The Acer Aspire Revo might be a mere nettop. But this little bundle of PC joy crams in NVIDIA’s Ion chipset and a HDMI port, meaning one thing only: gorgeous full HD pics beamed straight from your Aspire Revo to your slick HD TV.
Throw in an Intel Atom, a choice of 1GB or 2GB of RAM and a plentiful 160GB HDD and you’re looking at a PC destined to sit pretty in your lounge.
We put the £150, 1GB RAM–toting Aspire Revo through its paces. And even the low–powered, Linux–packing model was great at chucking out 1080p quality movies and TV shows. Setting it up couldn’t be easier and with a 160GB HDD (in spite of Acer’s claims that the Aspire Revo’s Linux variant only packs 8GB), you’ve got enough space to stash more music than John Peel ever laid his grubby mitts on.
That’s not to overlook a few nasty niggles though. There’s no optical drive here. That might keep the price down, but if you want to play DVDs or Blu–Rays through it, you’ll need to pick up an external drive and slap it alongside.
The lack of a DVI port is a real issue too. Modern monitors will only play nice if you nab an adaptor, again driving the overall cost up. And although spitting out 1080p video causes the Aspire Revo no problems, Flash is more troublesome than the London underground on a Sunday afternoon. That means real problems with BBC iPlayer, and in turn a real problem for this PC as a media hub for the living room.
The Aspire Revo’s struggles, though, all boil down to the less than powerful Intel Atom inside. It’s just not designed to do too much at once. But it does mean you’re not paying through the nose for something extremely desirable in gadget land: hi–def, on your telly, from a pretty box that won’t make your lounge look like a branch of Currys.
The fact is, the Acer Aspire Revo handles HD video better than some truly top end PCs. And at that price, you’ve got a bargain David Dickinson would give up fake tan for. If you need a PC under your TV, then this is it.
