Short mini review of Acer Revo R3610

[Schizophonic]

Aim: To supply my auntie with a media PC to stream online content and watch HD content. (budget limited)

So I was on a mission to look for a suitable alternative as she already had a WD Media player. This had problems itself as the content I had for her required converting and had was only 1st generation so playback was not fully compatible compared to the 2nd generation or more expensive models.

Looking around I heard about the Acer Revo flagship desktops. I did a bit more research and thought this would be a suitable desktop PC. The other mini HTPCs were more expensive (£50+ more) and this would be ready straight of the box.

Acer launched their latest model the R3700 with the new ION 2 GPU and Atom D525 1.8GHz (Dual Core) back in November 2010 and I was torn between this or old R3610. Common sense would prevail and say get the newest model but after some articals I found on the net it was proven that the new ION 2 is actually slower than the older ION chipset and the D525 marginally fasterthan the Atom 330 processor found on the R3610. Slightly disappointing right? Price wise between the 2 models are only varied as the R3610 is slightly more expensive than the R3700

Here are some pictures of the desktop.

From the 2nd photo you can see a comparison how big this desktop is. This would fit neatly at any AV cabinet or mounted to the back of a 20+" monitor (brackets supplied as well)

As I mentioned in my opening statement, the aim was to get this playing HD content. I am going to say honestly it wasn't as straight forward as I thought it would be and also what you read from other forums or articles its not as easy. Getting this to play HD content out of the box is not as easy. I tried to stream 1080 content via youtube and that struggled on full screen. I think this is because that flash does not utilise GPU and only CPU at the moment. So this is going to cause an issue.

I decided to throw some 1080 / 720 content to see how it plays. It stutters on 1080

I updated the drivers from Acer and Nvidia's website. Still no good. I read that people used XMBC to play their content but I didn't want to go through that route as this was for my auntie and using a media portal would not be the best idea as she would cause confusion for computer newbie. I changed the allocated memory to 512mb on the bios and thought that would help. Still stuttered. I downloaded combined community package and ran it in MP-HC and it still lagged. Finally I tried the 64x version of Media Player Classic and that worked perfectly without using any filters and just the core codecs from MP. Job done.

Here are some of the performance screenshots when running 1080 / 720 content.

As you can see little usage of the CPU results in lag free.

Overall, I'm happy with this device. Its a very suitable multimedia system for my auntie's needs and not only does it look great its very quite too. For about £200 you can get a very smart looking desktop PC to put in your living room.

/discuss
(comments or questions)

Reference/further reading
ION 2 vs ION 1 benchmarks http://gadgetmix.com/netbook/ion-2-comparison/
Acer Revo R3610 http://www.pauljroberts.com/acer-aspire-revo-3610-atom-ion-330-review
Acer Revo 3700
http://woodygems.wordpress.com/2010...ktop-first-impressions-and-real-world-review/

 

[Schizophonic]

ive been looking at one of these for ages now as a media centre pc, did look at the new 3700 but after reading the links you put maybe go for an older 3610.
what size was the 1080 you were playing? most of my files are dvd/avi so not really needed so much for full hd1080.
im thinking to use media portal 2 when its released!

With the 1080 content, they were between 6-8GB in size. The bitrate are all quite high when I converted them. If your only using it for DVD quality rips then running this through a media portal is effortless on eith ther R3700 or R3610.

The only thing I would be worried would be future compatability, what happes when you want to start watching FullHD content? Throwing in more RAM may not neccessary be the solution.

I have had an R3600 for just under 2 years (basically when they first came out), and these things are awesome. Notice to get proper HD playback (like 15GB 1080p MKVs) you'll need 2GB of ram and set the video ram to 512MB (which the BIOS will only let you do with 2GB of ram.

These things really fly, but I might upgrade to a newer dual core atom D525 or more powerful with an ION2, because I use mine as a file server and general home server as well as XBMC box.

I would disagree and say have you actally bothered reading my review and my sources provided? The D525 is faster but only roughly 5-10%. The ION2 is slower than the predessor. 3DMark benchmarks has proven this to be 500 points slower.