New Acer Revo's Advice (L70 & L80)

I'm new to the forum, but I read this post just over a month ago in the search for advice on whether to get a Revo and whether the L80 (being cheaper than the L70) would end up being better as the Celeron processor pass mark was almost twice that of the AMD. Thought I would share my experience with you.

I took the plunge in Jan and purchased an L80 for the good price of £149.99,
Installed windows 8 from memory stick from dos to desktop in about 30mins. Acer website only offered Win8 drivers for the Revo and were classified under the RL80. All successfully installed with no issues.

Now as for the performance, a friend of mine recently got the L70 with pre installed win8 OS to run as a HTPC with XBMC. I wasn't over impressed in the lag at which the L70 would navigate XBMC, It did however run a 1080p MKV reasonably but requiring more load on the GPU. The same movie ran from the desktop in VLC was jerky.

My L80 on the other hand, smooth operation throughout XBMC including with some more demanding skins. Tested with and without GPU support on large 1080p movie
GPU support enabled CPU load at 5% 24/25fps
GPU support dissabled: Still got an easy 24/25fps but with cpu load up to 45%

In my eyes this is the perfect addition to any living room, silent powerful and cheap
 
A bit of help needed if possible!

I purchased an Acer Revo L70, replaced the hard drive with a SSD.
Put it all back together, plug it all in and when I turn it on all I get is a black screen.

I tried restarting pressing F2,F8,F10 or F12 in the hope I could get to the boot by USB section, but nothing happened
 
Weird, bit unusual. Is there any option to clear the cmos do you know? I can't remember if i saw any jumpers or a battery when i did it but i presume there must be something.
 
I'm not sure but here is a picture I just took

http://i.imgur.com/XhG6qRa.jpg

Edit:

I just put the original hard drive in and I have the same issue. Could this mean the motherboard doesn't work?
Also when I turn it on I get a single beep if that means anything
 
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Did you try it before swapping the hard drive over? Did that work?

I'm not 100% but the blue jumper on the right of the ram slots looks like it'd clear the cmos :)

Just to check you did put the heatsink back on first before powering up right? (Silly question but best to check!)
 
I didn't actually, I should have done that :-(

Yep definitely did that, I put the whole thing together before turning it on
 
I can't criticise, i did exactly as you did and swapped out the HDD straight away aswell.

I think your best option may be to reset the cmos and see how that works. Otherwise, whack the original drive back in and send it back :)
 
How very strange. I went to the pub, came back and tried it. It now works, what seems to be perfectly.

I'm just updating my database now, and will put on the reFocus skin via Putty as soon as it's done.
 
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Do these things output 5.1 audio through HDMI or is there a separate audio out?

And are you using xbmc on Windows or a Linux build?
 
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I'm using it on a Linux build, I have no need for the features that Windows offers for this type of PC.

There is an optical port that can be used. I've only had access to that so can't confirm the 5.1 over HDMI
 
Now that I've been running the RL70 for a few days, I can say that buying an SSD isn't really worth it. Apart from the fast boot up times I don't really notice the speed of the day to day running itself.

Does anybody else agree?
 
does the one with the celeron 887 cpu do hardware h.264 video decoding? or is it all cpu driven?

celeron 887 should be proper decent since its based on sandybridge architecture so it will wipe the floor with a brazos or atom cpu.
 
Has anybody got the celeron one working with xbmc?
My uncle bought one and everytime I try and install stuff the screen just has flashingcolours appearing?!

I'm trying to install Ubuntu xbmc
 
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