Acer Revo One RL85
Although the Acer Revo One is a PC, its pint-sized form factor means that it’s also a rival to media streamers. Under the covers, it’s a very different piece of kit but must still, to some extent, take on the Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku players and Amazon Fire TV.
Compared to those gadgets, the Revo One is expensive. They are all under £100 whereas the Acer starts at £239, while the top-of-the-range model will set you back £599. This means it also has to compete with mini PCs like the Mac mini.
So why would you want to pay so much more than those affordable gadgets? Well since the Revo One is a PC, it’s not limited to certain apps. Roku players, for example, don’t have Amazon Prime Instant Video. Using the web browser of your choice, you can watch anything via the Revo One – Blinkbox, Sky Go, Google Play, you name it.
Since it’s running the Microsoft Bing version of Windows 8, you can do all the other things you’d normally do, too. You won’t be able to run full-blown PC games at a decent framerate, but there is plenty of scope for casual gaming if you connect a wireless controller.
Acer isn’t touting the Revo One for a particular room in the house and rightly so. You can easily plug it into your TV as you would a regular set-top box, put it in your study as a space-saving PC, or use it in the bedroom or even the kitchen.
If you are going to use it in your living room and connect it to a TV, you’ll need the remote control in order to interact. This has a touchpad to move the cursor as well as handy buttons, such as one to launch the web browser. There’s also a Qwerty keyboard on the rear. Most retailers ship the Revo One with this controller, though, some will supply a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so check before you buy. The controller doesn’t connect directly to the machine, so you’ll need to use one of the USB ports for the receiver.
The remote takes a little time to master, but you’ll eventually get the hang of the way it. For general navigation it’s quick, but gets fiddly when you need to interact with, for example, the EPG on Sky Go. Our main issues are that the keyboard is awkward to use. You’ll need to press the small buttons very firmly and the trackpad can be frustrating at times, making you wish you has a regular remote or a mouse.
Despite being so small, the Revo One has the potential to handle 6TB since it has three bays, which can take 2TB each. It can also double up as a NAS drive and supports RAID 0-, 1- and 5.
Inside is 11ac Wi-Fi (single stream) and Bluetooth, and there are plenty of ports on the back including HDMI, Mini DisplayPort (version 1.2 which supports 60Hz 4K output), two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports and ethernet. An SD card slot sits hidden on the top beside the notifications LEDs (three for each hard drive and one for network).
Three models are available. The entry-level option is priced £239 and comes with an Intel Celeron 2957U model with 1TB of storage. The £399 version has a 1.7GHz Core i3-4005U chip and 2TB of storage for £399. The higher spec model has a 2.2GHz Core i5-5200U, 8GB, 4TB of storage and a 60GB SSD. This sounds like a great setup, but will set you back £499.
Performance
Unfortunately, our review model isn’t on sale in the UK but is close(ish) to the £399 option. It has a 2.1GHz Core i3-5010U, three 1.5TB SATA hard drives (2.5in) in a RAID 5 configuration and 8GB of RAM. Our benchmark results are for this model only and note that both are mobile processors, which are really with power consumption in mind rather than focusing on performance.
In our Geekbench 3 processor and memory test, the Revo One scored 1937 and 4106 for single- and multi-core speed respectively. This is a little way off the 2014 Mac mini, which has a 1.4GHz Core i5 and 4GB of RAM – it scored 2803 and 5401 points. In PCMark 8, we recorded scores of 1829 for the conventional test and 2200 for accelerated. Both are middle-of-the-road for a device with an Intel Core processor.
Although the Revo has a newer fifth-generation mobile Broadwell chip, it doesn’t have a Turbo mode to hit higher clock speeds and that’s likely to be the reason for lower scores compared to the Mac mini.
Our hard drive tests show the Revo One can read and write sequentially at 183- and 56MB/s, dropping to 99- and 52MB/s for network file transfer. It’s the write speed that is the main worry here, which we’d like to see doubled. So using the Revo as a NAS drive will be fine for streaming content but you’ll be in for some finger drumming while waiting for files to be uploaded. It’s also worrying to see low speeds for small files which Windows uses a lot. 4K files read and write at 0.38- and 0.35MB/s respectively.
On the graphics side of things, using the built-in Intel HD Graphics 5500, we found the Acer managed an average of 29fps in Batman Arkham City at Medium detail and 720p resolution – a similar result to the Mac mini. That sounds promising but the minimum framerate was just 16, so there will be stutter. Even lowering the detail to low only raised these figures by one or two frames, so this isn’t a gaming machine.
Verdict
The Revo One is one of the most interesting PCs we’ve seen and packs a lot of hardware into a tiny space. Unfortunately, in our tests, the Acer’s performance was lower than expected.