Acer AspireRevo

We just received an early engineering sample of the Acer AspireRevo with the Nvidia ION platform. So far, the ION seems to do well in the AspireRevo, as Nvidia had claimed it would.

Nvidia's ION is a platform consisting of an Intel Atom processor paired with an Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset. The GeForce 9400M chipset is the same one found in notebooks and desktops like the Apple MacBook Air and the iMac.

The Ion platform's first real implementation is in the Acer AspireRevo, a small, inexpensive nettop designed to go after the market segment occupied by systems like the ASUS Eee Top 1602 and MSI Wind CS120. The AspireRevo is also designed to be a competitor that performs better than the "really cheap" $299 desktop PCs you'd find in your local big-box stores like WalMart or Costco.

The Acer AspireRevo I looked at is close to the final version you'll see later this year, and it is promising. It's being touted as a small PC that can be mounted behind a large-screen LCD monitor (like a 24-inch monitor), with the power that your family needs for mainstream computing tasks. Since it's built around an Nvidia chipset, the AspireRevo is aimed squarely at besting Atom and Celeron-powered systems with Intel integrated graphics.

The AspireRevo's styling is somewhere between the ASUS Eee Box's tilted box and the Mac mini's minimalism. The AspireRevo is squat, about three-fourths the thickness of the Apple Mac mini. This is understandable, considering that the AspireRevo lacks an internal optical drive. I like the fact that it has six USB ports and an eSATA port, the better to connect all your peripherals like a digital camera and external hard drives. If you mount it behind a LCD monitor, it can give you an all-in-one PC's look for less money.

The AspireRevo has built-in 802.11g wireless networking, a necessity in the connected household. I was able to hook up to our WPA2 secure network in seconds, and was on the Internet before you could say "Twitter." Downloading the inevitable Vista and PowerDVD upgrades took longer than the initial setup, but at least I was using the system on a fast connection.

I hooked up a LiteOn Blu-ray drive to the AspireRevo, and Kung Fu Panda was nice and smooth, with only a slight delay as the disc first started up. The colors popped and the visuals were stunning when displayed on our Gateway FHD2400 monitor, just like being in the movie theater. Watching other Blu-ray titles like X-Men 3 and U2: Rattle and Hum were just as enjoyable. Watching a Flash HD video on YouTube was quite a bit jerkier, since the flash video player hasn't been optimized for the GeForce 9400M chipset. Surfing on the AspireRevo was about what you'd expect from an Atom-powered system: occasionally slow, but faster than on a sub-1GHz Pentium III PC.

Source : http://www.pcmag.com