This is a challenging review to write. The PC itself is fantastic, the Win10 install that it came with is not. Let's start with the very very good, the PC itself. It is tiny, I knew it was going to be small, but I'm still surprised it's so small. The fan in it is very quiet and not at all disturbing as it turns on and off. The LED's on top are useful to see what's going on and look nice, nothing too glaring or obnoxious. The 3 drive bays are very easy to access, the 2 outside ones can be accessed without tools even - nicely done Acer. The built in RAID controller was easy to setup, I upgraded the storage already. It came with a 1TB boot drive, I left that alone. I installed a WD Red 1TB drive as a RAID mirror to the boot drive, so if either drive fails, the PC still runs and all the data is automatically backed up. The other advantage is that should one of the drives fail, just replace the bad drive and it'll rebuild the drive onto the new drive, gotta love RAID. The Ports are all well thought out and easy to access on the back. The USB ports can be close together so inserting or removing cables can be tight, but no issues of any cables not fitting. The memory came with 4GB which is ok for the most part on Win10, but at times it got bogged down. I upgraded to 8GB, the max this little PC can handle (no slots for any more than that). After the memory upgrade, performance is much better when running multiple apps or many tabs in Chrome. If just running a couple of apps or chrome with a few tabs, performance is fine and no real noticeable difference. The performance is notable when running many apps like Word, Chrome, Amazon Prime Music, PowerPoint, a CAD system... you get the idea, more memory good. Getting to the memory was a little bit of work as it was under the 3 drive bays, those had to be removed, but it wasn't that hard. Many reviews complained about the wireless keyboard and mouse - I'm fine with them. Both work perfectly, and have good tactile feedback. Nothing outstanding, but they feel good and work well. Nothing to complain about. Graphics are fine for streaming video and general work like MS-Office, but gamers best look elsewhere.
Now let's get to the bad... My PC came with Win10 on it. I chose that option so to avoid any driver issues or other issues upgrading from Win8. No such luck. It seemed the Win10 install on it was not tested. When I got it, WiFi would work great for a few minutes, then turn off entirely with Windows saying that the Wireless Network service was not running on this machine. Well it was, what happened to it? Turn everything back on, WiFi works great and is very fast... a few minutes later, it turns off and the same error comes up. Ugh! Solution, ethernet cable. The next major issue was with the video out, the monitor would turn off, and on, and off, and on... this made using it a bit difficult, approaching impossible at first. When looking online, I saw other people having the exact same issues with the WiFI and Display. Windows Update didn't fix them, going to Device Manager and updating drivers didn't help either. The fix was Acer, going to Acer's site and downloading ALL of their Win10 drivers for the RevoOne and manually installing them. I was disappointed I had to do that on a brand new machine, that could not drive a display or connect via wifi as delivered. Poor poor poor! These issues aren't hardware, they're all software issues. Now that Win10 has had a few big upgrades, and I've installed the Acer drivers manually, the PC is operating reliably and very well. I had hoped to avoid all that with a new Win10 machine, but that was not to be.
Conclusion: The PC is great and I'm glad I have it. The OS image installed was poor, hopefully newer customers will have a better pre-install on theirs, this was pretty unacceptable to me. Now that those issues are corrected however, it is a great little machine.
| Processor | 2.1 GHz core_i3 |
|---|---|
| RAM | 4 GB DDR3 |
| Hard Drive | 1000 GB Hybrid Drive |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Intel HD Graphics 5500 |
| Chipset Brand | Intel |
| Card Description | Integrated |
| Wireless Type | 802.11n, 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
