Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

Acer Aspire Revo

Posted by Robert Dow on May 14th 2009 | Comments Closed
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: windows acer reviews thumbs up desktop

The Aspire is a slick looking little computer, really little, measuring only 180mm x 180mm x 30mm (7.1in x 7.1in x 1.2in) about the size of a wide book.

Watching a blu-ray movie on the Acer

Playing Stalker on the Acer

Figure 1: Performance comparison of three PCs (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

The unit is powered by an Intel 1.6 GHz N230 single-core Atom processor, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, an Nvidia 9400M GPU (aka “Ion”) and a HOW MANY GB drive and it’s running 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium. The RAM is segmented into 1,792 MB for the system and 320 MB for the Nvidia GPU. Inside there is a Pico-ITX motherboard, an I/O Daughterboard, a hard drive, and memory. Power is supplied by an external 19v 65 w DC power brick. The unit goes on sale on May 18th worldwide and is being offering at play.com (pre order) for £299.99 ~ $452 and the price is expected to drop to $299.99 in the U.S.

We hooked up a 20-inch LG 1680 x 1050 display to it via the VGA connector, and although there’s no DVI connector, there is an HDMI output, plus four USB sockets (for more monitors if you want them.) Also, with regard to I/O, the front of the box has an SD slot, mic and earphone sockets, and a SATA socket so more drives can be added. We hung a LiteOn Blu-ray drive TO the unit ($149.99 list but can be found on the web for as low as $123 on the web).

Movies

This story was actually written on the unit. The first test was of course to try a Blu-ray movie because that’s what Nvidia is so proud of and what they say differentiates an Ion-based machine from any other Intel Atom-based machine. We ran Sunshine, (20th Century Fox), which is an OK, not great, SciFi movie, but one that has really terrific sets of the interior of a spacecraft. There are only a couple of fast action scenes in it, and they ran smoothly with no hiccups or frame drops.

In fact, we accidently started installing a program while the movie was running and, much to our surprise, only a few times were any frames dropped, and only one complete stop while the install program stole all resources—we found that to be pretty darned impressive for a single-core processor without hyperthreading.

Games

Our favorite stress test program is Stalker. We had to turn everything down, but the game did run and was playable. Other less demanding games like the Battlefield series, Command & Conquer, Spore, and Warcraft all play just fine.

Benchmarks

We ran several benchmarks on it so we’d have some comparison data. Elsewhere in Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs you’ll find a write up on the new HP Pavilion DV6Z notebook. We used it as the high end of the test spectrum for comparing the Acer Revo. For the low end we used an HP 2140 Mini-note with an 1.6 GHz N270 Atom processor and an Intel 945 IGP.

These tests and machines were not setup to be an apples-to-apples comparison but rather a spectrum of machines with different prices, performance, and power needs. It was difficult, however, to get a common resolution. That data is slightly skewed since the Mini-note could only display 1024 x 576, and we used 1024 x 768 on the other two machines. The results of the benchmark tests are shown in Figure 1.

We ran 3DMark06 in demo mode to arrive at the max power usage under load. All that gave us was the parameters we needed for arriving at the Pmark for the three systems. We added $284 to the price of the Acer unit for peripherals ($174 20-inch monitor, $30 keyboard & mouse, $20 speakers, and $60 DVD drive.)

Where:

• Performance is expressed in 3DMark06 score
• Price is expressed in US dollars
• Power is expressed in watts of the system

Where would it be used and who would use it?

Figure 2: Pmark for Acer, HP Mini, and HP Pavilion

We see three usage scenarios for the Acer Aspire Revo:

Students K4 to UG4. This is a low cost, small form factor, ample machine that can do everything a student would want to do, and would not break the bank of the student and/or his or her family.

First machine. The Aspire Revo, like netbooks, is a real market expander. More so than a netbook, a Revo is not a cannibalizer. People with limited budgets who need a computer will find everything they want in a machine like the Revo and they will increase the size of the installed base.

Second machine. Most homes have at least one machine, the Revo is a candidate for the kitchen computer, the media computer, or just a backup machine. Its price is low enough that it can be bought like a CE device and could be plugged into a flat screen TV.

What do we think?

This is a winner. Possibly one of the best deals to come around in a long time. The timing is perfect with people looking to make smart cost-effective buying decisions. As the Pmark scores show, this little machine has tremendous value for the money.