Customer Reviews

Acer AspireRevo AR3610-U9022 Desktop PC (Dark Blue)

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I don't normally write reviews, but this little guy blew me away. For $125 more so over the 1600 you'll get dual core, 2GB RAM, Windows 7, wireless keyboard and mouse and the VESA mount (its included). And the dual core will make a difference if you are playing back 1080P source material.

Be sure to download the flash beta 10.1 which uses the Ion processor's hardware acceleration or you will be disappointed. Also need the latest NVIDIA drivers. I'm playing movies both through Media Player Classic - Home Cinema and utilizing the PC to run the latest BOXEE beta which while having some bugs really is fun to play with. Boxee will consolidate your media library on your PC or network share (I'm using an UNRAID server, which is fabulous as a media server) along with content from the internet (TV shows, Movies, Apps, You Tube etc..). Thinking about playing with XBMC next (Which Boxee is based on).

The HDMI out is working great for both Video and Audio (not all HDMI outs on PC's support audio as I found out the hard way). There is a utility with the NVIDIA graphics to size the desktop to exactly your flat screen dimensions (no need to play with aspect ratio on your TV).

While not my use, it would make a great extra PC for the kids or significant other if all they do is surf, with an occasional word document here or there.

The PC is really quiet, I simply can not hear it at all and it stays nice and cool.

Highly recommended, but I guess you knew that already!

Four months ago, I set out to find a way to link my 50" plasma TV to the Internet.
However, my initial attempt of using a 3+ year old Desktop to that end fell well short of my expectations in numerous areas.

Round two of my search after dedicated Media players yielded a list of very capable and quite popular devices such as WD TV Live, Asus O!Play, Popcorn Hour with its soon to be released next iteration: Popbox (3/20/2010), and more.
For me, a repeating issue with most of the above was the limited number of sites one can go to on the Internet (or 'worse' having to pay subscription), not having a built-in hard-drive and so on.

The lure of total flexibilty and open-system approach was irresistible, and a continuing
search revealed Acer Revo AR1600 and R3610 which seemed to fit the bill, with reviews to match.
At 200 and 320 US dollars respectively, picking the right one turned out to be more than a case of "Good enough vs. Nice to have":

Obviously, more power as in the R3610 never hurts when future applications might become more demanding.

The R3610 comes with Windows 7 Home Premium which was a wonderful experience for me on an Asus M91MT Tablet that I had for 3 months now, and I prefered that over the solid but dated Windows XP.

In the aftermath, the wireless keyboard and mouse turned out to be excellent. The reception for both never misses a keystroke or a mouse click even 15 feet away from the PC, and with NO direct line of sight (the Acer sits mostly hidden in a cabinet).
That alons meant a savings of 40+ dollars over buying a separate wireless keyboard/mouse.

With 2G RAM in the R3610, you can be comfortable increasing the allocated memory for Video - in the bios - from the default 256Meg to 512. Buying a second 1G RAM for the AR1600 would run you abour 25 Dollars. People do report good picture with the 1G RAM on the AR1600, but the perfect, no-hickup streaming HD I get may be partially helped by the added memory. As it goes, I cannot be totally scientifc here, only report the results.

The R3610 comes with an SPDIF out for those who want up to 7.1 Audio to their amplifier etc.

R3610 als has a built in wifi which was invaluable to me while I was working away from
the router, on initial boot, installations etc. (otherwise it is wired ro rhe router and via
hdmi to the TV). Again, getting a wifi card for the AR1600 can set you back 20+ dollars.

Additional notes:
1. I installed XBMC (endless plugins - wow), Hulu Desktop (what a pretty menu system and the best player I have seen to date), and also used a bit the already installed MS Media Center. Excellent picture and streaming quality from all source I tried with the above.

2. The Acer really DELIVERS! - It's smooth, fast, tiny, whisper quite, extremely low energy consumption (~30W running, 1-4W when in sleep mode).

3. The Power scheme on my Acer had the default set at 'Balanced', but hey.. this is not a laptop trying to conserve battery power. It's pluged into the wall. So make sure it's
all-systems-go and set the default to High Performance.

4. The nVidia ION menu lets you adjust the screen to an exact pixel count. It may come very handy if when it uses the native resolution of the screen, Windows and applications extend slightly beyon the visible area of the screen.
Per much other info on the subject, I also downloaded the latest Adobe Flash player -
version 10.1 which is said to utilize better the resources of the nVidia ION Graphic card.

5. Linux-Ubuntu vs. Windows 7. If you are an uber-geek who is comfortable with the former you may decide to get a similar machine with Linux and save some cost at the same time.
For the rest of us, after seeing what a painful experience a colleauge of mine went through
with a similar machine with only Linux on it (and we work/develope in a Unix env), I am glad to have gone the Windows 7 way. She ended up with a Windows look-alike flavor of Ubuntu,
dubbed Ylmf.

6. The only addition I bought was a very capable Media remote (Windows 7 Vista XP Media Center MCE PC Remote Control). It controls perfectly the media centers listed above.
The remote sets the Acer to sleep-mode and back to life, which is instantansuos!

If it did not become clear by now.. this review was about how great the Acer R3610 is as a HTPC.
I have not opened even one excel, or edited Word docs.. There are too many videos, movies
TV stations and music to enjoy in our free time.
Acer and friends have really made the future of entertainmet VERY exciting. All aboard.

I started out with a desire to find a pc capable of playing HD content with a small form factor that i could attach to the ceiling projector mount in my living room. I started with the 1600 revo, but the single core cpu of that unit wasn't enough to handle anything flash based, even with the beta versions of flash that utilize GPU processing. However this unit is the cats meow with the dual core atom. I have yet to find anything that it won't play. The ion platform with the dual core cpu is hard to beat for the money. This unit gets the job done and connects to my desktop that maintains my collection of videos. One thing to note that this unit has a wireless keyboard / mouse and wireless network, where as the 1600 does not. Oh, and if you can't figure out how to connect the mouse / keyboard to the PC, open the mouse battery compartment and you'll find the USB receiver plugged in next to where the batts go.

Having had a a lot of success with my first Ion powered Sony vaio netbook which works extremely fast and smoothly over my Draft N wireless network, I was excited to find the Revo 3610 with a lot more optimization for an HTPC. Part of my excitement was the N mode Wireless in the package. I will get to that in a moment though.

The machine is a great combo of small size, reasonable price and nice components (The HDMI and NVIDIA work perfectly with no real tweaking needed, just plug in to you HDTV). The software however is pretty poor to start. The bloatware is painfully heavy and in the process of removing it, the machine would constantly lock up, lag and give error messages, which I now think the Wireless network connection was partially to blame. Regardless, after getting very frustrated with a near brick do to all the errors and locking up all programs and dreading the idea of going back to the Bloated default, I bit the bullet and made a USB Windows 7 boot and fresh installed Win 7. This worked like a charm and I highly recommend it and setting up the Flash drive to boot is simple since MS now has a utility that will do it for you once you download the image file for Win 7. From there just reinstalled the NVIDIA drivers, Chrome, HULU, BOXEE, Flash 10 beta (with NVIDIA support), Windows security and thats about it. Now the machine was snappy and clean again, problems solved!!!!! Or so I thought.....

This left just the terrible WIFI still, its only about 25 feet from the router and will constantly drop signal, run well under N speed (barely B type speeds) and causes anything that streams to lock up when the Wireless card acts up. This is all in the same room where my vaio netbook has full signal, 97mb/s never drops signal and is rock solid, it also works brilliantly upstairs and abotu 50 feet farther than the acer with no issues whatsoever. So I tried the last effort before returning the ACER, I Wired it to my LAN and PRESTO! it worked like a charm, now the computer that was absolutely USELESS over the wirelss was almost as quick as my Core 2 DUO Desktop and played HD through HULU and Youtube perfectly without a hitch.

So I ordered some cable to hardwire it to my network to use it as a HTPC. So the conclusion is, this is a great system but it took some effort to make it really unhampered by the useless junk ACER put on it, and loose any hope of even trying WIFI with it, its really the only Pathetic component on the machine, I am really tempted to just pull out the WIFI card so it will never even think of trying to connect again.

Remember these two things and you will be happy with the ACER 3610
1. Assume WIFI doesnt exist on the machine and you will be much happier!
2. A fresh install of Windows 7 is actually easier and faster than trying to clean the bloatware and errors that will arrise with the machine from stock, I highly recommend you do this first and start with a nice fresh set of software to run the very nice hardware you just got!

I purchased this product from CDW because Amazon was not carrying it at the time.

That being said, I am thrilled with its performance. I currently use it as a media center pc in my living room where it is connected to a TV (HDMI) and a monitor (VGA).

The included documentation is a little light, but honestly if you don't know how to connect some wires and hit a power button you don't need this computer.

As for performance, I have had no issues with it thus far and in fact the dual-core atom as performed better than expected. I suspect that this is due to the dedicated video card. I may increase the amount of ram (includes 2GB but upgradable to 4GB) though atm I don't see a real need.

The included wireless mouse and keyboard are attractive and go nicely with the computer. They work very well out to at least six feet (haven't tried going out any farther).

My only complaint is that the VESA mounting brackets were not included at the time of purchase, though this may have changed.

I've been reading the reviews on how great this little PC was a HTPC. So, decided to bite the bullet and buy one.

Once I received it, of course I hooked it up via HDMI and began the process of removing all the bloatware (highly recommended) and installed XBMC (the latest stable release). I noticed that my SD content ran fine but my HD content had a tendency to stutter. I thought it may be the streaming of content via the USB, so I tried Network. Nope, still happening. Then decided to copy a file to the Acer's hard drive, still stutter. Hrmmm. After some research, I found out that the nightly builds of XBMC had a setting to enable DXVA on the video settings. So, I downloaded the latest nightly build, enabled DXVA and BAM! Perfect smooth HD content. Oh, one other tweak: you may want to adjust is the GPU usage of video in the BIOS. Change it from 256 to 512.

Once I got all that figured out, this lil guy is a HTPC champ! Hope that info helps you out in the end!

This thing is just about perfect. It's been able to play every video I've thrown at it without skipping a beat and it's virtually silent to boot. That includes HD content all the way up to 1080P. The HDMI and VGA / Optical out are perfect for hooking up to your home theater. It has plenty of USB ports and an ESATA port for hooking up external storage although personally I stream everything over the built-in wireless, which gets excellent reception even though my router is on another floor. The white, wireless keyboard and mouse work great and rarely if ever drop movements. The keyboard is about 3/4 the size of a normal keyboard which is perfect for HTPC use and can be tucked away easily. Mine came with the VESA mount for attaching to the back of a TV. The only thing not included that I added is a USB IR receiver so I can control it via remote.

My complaints are minor. The responsiveness when navigating in Media Center is a tad slow and the 5400rpm hard drive isn't the speediest thing out there.

Bottom line, you can't beat this thing for the price.

I spent about one month researching various HTPC solutions. I considered building my own from scratch and I also looked into pre-configured units. When I came across the Revo, I hestitated because I doubted that such a small (and let's admit it) funky looking little thing could possibly render my 1080p material (h264/avc). Turns out my doubts were happily unwarranted. While processor, even with the dual core, is modest, the Nvidia ION chipset lets the CPU offload the video decoding/rendering to the GPU via DXVA (Direct X Video Acceleration). In English: The wimpy CPU isn't a bottleneck on video. According to the task manager, the CPU(s)are only churning at 20% during serious 1080p decoding. Awesome.

The outputs are also saucy. The HDMI is pretty much standard and expected as of the time of this writing (March 2010) but the sp/dif optical out was a nice plus since it lets me output the digital audio to my less-than-current HDMI-less AV/Receiver and not skip a beat.

Windows 7, as most people agree, is a vast improvement over XP and a significant refinement over Vista. Thrilled it was on the box.

This thing runs nearly silently, and stays cool enough that I can keep it in my not-so-well-ventilated AV cabinet without much worry.

Someone mentioned the relatively small capacity HD. Here's my thought on that: This box, in my view, essentially presumes that you are using it connect to another box somewhere else in your house acting as a full blown media server. Said another way: If you're looking at these things for HTPC, you've probably got another more traditional "tower" somewhere else on your home network serving up your stuff. With respect to blu-ray: The box has an e-SATA port that will let you connect a stanalone blu-ray player to it if that's your scene. Since those things keep getting cheaper every month... I'm pumped because I can wait that decision out.

All in all: I'm delighted by this thing, and know that building an equivalent box would have resulted in a machine twice as expensive and 3 times the size. Color me impressed. I'm now an Acer fan. :)

~!mike

If you're looking at the Aspire Revo, then chances are, like me, you're considering putting this little fellow under your TV and using it to watch local and online media.

Out of the box, the HDMI connection worked very well. If your television has an overscan feature, make sure it is disabled for whatever input you're using. Otherwise, the picture will not fit the screen correctly. If your TV has no such feature, then you will need to go into the NVIDIA control panel and adjust it manually. Either way, you should be able to get it looking good without too much trouble.

Once you have your display sorted, you'll then want to uninstall all the useless trialware that comes with it. Thanks to the pairing of a slow CPU and hard drive, this can take a while, so get comfy. After I had completed this, and the computer was moving a bit faster, I elected to make some restore disks using the included software. As the system does not have an optical drive, you'll have to use an external DVD writer. If you don't own one, I'm sure you can borrow one from someone who does.

When you're done with all that, then it's a good idea to run Windows Update a few times until you've installed all available updates. These updates include not just performance fixes, but security ones as well. Many people who have problems with malware and whatnot are running a system that is not fully up to date, so always installing any available updates is a good idea. I then installed an antivirus. Now, some will argue that an antivirus isn't really necessary on a HTPC, and the drain on resources is an unacceptable trade-off. This argument does have some merit, and you may decide to go without. For what it's worth, I installed the free Microsoft Security Essentials, and have not noticed any impact on system performance.

Once you've spent a few hours doing all that (no wonder I'm a Mac user!), your system should be almost ready to use. If you plan on watching any Flash video (such as Hulu), you'll want to make sure you have the latest graphics drivers and the latest version of Flash (which as of writing is 10.1). Prior versions do not support hardware acceleration, and without that, your little Atom CPU will really struggle to play anything at all.

But after all that work, is it worth it? Mostly, yes. Even 1080p Flash video plays back very smoothly. I canceled my cable and just use this to watch Hulu, and it works very well. It does unexplainably crash every so often, but I'm hoping that's just a software problem with my configuration. I was also experiencing annoying popping noises over my HDMI connection, but disabling the wireless card (I have a wired network throughout the house) made it go away (go figure). From what I've read elsewhere, wireless performance leaves something to be desired, so I'm not missing much. Windows Media Center performance is acceptable, though not as snappy as I'd like. Menus sometimes take a second or two to appear once selected, often to the extent that I wonder if I really clicked it. Netflix performance is a lot snappier on my Xbox 360, though that's hardly surprising.

Any complaints however, are minor. It has to be remembered that this is a very cheap computer. The build quality is OK, though it's nothing to get excited about. You're getting a lot for your money though, with a GPU capable of playing back 1080p video (and even some light gaming), an HDMI port, and lots of other connectivity options, including an eSATA port.

If you have a realistic idea of what this machine can do, you won't be disappointed. It's certainly worth what I paid for it.

Amazon seems to label this as dark blue but I really think it is black. I am very happy with this little nettop so far. I have it hooked up through hdmi to my 52" lcd tv. There wasn't as much bloatware as I thought there would be so that was nice. I only had to uninstall about 3 or 4 things. I installed XBMC, Boxee, Hulu Desktop, and Flash 10.1 beta onto it and it is running really well. I originally tried to stream my videos but that didn't work out too well since I have a wireless g-router. So I just attached an external hard drive to the nettop and all my media is playing perfectly now. I even installed Steam on this to see how it would run some games. I am really impressed, I downloaded Left 4 Dead using 720p display settings and it actually runs pretty smooth. The load time is a bit long but it isn't that bad. Once it is running, it is very playable and looks great. There is a common problem that I have using hdmi though. The screen appears overscan but it is easily fixed by using the NVidia display settings to resize it. The wireless keyboard and mouse that it comes with feels cheaply made but they do the job. I think the stock set will do just fine, although I am thinking about purchasing a multimedia keyboard with a trackmouse. The Acer Revo boots up fairly quickly and it comes preinstalled with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (NOT Starter!) a big plus! All in all, I am very happy with the Acer Revo.