co.uk

The Revo is a diamond-shaped box about the size of a hardback book, and is designed to sit upright on a clear plastic stand that you clip to its base.

It could equally lie on its side on a shelf or even attach to the back of your monitor using a VESA mount. Thanks to its ability to play 1080p HD video and the fact that it’s incredibly quiet, it could be the perfect media centre PC for your living room.

The Revo doesn’t come with a monitor, which is good news if you plan to use it as a media centre in your living room. Its HDMI output means the R3600 will also connect easily to your HD TV. Alternatively, you could connect the HDMI interface to a suitably equipped AV amplifier if you want surround sound. It’s a shame there are no analogue surround-sound outputs for anyone with an older amplifier that doesn’t have HDMI inputs.

If you just want a low-power PC and aren’t interested in multimedia, the Revo is a great choice. However, with a decent 19in monitor costing around £100, this puts it in the same price range as Novatech’s Ion Fusion, which has a faster dual-core processor but comes with Windows XP instead of Vista Home Premium.

The R3600 has a single-core Atom processor. The Revo was the slowest PC in our benchmarks, but don’t worry about its joint-last score in the video tests, since this isn’t a test of the ability to play video, but of the CPU’s performance when encoding it. In normal Windows tasks you won’t notice much difference, as long as you don’t need to run many applications at once.

We were able to play Blu-ray quality 1080p video using Media Player Classic (which is free from http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli). The R3600 managed to run our Call of Duty 4 test, but only at a miserable 4.5fps. You should be able to play older, less graphically intense games but for modern titles, you’ll need a PC such as Ginger6’s G6 Studio on page 82.

In terms of expansion, the eSATA port will let you add an external disk in addition to the 160GB hard disk. The inclusion of a memory card reader and Draft-N wireless puts the Revo firmly ahead of other nettops.

Basic Specifications

Rating *****
Processor Intel Atom 230
Processor external bus 133MHz (533MHz quad-pumped FSB)
Processor multiplier x12
Processor clock speed 1.6GHz
Processor socket Socket 437
Level 1 cache 56
Level 2 cache 512KB
Memory 2.000000
Memory type DDR2
Maximum memory 4GB
Motherboard Acer MCP79
Motherboard chipset Nvidia nForce 740i SLI
Power consumption standby 2W
Power consumption idle 22W
Power consumption active 30W

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 1/4
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/0
eSATA ports (front/rear) 1/0
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support 802.11n
Other ports minijack audio output, minijack microphone input

Internal Expansion

Case mini-ITX
PCI-E x1 slots (free) 0 (0)
PCI-E x16 slots (free) 0 (0)
Free Serial ATA ports 0
Free memory slots 0
Free 3.5in drive bays 0

Hard Disk

Hard disk model(s) Hitachi HTS543216L9A
Interface SATA 300
Total storage capacity 160GB
Spindle speed 5,400rpm

Graphics

Graphics card(s) Nvidia Geforce 9400M
Graphics/video ports VGA, HDMI

Sound

Sound Realtek High Definition Audio
Sound outputs stereo line out, mic in
Speakers none

Removable Drives

3.5in floppy drive no
Supported memory cards SD, MMC, Memory Stick Pro, xD
Optical drive model N/A
Optical drive type(s) N/A

Display

Screen model N/A
Native resolution N/A
Response time N/A
Screen inputs N/A

Other Hardware

Modem No
Keyboard none
Mouse none

Software

Software included Microsoft Works 8.5
Operating system Windows Vista Home Premium
Operating system restore option restore partition

Buying Information

Warranty one year RTB
Price £236
Supplier http://www.simplyacer.co.uk
Details www.acer.co.uk

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