The Acer Revo RL-100 is a nettop designed to connect to your tv in the living room.  The smal form factor PC is poweed by a 1.3 GHz AMD Athlon II K325 processor and NVIDIA ION graphics processor which offer 1080p HD video playback and responsive performance without drawing as much power as some other HD-capable chips.    The rest of the hardware includes 4GB of RAM, a 750GB hard drive,  and a DVD burner.  Included with the Acer Revo RL100 is a wireless keyboard-and-touchpad combination device which lets you surf the web or search for media from your couch.

Although the RL100 has been available overseas for about six months, it’s now available in the US for the first time at a retail price of about $500.  A model with a Blu-Ray drive is expected to be available for $570 soon.

via Engadget

Acer has unveiled two new nettops under the Acer Veriton name.  They should look pretty familiar if you’re acquainted with Acer nettops because in terms of shape it’s basically the same as the Acer Aspire Revo 3700 ($349).  The two models are names the Veriton N281G and N282G respectively.

The Veriton N281G is more of a budget model, featuring a single core 1.83GHz Intel Atom D425 processor, integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics, 2GB of DDR3 memory, and a 320GB hard drive.

The Acer Veriton N282G is the media powerhouse of the bunch, featuring a 1.83GHz dual core Intel Atom D525 processor, NVIDIA ION 2 graphics, 2GB of DDR3 memory, and a 320GB hard drive.

Acer says both models should be available this month for $399 and up.

via Engadget

acer aspire revo 3700

UPDATE:  The Acer Aspire Revo 3700 is available now at Amazon for$349.

We introduced you to the Acer AspireRevo nettop jut the other day, and now Acer has officially announced the launch details for the AspireRevo 3700.   As expected, the computer will pack a dual core Intel Atom D525 processor, NVIDIA ION 2 graphics, and run Windows 7 Home Premium.   There’s also 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 250GB hard drive, 6 USB ports, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, HDMI output, and a wireless keyboard and mouse.

The Acer suggested retail price will be $349.99, which makes is very competitively priced in the nettop field.  Acer says the nettop should be available today, but we haven’t found it in stock anywhere yet.  Let us know if you find one in stock!

via Engadget

Physically this new Revo 3700 isn’t a radical departure from the earlier Revo designs, but what’s new is the Intel Atom dual core processor with cores runnig at 1.8GHz Intel and second generation NVIDIA ION graphics.  eter from Netbook News got a chance to takea look at one and posted some unboxing photos.  The model getting unboxed has 2GB of DDR3 memory and a 320GB hard drive, Windows 7 Home Premium, 6 USB ports, VGA, HDMI, and S/PDIF ports, as well as 802.11b/g/n WiFi.

You can find more photos at Netbook News.

Acer Aspire Revo 3700 Nettop

Acer’s been busy working on a follow up to the popular Aspire Revo 3600 (thea dual-core Atom 330 and NVIDIA’s Ion graphics system).  Today, almost a year to the day that the Revo 3600 was launched, they give us the Aspire Revo 3700.

As far as advancements go, this one’s fairly predictable the 1 liter enclosure now boasts Intel’s latest 1.8GHz Atom D525 dual-core processor, NVIDIA’s next-generation Ion platform, support for 1080p video playback, a 500GB hard drive, four USB 2.0 ports, 4GB of DDR3 memory, VGA / HDMI outputs, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, gigabit Ethernet and a mini PCIe slot. It’s expected to ship later this year with a $580 price tag, but it’s still a TV tuner shy of being exactly what our living room asked for.

We’re hoping to get one in soon to you our first hands-on impressions.

The Acer Aspire Revo nettops have been some of the most popular nettops on the market for the last year.  With even the cheapest version (at $199) has killer features, a tiny footprint,  and NVIDIA ION graphics for pumping out HD video, they make great tiny pcs or multimedia devices.  So  it should come as no surprise that Acer taht Acer introduced the new Revo family today. The three new products include:

• Acer Revo multimedia center – An all-in-one media center PC with a wireless remote called the RevoPad which serves double-duty as a keyboard and a touchpad with multitouch support
• Acer RevoView media player – Basically a hard drive enclosure that connects to your TV with HD video support (plus a remote control and support for USB storage devices)
• Acer RevoCenter home storage appliance – Networked attached storage device for storing your media and streaming it over a home network

No word on pricing or availability yet, but the current Acer Aspire Revo nettop with Windows XP and NVIDIA ION LE is still great value for $209 shipped.

Blogee was able to get access to some of the new Revos, so there’s a ton more pictures after the break.

Acer Revo Nettop

Acer Revo Multimedia Center

Acer Revo View Nettop

These days, more and more people are giving up their cable tv connection and are watching television content online – via Hulu.com, Netflix or by downloading tv from Bittorrent sites.  If you’re like me, this has started to limit your tv watching to your laptop screen.  But, with a small investment and half a day, you can build a dedicated, silent, home theater PC to connect to your flat screen tv.  This post on Lifehacker covers how to use the open-source XBMC software to run on a $199 Acer Aspire Revo to build a comprehensive home theater PC.

What You’ll Need:

- Acer AspireRevo: This $200 nettop ships with 1GB of RAM, an Intel Atom 230 processor, 160GB
- XBMC Live: This is a Live CD version of XBMC that boots directly into XBMC and has a tiny footprint.  You can find the download specifically set up for these NVIDIA ION machines on this page, you can grab the direct download here, or download via BitTorrent here.
- A thumb drive: It doesn’t have to be huge, but this 8gb Kingston Datatraveler is cheap ($15.95) and will be useful for other projects as well.
- An IR receiver/Windows Media Center remote: This isn’t strictly necessary, but if you want to control your shiny new XBMC via remote control, you’ll need some sort of supported remote with a USB receiver. I got this Mediagate remote for about $30 and it works great. (Incidentally, it also works like a charm with XBMC as soon as you plug it in.)

Read the full post here on Lifehacker how to create XBMC HTPC Nettop.

Acer Aspire Revo Ion Nettop

It looks like Acer’s exciting new Aspire Revo Ion based nettop is shipping in Canada.  We had a first look at the Revo back in April, and subsequently had a peek under the hood as well.

Here are the specs of the Revo that is shipping from NCIX.com

- Intel Atom N330 1600 MHz Processor
- 160 GB Serial ATA II HDD
- 2GB DDR2 RAM
- NVIDIA ION Graphics Chipset with (VGA D-sub) and HDMI
- Wireless 802.11b/g, Ethernet LAN 10/100
- Four-in-one card reader supporting Secure Digital, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard (MMC)
- 6x USB2.0 Ports, eSATA, Microphone Jack, Headphone Jack

See the video after the break.

The insides of the Acer AspireRevo

The Acer AspireRevo is the hottest Nettop around right now.  Read on for a full review.
Setup
We love us a good out-of-box experience, and were mostly pleasantly surprised at our experience with the Revo — minus one glaring shortcoming. The device has a small power brick, a helpful (if not incredibly firm) stand, and little else to worry about.
We set it up next to our TV and naturally went for the HDMI port. Unfortunately, on first boot the Revo didn’t want to go HDMI, and instead we had to plug in a VGA cable, and then switch to HDMI once it got comfortable. Luckily, the experience post-HDMI is flawless: the computer happily and helpfully pumps surround sound audio out through the HDMI cable, we literally didn’t touch a thing to set it up in that regard. We plugged in the Lite-On Blu-ray drive included in our reviewer kit (a standalone product which will be available for $99 this summer), and Revo picked it right away, and before we knew it we were watching a Blu-ray movie with the pre-installed CyberLink PowerDVD 9 software.

Our Revo came with a lot of pre-installed software that was nice for showing off Ion’s capabilities, but “perks” like Google Desktop and the ultra-pervasive McAfee (it showed up in our clean install of Firefox in true crapware form) aren’t very welcome on a machine that needs all the CPU headroom it can get.

Performance
This is really a tale of two chips: the CPU and the GPU. Sadly, while we were very impressed with NVIDIA Ion’s performance (it’s basically the GeForce 9400m for cheap and low-power computers), the sluggish Atom 230 processor almost ruins it for everybody. The fact that Ion can run Vista is also a bit of a double-edged sword: accelerated interface elements like Aero Glass and Flip3D are great, and the windowing system is much snappier than traditional netbooks, but they come at the cost of an overall performance hit over running XP — hopefully Windows 7 will arrive soon to save us from that conundrum.

Startup is fairly quick, but the time to a “usable” desktop can be quite a bit longer — it took us almost as long to open Firefox as it did to land on the desktop from a cold boot.

Oddly enough, we found web browsing — the supposed heart of a “net”top experience — to be the most lacking. Sometimes we felt like we were having connection problems, and in fact Gmail at times would stop working entirely since it thought it was having so much trouble getting its packets through — we seemed to fare better on Ethernet than with WiFi. Internet Explorer is a complete nightmare, but while we had a better time with Firefox and even better in Chrome, we wouldn’t feel comfortable doing “heavy” browsing on the system on a daily basis.

Video playback is the real winner here, with accelerated 1080p video in all sorts of flavors. Unfortunately, you have to know what you’re doing. For instance, a 1080p QuickTime movie plays nice and accelerated in PowerDVD, but horribly in actual QuickTime, since it’s not GPU-accelerated. Blu-ray movies also work great, but you have to wait through a sluggish start-up time and interface unresponsiveness of PowerDVD.

The slick CUDA-powered Badaboom transcoding software makes very quick work of hefty transcoding jobs, turning 720p camcorder footage into teensy iPhone-friendly videos in minutes — one of the more impressive displays of Ion force.

Unfortunately, Flash video playback was a real trial for the Revo. Hulu played fine at low-res inside a window, but when we went fullscreen it got all choppy. YouTube was surprisingly even worse, not managing a full frame rate at even low quality. With Flash video being one of the number one things people want to do with a media PC these days, it would behoove NVIDIA and Adobe to get things better accelerated here in the near future — they both say they’re working on it, but it’s hard to tell when we’ll get straight, pervasive GPU acceleration of Flash video playback, and we’ve gotten slightly conflicting reports from both sides on how the limited existing GPU acceleration in Flash 10 is supposed to work.

Spore (after a rather long install process) plays great, with only a few minor slowdowns, and we’d imagine games like World of Warcraft would be very well suited to the system. Unfortunately, while a game like Team Fortress 2 “runs,” we’d hardly call it a livable solution without some severe downgrading in graphics and framerate issues.

Despite all of these strains, the Revo was usually the quietest thing in our apartment, making it a prime candidate for the home entertainment jobs it’s purposed for. Sadly, we encountered a bug at one point that made it completely mute, somehow shutting off the sound out through HDMI. A restart had us going again.

Wrap-up
The Revo is a really odd mix, a device that can excel at “enthusiast” applications like video transcoding and gaming, but struggles with a basic web app or YouTube. It seems Joe consumer — the supposed target of such a device — will gravitate to the Revo for its low price, but might be a bit disappointed by the seeming inconsistency in performance, or confused by the need to buy an external disc drive. High-end users will know exactly how to put the Revo to good use, but for a couple more hundies they could get a lot more CPU power in perhaps a Dell Studio Hybrid or Mac mini. We’re sure the market will solve all this — there’s no denying that it’s a lot of bang for the buck — but we’d say nettop manufacturers should try pairing Ion with higher performance chips as soon as possible, and hopefully they can hit a bit broader of a target.

Acer Aspire Revo Nettop

Yet again, the rumors were (almost) true and even a day earlier than anticipated, Acer is launching what amounts to NVIDIA’s first Ion-based nettop .

The AspireRevo debuts today alongside a plethora of other Acer wares, boasting a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 processor, up to 4GB of RAM, up to 250GB of HDD space, a 4-in-1 card reader, HDMI / VGA outputs, gigabit Ethernet, six USB 2.0 sockets, audio in / out, Windows Vista Home Premium / Basic and a svelte black and white enclosure that measures just 7.1- x 7.1- x 1.2-inches. The built-in Ion GPU means that this bugger is completely capable of handling 1080p (and thus, Blu-ray) content, DirectX 10 and even mildly demanding games such as Call of Duty 4 .

Check the full release just past the break.

SANTA CLARA, CA-APRIL 7, 2009-NVIDIA and Acer reshaped the PC landscape today by setting a new standard for small PCs with the introduction of the world’s first NVIDIA® ION™ -based PC, the Acer AspireRevo.

No larger than a typical hardcover book, the AspireRevo is a fully capable desktop with advanced graphics and impressive multimedia features. Equipped with NVIDIA ION graphics, the system can handle a wide variety of computing needs including high definition video, gaming, sharing digital photos, surfing the web, and other tasks consumers expect from full-size systems.

The AspireRevo represents a sharp break from 20 years of big, power hungry, and expensive PCs by delivering a full PC experience in a small, energy efficient, and affordable system. NVIDIA ION graphics make this possible with performance that is 5-10 times faster than traditional PCs with integrated graphics.

“The AspireRevo is small and quiet enough to go anywhere, yet big enough to handle all the needs of your digital lifestyle,” said Gianpiero Morbello, corporate vice president of marketing for Acer. “It’s perfectly suited for the living room, because NVIDIA ION provides a brilliant graphics experience with digital photos, watching video, and playing family-friendly games.”

“The Acer AspireRevo with our new NVIDIA ION GPU is so small and powerful it’s unbelievable,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. “Watch Blu-ray movies1 and HD movie trailers, or clean up jerky, dim cell phone videos for internet streaming. This is the perfect PC for today’s consumers.”

The NVIDIA ION graphics processor in the AspireRevo supports:

• Windows Vista Home Premium
• Outstanding 1080p HD video with true-fidelity 7.1 audio
• Popular games including Spore, Call of Duty 4, and Sim City 5
• DirectX 10 graphics with advanced digital display connectivity
• Accelerated video enhancement and transcoding using NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology

About NVIDIA ION graphics processors
NVIDIA ION graphics processors turn up the visuals on small PCs with up to 10X faster graphics performance than similar systems. ION graphics processors provide support for premium Windows Vista features, outstanding media capabilities including 1080p high definition video and Blu-ray movies, and support for popular PC games.

1 Requires an external Blu-ray movie player.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce graphics products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro® graphics products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ computing solutions products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, impact, and capabilities of the NVIDIA ION graphics processor and NVIDIA ION GPUs; and the affects of the NVIDIA ION GPU on desktop PCs including the Acer AspireRevo, are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; adoption of the CPU for parallel processing; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor’s products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-K for the fiscal period ended January 25, 2009. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.