Customer Reviews

Acer AspireRevo AR1600-U910H Black/White Desktop PC (Windows XP Home)

5 star:		(57)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I know some people will use this aa a small form pc for everyday use, but I'm only reviewing this from a HTPC perspective. Right now its connected to my network wirelessly and Im streaming my movies to my flatscreen tv. Its great for viewing Hi def content, I thought theres no way a processor this slow could ossibly playback through HDMI clearly. I was pleasantly surprised, after a bit of setup it streams ANY format thrown at it through HDMI. I loaded windows vista on this because of windows media center wich really helps with managing all my movies, music and pictures. The only issue is viewing flash video online, dont get me wrong it plays the video reasonably well but you will notice the stuttering at times on the video. Flash currently is not configured to run on these new processors so viewing flash online will be an issue until flash 10.1 wich will be released some time early next year. The processor isnt strong enough to handle high end computing tasks like video editing or photoshop, but this isnt what this pc is made for. Coupple of notes about setup, it comes with windows xp home but that OS may not provide as much sophistication as most people would like, I installed vista on this pc pretty easily. You must have either an external dvd drive or a usb drive with at least 4 giggs of available space. If your using a usb drive you must load the OS dvd on a diferent pc and then copy the files over to the usb drive, afterwards connect to this pc and start setup while in windows xp. Also please remember to load all the drivers needed if you install a new OS. [...]

This is my third Nvidia Ion setup and I am rather suprised. My other two setups are Atom 330s (which does run a bit faster) not Atom 230s so I was a little apprehensive. I purchased this unit as a second HTPC to hook to a 1080i/720p 36" LCD in our loft. My main HTPC has all of the music, recorded tv, and movies on it's hard drives. I purchased this unit to stream video to over my Home Group (Windows 7 lingo for your secure home network). To start I registered the unit and upgraded it to Windows 7 Home x64 with one of my upgrades from a family pack. This can be easily done by copying the setup disk to an external hard drive and making the drive active. Then just change the bootup options in the BIOS (DEL key) to "Boot from USB" and the rest is a snap. Don't forget to switch it back after your it's first restart. There are detailed instructions on the web if you need help. I upgraded the memory to 2gb for $18 which again was very easy. I really had to search to determine the memory setup out of the box for this unit. It comes with 1gb (all on one SODIMM card) of PC2 DDR2 800 memory. So the upgrade was just an additional 1gb SODIMM card. It took 5 minutes. I also changed the BIOS setting to use 512k of the memory for the GPU instead of 256k. While in the BIOS I set my computer to automatically bootup at 7:00 am. This is one of the big advantages of using an Ion setup, it uses so little power (less than 30 watts) so that you can leave it on all day. Of course, it drops into sleep mode (SP3) when not in use and I turn it off myself at night. I also added a 1gb flash drive and set it up to be used as a FAT32 Ready Boost drive for caching. Just helps it to run a little faster. So my total setup to a Windows 7 Media Center was about $80 and well worth it. It works great on my TV and streams all my content easily over my Gigabit wired home network. With the coming release of Flash 10.1 this system will have no problem with web based HD also. I didn't try 32 bit Windows 7 so I can't say much about it. And this system has to have the extra 1gb to run 64 bit. It is realllllllly slow without it. I did also order a media center remote control for $25 which works great. Get an external DVD drive (or Blu-ray drive), an external data source, and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo (I was perfectly fine with the wired version it comes with since my kids will trash it anyway)and you have a very good computer for very little money. These systems have no problem with web surfing or MS Office 2007 so they make great kid/dorm computers. Also, I have no problems with the HDMI output to a Visio LCD. Enjoy!

I've now had my Revo for 1 month and there are lots of things I like about it and several things I don't like.

Revo is small, quite, low powered and simple. No fan noises nor excessive heat at all. I notice the "thumping" of my external hard drive during seeks more than anything coming out of the Revo.

The ION Graphics and HD 5.1/7.1 sound over HDMI work great (when they work). When running video of any kind, you absolutely need to latest codec's which supports ION. For Flash video, only 10.1 pre-release works. WMP 11; Unbox as well. You can tell it is working by 2 things: no hope of HD video output without it; CPU constantly peaks at 100% without it as seen on the Task Manager on the performance tab. Playing MKV/MP4 on H.264 is generally smooth with some streaming play "pausing" (testing on Amazon On Demand in HD ). Streaming supports up to your 100T speeds through a wired network cable. Anything Hulu runs fine.

I added an external Bluray player which works with my PowerDVD 8 Deluxe [OLD VERSION]8 . Flawless and as good as any Bluray with DTS True HD. Getting 5.1/7.1 sound needs an upgrade though.

Advice: Don't try to upgrade ANY nVidia drivers without planning for a long outage as you most likely will lose your HD Sound. Just google "acer revo no hdmi sound" and you will see others struggling with this. I made the mistake of updated my ION video driver directly from nVidia and lost my sound until I did a "Restore to Factory Settings" operation packaged on a hidden partition on my Revo in order to get HD sound back. The nVidia HD sound device is not selected by default, so you always need to go into the Control Panel -> Sound ... and select it. What happens after I updated my video driver is that no matter what sound drivers I installed (even driver roll back), the nVidia HD device never shows up anymore. A friend told me that I would have needed to uninstall every nVidea driver; do a driver cleanup; then reinstall all of the latest drivers in order to get that to work again. Frankly, I haven't tried this yet as it already sounds really painful.

Haven't tried Linux yet, but tempted to see if that flips me over to loving this device. Otherwise, I can't complain about the price. It brings a PC onto my home theater which is nice for doing email etc. I often debate if I should have gone the other way - bluray plus streaming video support. But then you get locked in to what your bluray will (or will not) support.

I purchased the Aspire Revo R1600 for the sole purpose of replacing my original Xbox running XBMC. It appears to be very capable and has met all of the expectations I had. Hardware accelerated graphics on XBMC Live via VDPAU is working great. Content that used to choke the original Xbox and even the AppleTV running XBMC works flawlessly on the R1600. I did swap out the single stick of memory for a matched pair of SODIMMs but I actually installed slower DDR2-667 memory instead of the DDR2-800 that originally came with it because that's what I had lying around. PassMark performance tests showed a single module of the DDR2-667 to be almost exactly the same speed as the stock DDR2-800 and the two DDR2-667's definitely blew the single -800 away.

PassMark scores are actually lower on Windows 7 than they were on the default XP build but Windows 7 is much snappier than XP. I am using the 512 MB video memory setting in BIOS to boost the video performance but you wouldn't want to do that if you only had 1GB RAM installed.

The only complaint I have is that the box is so new Acer doesn't have any documentation online and the VESA monitor mount is nowhere to be found. I'd buy one if someone had them for sale but Acer doesn't even list them on their website so I don't even have a part number.

The R3600 / R3610 comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse but the mouse and keyboard included with the R1600 are very small and unobtrusive. I currently have the box configured to boot off a 4gb usb thumb drive straight into XBMC Live and only have a IR receiver attached - keyboard and mouse stored in a drawer just in case. The article on lifehacker sums things up pretty well - you almost don't need to dig through the xbmc or avsforums threads to get things up and running.

Size-wise the R1600 is thinner and lighter than the AppleTV. The pictures are deceptive because the keyboard and mouse, while smaller than "normal" are also angled oddly in the picture. The keyboard is actually about four inches wider than the R1600.

The case comes apart easily after removing a single screw on one side - just fit your fingers in the groove between the light and dark colored plastic pieces and gently pull, working your way around each of the sides until the side comes off. An integrated IR port would have been nice but for $199 I'm not going to complain.

Pros: HDMI, eSATA, SD reader, ION graphics, expandable up to 4GB of RAM!!! Quiet fan, Solid stand when installed properly (listen for the click)!!!

Win XP - yes, this is a PRO

Runs Netflix instant movies perfectly, Hulu is slightly choppy, but 100% better than the netbook this replaces. I suspect wireless was the major issue on the netbook and the ION graphics improves over the Intel GMA950 too. Runs Office perfectly, surfs the web perfectly. Plays flash games perfectly. Basically, this PC does 90% of the things computers are used for perfectly. HDMI audio plays fine on my Sharp LCD.

No need for a CD drive. Either use a USB thumb drive OR network to your Primary PC workhorse's drive.

Cons: Cover is difficult to remove, but not impossible. It just takes some patience.

Substantial bloatware (junk software & trial games). McAfee AV makes this thing crawl at a snails pace. That was the first to go and speed improved dramatically. Dumped the Carbonite and Winlocker junk too. Each of the trial version games has to be removed individually. After removing all that I put Advanced System Care and AVG on to clean it up and keep it clean.

Other Thoughts: This is not a PC for editing audio/video or gaming and anyone who complains about that is an idiot for buying this PC. (Many found on other sites) All of the negative reviews of this PC are from people who didn't research before buying... or tweaked them into oblivion. I'm a geek and I like to tweak things, but I don't see any reason to switch to Linux, Vista or even Win7 when XP is stable and familiar. For an HTPC this doesn't require any tweaking!

I will be adding some RAM when I get around to it, but I don't have any issues yet that require it.

This is a computer--XBOX is a gaming system. Apples and oranges... don't be swayed by reviews to the contrary. This is also a much better PC than the Lenovo Q100 (and others) for the same price... see Pros above.

The R3600 with Atom 330 is faster but also over $100 higher in price (like all PCs with the 330). Again, this is a great 2nd PC. If you need a faster processor than the 230, you need to use your Primary PC workhorse.

I bought the Revo 1600 to run Ubuntu 9.10 and XBMC, and for that purpose it excels. It is connected to a Monoprice HDMI switch that is connected to an Onkyo TX-SR705 receiver, which is connected to a Sony KDS-60A3000 TV.

I booted into Windows only long enough to make sure the unit actually worked, but that was long enough to notice all the unnecessary programs it had pre-installed. Ubuntu loaded (from a USB flash drive) without a hitch.

Because my Revo is for HTPC purposes, I use the following with it:

1. IOGear USB 2.1 Bluetooth Micro Adapter GBU421

2. Logitech PlayStation 3 Cordless MediaBoard Pro (it's branded for PS3 use, but it works well with a PC)

3. Logitech Harmony 880 Advanced Universal Remote Control

In order to use the Harmony remote, I have a generic Media Center IR receiver connected to the Revo. It was necessary to install (and configure) lirc, which isn't installed by default with Ubuntu. The Logitech Harmony software includes support for Media Center remotes, so I had no problem getting the 880 to work with my setup.

I also added 2GB of memory to the unit (OCZ OCZ2M8002G PC2-6400 CL 5-5-5-15 DDR2 800MHz SODIMM 2GB Module). After installing the additional memory (thanks for the picture on how to open the case!), I changed the memory allocated to the GPU to 512MB.

After adding the nVidia VDPAU repository to Ubuntu, loading the 195 driver, and rebooting, I was in business. The nvidia-settings utility includes an overscan compensation feature, which helped with my TV.

In order to use the nVidia 195 driver with MythTV 0.22, it is necessary to get a later build of the MythTV frontend from Jean-Yves Avenard's site (the version in Ubuntu's repository will try to make you uninstall 195 and use 185).

Using some scripts found on various sites, I was able to launch both XBMC and MythTV with only remote key presses, which eliminated the need to use the keyboard for media purposes.

The Revo 1600 sits neatly hidden behind my TV and is very quiet. It works well for what I use it for (XBMC and web browsing), especially considering its price. Highly recommended.

I gotta tell you, this little pc is about the size of a linksys router.It just blows me away how small this is. Man, what a little power house! I hooked it up via hdmi to my 46 Panasonic for a little media pc. It loads faster than I expected. It has windows XP sp3, SD card reader, audio-mic ports in front, 4 USB ports in back. No optical drive. Were the heck would they put it!! There is a SATA port in the front to do a external, maybe a Blue Ray, or have a tandem hard drive. It is equipped with a 160GB with 1 GB RAM. As far as streaming video on sites like Hulu and Netflix, surprisingly the intel Atom processor doesn't skip a beat. For $199 this little pc gives a good bang for a buck.

This is the best budget Nettop PC / media extender out there under $200. Hardware wise is not that impressive you get what most manufactures ships as low end configuration in their respective lines of Nettop and Netbooks but the big difference here is nvidia ION graphic card you get with the Acer Revo. If you are looking for a media extender or just like to play HD home movies this Nettop is the best choice for the money. The ION graphic card will play 720p video with good quality and minimal impact in the processor load. 1080p not so much.... with this high resolution you will get a lot of frame skipping making it unwatchable.

Is important to know that this model does not comes with wireless keyboard and mouse nor the VESA mount. I does comes with a wired keyboard and mouse and a clear plastic vertical stand. All of those are very flimsy and cheap looking but usable. You also get a LOT of useless software and games on a trial basis (total waste of disc space if you ask me)

It would be nice that they ship this with Win7 since is a pain in the b... to share files over my home network since all my other laptops and Pc's are using Windows 7 by now.

As I need it to connect this to my wireless network I purchase the Medialink - Wireless N USB Adapter - 802.11n - 150Mbps -Windows 2000 / XP / Vista 32-Bit / Vista 64-Bit Compatible it works well most the time, but it tends to loose signal when I download heavy files using my torrent client (yes I forward the ports and make the proper firewall exceptions) I'm not sure if it is a hardware / software incompatibility related to the Acer Revo or the Network adapter is not working well. Basic web surfing seems to works well though.

You got a total of 6 USB ports 4 in the back 1 in the top and the last in the front behind a rubber cover, 1 e-sata port in the front, 1 media card reader in the front, Ethernet port 10Mbps to 1Gbps, This Nettop works on 35 watts 12 volts power supply that's much less than you average PC (500 watts or so). You get little to no heat coming out of the Revo, the sound level is really low too actually is hard to tell if is on or not unless you see the blinking lights.

If you have any Netbook you have a pretty good idea of the performance since this Nettop have Netbook guts inside. One thing I notice is that the processor have dual thread so it may seem a bit faster than you average Netbook the task manager even show the processor as if it was a dual core processor (which is not).

I have this Nettop for a month now and I am pretty happy with it. Works well for web surfing, Open Office applications, and other basic computing tasks. I would like it better if they included some nice things like wireless card, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, vesa mount, and Windows 7. Of course if they include all that the price will be much higher so I can't complain too much.

I bought a refurbished one from an other site to lower my risk at first place since I was not confident about what this small nettop could do for me after reading ALL the customer reviews for this product. But I really wanted to try a HTPC myself for low budget since I am an IT person, and attempted to all the new things with low budget-I have not tried iPhone yet since it's too expensive for me to get experience:) My plan was to dump this one to kid's use if all my efforts failed... I am reluctant to return anything if basically merchandise is in working condition but my purchase decision was bad. Just want share my experience here.

Pros: small size (can sit behind my 46" Sony 1080p LCD); quiet (the noise can be heard if you put your ear close to the box); biggest bonus: nVidia Ion Graphic Card (I bought this nettop only for this card); other features like eSata port, 6 USB ports;
Cons: no built in wireless capability (this should cheap and easy, wonder why they did not think of that), the mouse and keyboard are cheap built (I replaced them anyway); it should at least come with XP Pro instead of XP Home.

I bought it for HTPC, but from reviews I could see a lot of people bashed it as junk, and some people praised it as best value. So don't expect it to be plug-n-play toy, I actually worked it for two nights to make it to work with full HD 1920x1080 video till 3-4 a clock in the morning; I stopped to search for solutions when I encountered problems... Here are summaries what I did to make it work for HD content:
1. take off all bloatware: slow CPU will take you coupe of hours for this task, specially the McAfee stuff slows it down to unbearable;
2. upgrade drivers: go to nVidia site to download latest driver-[...] select "ION", "ION LE (Desktops)" [ION LE (nettops) version does not work], "Wondows XP"; Adobe FlashPlayer 10.1 beta at [...]
3. install Media Player Classic Home Cinema at [...] (I used to use Media Player Classic which does not work any more for HD content, it still work for PC but Home Cinema version is a low-resources usage player supporting video stream using DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA), this is the key for HD content; if you see CPU usage above 90% when playing 1080p video, you will have problems like skipping frames, sound out of sync of pictures, etc( these all happened to me before I solved problems), basically you need to use the ION to decode and to play video instead of CPU since the CPU simply can not handle the task;
4. bring up nVidia Control Panel when you right click on anywhere at desktop screen, change resolution for your TV and select NVIDIA to "Adjust video color settings" and "Adjust video image settings";
5. set up sound output: Control Panel -> Sounds and Audio Devices, select NVIDIA High Definition Audio for Sound playback under Audio tab and do same as Voice playback under Voice tab;
6. in order to have your media player to take advantage of NVIDIA ION, you have to set the player to use it. I use Media PLayer Classic Homecinema v1.3.1249, go to View->Options, select "VMR9 renderless"(the default was "system default") under Playback->Output to set MPC Video decoder in DXVA mode, also select "NVIDIA High Definition Audio" under DirectShow Audio. This is key step in order to use the ION card. For Vista users, this step could be different since Vista can assign hardware from outside of players from what I read, for all other video players I believe there are similar configurations to setup;

Finally I am happy with the result and I did not need to add anything (extra memory, or change of OS), only few goals that I have not achieved: 1. for RMVB content, the player still uses CPU to play, CPU usage is very high, for HD inside of RMVB, it is still a problem, I tried coupe of times to adjust other parameters then I found my settings for MKV was messed up quickly, so I live with it for now; 2. for online content, specially Hulu, I still experiencing a lot of skipping frames, I tried IE and Firefox, Firefox uses much more CPU (70-80%) than IE(30-40%), and IE play back is much better than Firefox, while my 11g/54Mb wireless network did not show as a problem (only 10-25% usage). I heard Adobe is working with nVidia to resolve the issue, next release at second half of 2010 should be good; 3. How to wake up the HTPC from sleep(SP3)? I am using Gyration mouse and key board. I tried EventGhost, MCE Standby Tool to wake up my PC using USB based mouse, so far no luck.

I bought Linksys RangePlus for wireless which works fine and Gyration mouse and keyboard which is fine as well, only catch is that two of them works at 2.4GB, so if I put them side by side at the back USB slots, one of them stops working.

I purchased this to be my Home Theater PC using Windows Media Center. I figured if it didn't work, I could use it as an additional computer in the home. Comes installed with Windows XP which for normal web/email would work good. For what I wanted, Windows 7 would work better so I gave it a shot. Contrary to what some have said, this thing will run Windows 7 and run it well. The install went off without a hitch and after downloading and installing the Windows 7 drivers from Acer's support site, I was off and running. Connected to my Plasma, I am now able to access all of my stored digital content using Windows Media Center. Movies play in full 1080p without missing a beat. As noted on other sites, this unit does not play Flash video, used by YouTube and Hulu, very well. This is due the fact that Flash does not yet fully support video offloading to the GPU. This support is due out early next year with Flash version 10.1.

One word of caution here. If you plan on buying this for a HTPC, make sure your HDMI connected display supports HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection).