Netbook Reviews

The highly anticipated first Nvidia Ion powered Nettop, the Acer Aspire Revo has finally seen a review!

The model which has been featured in the review, features 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 250GB HHD and the Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz processor which is in every model. The suggested retail price of this model is $299.

The reviewers found the setup of the Acer AspireRevo to be relatively simple, with the HDMI output already pumping out audio to the HDTV. The stand is said to be very sturdy, but you can of course mount the slim unit to the back of your monitor / HDTV.

The test unit came with an external blu-ray player, and PowerDVD 9 loaded right out of the box. Blu-rays, as expected played fine with the GPU-accelerated decoding, as so did 1080p quicktime content on PowerDVD, but not so smoothly on quicktime player (as GPU acceleration is not supported).

All 1080p content should be playable without problems, as long as your using the Ion powered GPU decoding in a compatible program such as PowerDVD or Media Center.

Vista ran well, with full graphics support, but Flash video playback at full screen had some problems. So full screen Hulu watching could be a problem. Adobe and Nvidia say they are working on GPU accelerated Flash support, which would speed things up, but no time scale information has been given.

I would love to see some more tests on the Acer Revo, such as running Windows 7, and media center. I would love to get my hands on it to give it a full run down.

With a UK release date of May 18th, I should have my hands on one soon. I am very interested in using the Acer AspireRevo as a “hidden” ultra quiet HTPC, for playing 1080p MKV files, and blu-ray.