Acer Aspire Revo R3610 Desktop PC (Intel Atom 330, 1.6 GHz, 2048MB RAM, 250GB HD, LAN WLAN, Windows 7 Home Premium, Integrated Graphics Plus Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
Posted by Notcot on Jun 11, 2010 in PCs & Laptops |
Product Description
Acer ASPIRE R3610 ATOM33016G 250GB 2GB NOOPT W7HP 92NVEYZUNN Desktops Desktops and Tower PC
- Acer Aspire Revo R3610 Desktop PC
- Intel Atom (330) 1.6GHz Processor with 1MB L2 Ca
- 2048MB SDRAM
- 250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive
- nVidia ION Chipset with Integrated Graphics
The Acer 3610 is a very impressive bit of kit, so first things first. Out of the box you get the actual unit, which is a very small 18cm by 18cm by 3cm. You get a footstand for vertically mounting the unit, a monitor mount kit and a wireless keyboard and mouse with batteries. There is no monitor provided. Nor is there an internal DVD/CD.
So what are you going to use this for? Pretty much everything other than playing games. It does actually quite a good job of that as well, especially older games but it will be hit and miss. It works as a very good multimedia centre courtesy of the quite stunning Nvidia ION graphics chipset. This sets it apart from your standard Atom machines with Intel graphics.
This machine’s predecessor was voted across the board as the premier Atom powered nettop. There is no reason to believe the same will not happen for this as well. Especially when you consider it runs Windows 7 64-bit, which not only looks prettier than Vista, it works a whole lot better. At 64-bit it will also make use of this machines dual core processors and potential 4GB memory (the one I have comes with 2GB).
In use it makes practically no noise at all, even when you are asking quite a lot of it. There are six usb ports, an eSata port. Optical audio out for hooking to an amplifier, the normal 3.5 audio and mic sockets, a single VGA and HDMI socket. WiFi and Ethernet.
Although I use this for my everyday desktop applications which are general browsing via Google Chrome, Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and OpenOffice. I also use it as a media centre in my study to watch movies either streamed from my windows home server or off the local disk. It will play 1080p high definition content with no issues at all.
The only video playback issues I had are with Flash Player in youtube and iplayer etc. This is because Flash pumps graphics via the CPU which is not upto that job on this machine. Adobe are now beta testing a Flash you can download that pumps graphics through the graphics processor. This works absolutely fine here with the ION.
It also comes with a monitor mount so you can attach the Revo to your monitor, although it relies on your monitor stand not using the VESA mount. If your monitor stand does use the VESA mount you will not be able to use this monitor kit.
The one downside to this machine is the amount of bloatware that comes pre-installed. It’s full of childrens and general games I will never play, a raft of microsoft office products you have to pay for and a myriad other stuff. It does come with a very useful recovery software that you should make use of as there is no install or re-install CD that comes with this.
As an aside. I knew this was not going to come with an internal CD or DVD drive. I just so seldom use them anymore. If you do use a CD/DVD drive and are getting the Revo then there are a load of good external drives for under 40 pound. I would highly recommend the LiteOn models.
I think I might have gone on a bit, end of the day. A great bit of kit if you do not want to play commercial games. It may seem a little trite to mark this down from its deserved five stars to four because of the amount of bloatware on the machine, but it took almost three hours to uninstall that lot. It really is annoying. So listen up Acer.
Rating: 4 / 5
I bought this for my parents who were getting stressed out with a dilapidated laptop. I can safely say I’m actually rather jealous.
First of all, here’s a list of additional things you need to get a fully-functioning desktop computer out of this:
- Monitor, VGA input (or a TV with HDMI/VGA input)
- Speakers, 3.5mm stereo input (or optical audio amplifier)
- USB CD/DVD drive (DVD-RW recommended)
Regarding the monitor mount mentioned in J. Potter’s review – I believe that it IS a VESA standard monitor mount, and have attached my unit to the back of a Samsung Widescreen LCD monitor. Admittedly, it took me a while to figure out how and led to me unnecessarily taking the mount apart trying to work out how it did attach (you need to slide a piece of the mount upwards to reveal the screw-holes). I did this the early hours of Boxing Day though, so wasn’t at my best. Once attached however, it looks great, and doesn’t protrude above the screen at all. It looks like an all-in-one now.
Echoing J. Potter’s review, this unit really is extremely quiet. You don’t even know its on – a massive improvement over every other computer my parents have had. This makes it great for watching media through the various on-demand internet TV services. You will get some stutter watching direct from BBCiPlayer (particularly HD), but that is not due to the R3610 but rather bandwidth, server and software issues at the BBC end.
Bad points about this machine:
- no recovery disc included, you have to make your own using a DVD-RW drive. I didn’t have one to hand so am somewhat nervous about recovery should something horrible happen. I believe you can get one from Acer customer services but they charge something like £40 to send you a disc.
- as mentioned by J. Potter, the amount of ‘stuff’ (software) on the machine is pretty annoying and takes a while to get rid of. The games included are particularly awful and a pain to uninstall.
Those are the only things that spring to mind, I really am very impressed with this little machine, particularly because it runs Windows 7 so well and was so cheap. Many people get these to stick on the back of a LCD TV to facilitate on demand TV over the internet and a media centre, which is kinda what is was designed for.
For what my parents use it for (internet browsing, the odd word-document, internet TV), it really is perfect. I’d hesitate to ask much more of it however – but if you want to play games or use demanding graphics software you shouldn’t be looking at this anyway.
Oh and a tip for people who can’t get the mouse/keyboard to work – there’s a tiny USB adapter inside the battery compartment of the mouse that needs to be plugged into the machine in order to get the mouse and keyboard to work. This is briefly mentioned in the instructions but many people seem to not see this.
Rating: 5 / 5
It’s a great little box for most media playback, when I got it I loved it. But, as a warning, if you are using it to connect to the TV to watch catchup TV services (this was my idea) it no longer works with BBC iPlayer HD files. The new format adopted by the BBC (from March 2010) does not allow Flash Player to use the Nvidia GPU’s hardware acceleration. The very energy-efficient (but rather slow) Atom CPU is just too slow to cope with HD video on its own, making playback stuttery and unwatchable. It’s a real shame as, with a slightly faster CPU, it would have been perfect.
Rating: 3 / 5
Don’t believe the review which says there is no audio over HDMI output. I had that issue and updating the video drivers fixed it. This machine plays full HD video with no issues, it boots up in less than a minute and is almost silent (it has a speed controlled fan)
Rating: 5 / 5
When I recieved this ‘nettop’ pc the first thing I did was insert a 500GB hard drive that I bought from Amazon, and installed Windows 7 on it. It is connected to my TV displaying in full 1080p and playing Blu-Rays and DVDs through an external drive. I have also purchased a wireless keyboard with a built in trackball for navigating around Windows Media Centre, and browsing the web on the big screen (it is better than a Remote control for the reason that you can enter web addresses etc..).
Overall, this PC makes for a perfect media centre PC and has no issues playing DVDs and HD video, only has some tiny skips with Blu-Rays, but nothing that makes it unplayable.
Rating: 5 / 5