Thread: Acer aspire revo r3600

The Aspire Revo was the only Nvidia lon-based nettop in our roundup. Its tilting design is quite eye-catching, and it can stand upright on a plastic base or be screwed on to the back of any LCD monitor. On the inside. you get a single-core Intel Atom 230 CPU running at 1.6 GHz, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, and of course the Nvidia Ion chipset. Connectivity options include a healthy six USB 2.0 ports, eSATA, VGA, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 big Wi-Fi, a 4-in-1 card reader, and 7.1 - channel audio. The retail package includes a wireless keyboard and mouse set, USB speakers, a webcam, mouse pad, and the VESA mounting plate. The webcam comes with a stalk and swiveling head. Performance was a mixed bag, with the CPU proving to be quite a bottleneck in several of our tests. The GPU can handle HD video playback without stuttering, and can accelerate certain tasks like audio and video encoding, but the single-core Atom is still low-end, which really limits what you can do. The benchmark results table below doesn't really reflect the graphics capabilities, since we don't use heavy visual or gaming tests for nettops anyway. VERDICT: We got the feeling that Windows Vista wasn't really suited to this kind of hardware, and that scores might have been better with a lighter OS. FOR: Design, great graphics, accessories AGAINST: Crippled by a weak CPU.