Acer Aspire Revo Owners Thread

[ginoworm]

Hi all,

Right I didn't see anyone else answering questions so as a new owner I thought I would get the ball rolling.

I have the £249 version with 160gb hdd, this was purchased for one purpose, windows center, no gaming and no other apps.

The standard vista install is ok in media center but is not tv pack so the first thing I did was install the windows 7 RC from a bootable USB drive, can't post the guide is used right now as I'm typing this on my iPhone, it installed all drivers except coprocessor but that doesn't seem to affect anything.

Now to the burning questions, performance as a htpc:

I installed the divx mkv preview program and mkv's both 1080p and 720p play using no more than 20% CPU, better than I expected, and this was the only unanswered question I had seen in other reviews and previews, so yes hardware acceleration works on mkv files.

I have mine fitted the my monitor using the supplied bracket, this is so much better in the flesh, you have to see the quality, despite what the reviews say I have yet to really hear the fan so as a htpc this is awsome.

One critism is that ebuyer and indeed the acer Uk site list draft n wireless but this only has b and g unless I have a driver issue?

Also it's only 100mb Ethernet which is a shame but I can live with that.

Just reformatting my laptop so any question I will answer later.

[lmaolmao]

is the audio output one of those "secret spdif" ones? my laptops headphone port was actually an optical port too.

any chance this has that too?

[Kaotician]

I've been spending a couple of hours looking at this kit this morning, though I'm thinking of the £150 1gb linux version. You state that Ethernet runs at 100mb only - what does that mean in practice for usage etc?

[ginoworm]

Multi channel audio is only through hdmi, regaring 100 mb I can't see it being a problem as it's unlikley you would be transfering lots of files to this as it is a perfect home server client.

I have this in the bedroom and use dvblink to get tv of my sat dreambox, it's like having a native tuner.

[Kaotician]

Thanks for the reply there, Gino. In terms of web surfing and general browsing, how does this unit play out? I appreciate that I'm looking at a different model to your own, but suspect that, allowing for Vista's higher CPU demands relative to Linux, that the two might be somewhat comparable. Reading around, I see that there are issues relating to Flash-enabled playback on YouTube (not essential for me), but that video media playback is excellent. Also, how about other programs (possibly MSOffice, if you have it?) etc.

[ginoworm]

I'm only using media center but the performance when downloading and installing software was pretty slow.

I wouldn't recomend as a desktop replacment but media center is amazing on it, problem I have is no sound on dts mkv's?

Got dd mkv's working after installing latest realtek hd drivers, the default windows 7 drivers didn't work.

I installed ac3filter but still no joy, performance in general as a media center has surpassed my expectations, I really didn't expect such Stella performance.

[Kaotician]

Hi, dts sound will depend on whether your tv has a built-in dts decoder most don't, although dd seems more like standard, assuming you're passing the signal via hdmi straight through to your tv set - or are you going via an amp?

[GhostRiderz]

Did the revo come with a driver disc for xp/vista? I could find them on the Acer site.

[ginoworm]

DTS working now, i didnt enable the directshow filterwhen i installed ac3filter, i think that was it.

No didnt come with a disk, has a recovery partition which i have left untouched, on the acer site it only has Audio, chipset and wifi drivers, its under the model number R3600 not revo.

going to install fresh new build later (7126), ive been messing so much trying to get Audio so wont hurt.

Still very much impressed.

[GhostRiderz]

Cheers i'll d/l the drivers, Just ordered my Revo off play.com, gonna use it as a CCTV DVR instead of my my EEE 4G.

[NaTT]

Originally Posted by ginoworm

Hi all,

Now to the burning questions, performance as a htpc:

I installed the divx mkv preview program and mkv's both 1080p and 720p play using no more than 20% CPU, better than I expected, and this was the only unanswered question I had seen in other reviews and previews, so yes hardware acceleration works on mkv files.

good news (I'm hoping my linux version arrives today from Play, but the status doesn't look promising...) but I can't help but think your statement might be based on an incomplete set of scenarios. I hope not, I'd love to be proven wrong...
MKVs can "contain" many variations on the theme "1080p" and depending on how they were encoded and what was encoded will determine if hardware acceleration is possible.
I've a lot of 1080p MKVs that refuse to be accelerated and the ones I've made with full resolution Flac audio files always bump up the CPU usage.
Have you any MKVs that you'd not been able to H/A before, but now can?
With the Atom processor, I fear that if you can't H/A a high bit rate file, you won't get watchable results. In which case it'll become an electricity saving Download device for me and not the HCPC replacement I'm hoping for.

[Kaotician]

Does anyone know which particular version of Linux it ships with? NaTT, I'd be really interested in a review if you find the time to post one, with details regarding web browsing and office apps, if possible. I'm thinking of maybe picking up an extra Gb of Ram to help the thing along.

[palfret]

I'm interested in getting one of these, but was wondering which WiFi chipset they're using? I'm planning on building a device that can act as a WiFi access point, and that's only supported by some of the Linux WiFi drivers (notably, *not* the ndiswrapper ones for example). Obviously I could stick a suitable WiFi/USB device in instead, but I'd rather if it works with the internal device, but I can't seem to find any details anywhere on what WiFi device they've used.

Obviously, this is mainly for the Linux models, but curious to see if they put the same device in the Windows ones as well. If anyone can provide me with this information, that would be very helpful. Thanks!

[swabes]

Great post Ginoworm I'm looking at one of these as a Win 7 RC1 Media Center machine as well.

What TV Tuner are you using?

What is the performance like when displaying the TV Guide over live TV - does the live TV stay smooth?

Thanks

[jameson_uk]

Originally Posted by ginoworm

Also it's only 100mb Ethernet which is a shame but I can live with that.

Nearly forked out £150 on the spot until I read this... Is a real shame as the Zotac ION boards have gigabit LAN but with the dual-core board costing more than the Linux model this is kind of not worth it.

Off to research how much bandwidth is needed to stream BD ISO files....