Acer introduced a small computer designed to work as a media center at CES this year. It’s called the Acer Revo One; it looks more like an appliance than a PC; and Acer announced at the time that it would be available in Europe in early 2015, but made no promises about a US launch.

Now the Acer Revo One RL85 is officially available in the US.

revo one_01

Prices run between $250 and $600, depending on the configuration.

Newegg offers a model with a Celeron 2957U Haswell processor, 2GB of RAM, 60GB of solid state storage, and Windows 8.1 with Bing for $250.

Twice as much money gets you a model with an Intel Core i3 Broadwell chip, 4GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive, along with Windows 8.1.

Or you can opt for a $600 version with a Core i5 Broadwell CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.

Each model features HDMI and Mini DisplayPort for up to two 4K displays, and three bays that can accommodate 2.5 inch hard drives or SSDs. Two of those bays are hot swappable, allowing you to easily open the case, slide out a drive and slide in a new one.

The Acer Aspire Revo One RL85 is like a little cylindrical tower measuring 6.2 inches high, and 4.2 inches across. It supports 802.11ac WiFi, has two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, and an SD card slot.

via PC World

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24 replies on “Acer Revo One RL85 entertainment PC now available in the US”

  1. After reading a bunch of Acer’s literature, I’m a little concerned that they are making no mention of the 3x 2.5″ drive bays in the US model. I even found the manual on their site, no mention of extra drive bays. Maybe I suck at reading, but I can’t find anything.

    If they don’t want to advertise such a feature in certain markets, I’m hoping they didn’t go as far as removing the extra Sata connectors.

    The reason I was looking into it, was that I was trying to figure out if the $250 model used an M-sata, or if that 60gb SSD occupied one of the 2.5″ bays.

    1. Were you ever able to get a definite answer on this? I still can’t find anything regarding the extra drive bays on the celeron model.

      1. Nope. But I didn’t look into it any further.

        There might be some reviews out there where someone went as far as tearing one down.

  2. Where the hell is the black model they showed off at CES? No one in the USA has WHITE electronics in their home theater/livingroom.

  3. I sort of wish they hadn’t put the SD card slot on top though. As far as I can tell there is no little spring-loaded “dust door.”

    1. Those seem to commonly ship with a wireless keyboard and mouse too. Anyone know whether the PC’s end for these links is a dongle vs. something hardwired into the base unit?

  4. I hate to nit-pick, but since Acer is mentioning 4K in the details, I think its worth pointing out that some forms of 4K video playback might be a little bit out of reach, even for the i5 model.

    h265 4K video decoding is fairly CPU intensive. Here is a screenshot of an H265 benchmark I ran on my Pentium G3258 (a bit more powerful than this i5-5010U) https://i.imgur.com/9pMHfbk.jpg

    I would say this i5-5010U would probably be okay watching 24fps 4K h265 video as long as the bitrate is lower than 5mbps. (Netflix 4K is 15mbps, some h265 4K content is above 20mbps).

    However, one variable that I can’t account for is that Intel has implimented a feature in Intel HD-6000-series iGPUs that assists with HEVC decoding. No idea how much it assists though.

      1. Yes I was aware of the firmware update, but it is very unclear how much of an assistance it provides with HEVC. Apparently it is entirely by software, so it isn’t an actual silicon feature of the CPU that assists.

        When it comes to my Mini ITX HTPC, I am fairly confident that I will be able to buy a $70 video card in the near future with full HEVC decoding support. When it comes to Mini PCs (with no upgradability in that regard) I am very skeptical about h265 performance.

        1. Well, only the VP9 acceleration is suppose to be partial and thus still a CPU load… While the HEVC is listed under GPU hardware accelerated support… at least as long as you have a…

          Core M family; 4th-gen Core CPUs with HD, Iris, or Iris Pro graphics; and “Select Pentium®/ Celeron® Processors.”

          And covers both 8-bit and 10-bit support…

          But I agree that performance may still be a question, even with hardware acceleration support, but Intel’s Gen 9 GPU should expand on it for Skylake, Broxton, etc… and both Nvidia and AMD are definitely going to cover it for their latest discrete graphic cards…

          1. Yeh I’m hoping Intel includes proper HEVC decoding in future CPUs.

            I’m also hoping the entire industry wises up to what acceptable bitrates are for 4K h265. For example, when Samsung launched the NX1 camera, they released some sample 4K videos from it, at 40mbps bitrates. Photog websites were all wondering why their i7 iMacs couldn’t play the files properly.

            It’s been established that Animated video can be acceptable at 1mbps, and there have been some claims about 5mbps live action video. But that claim makes Netflix’s choice of 15mbps 4K seem very liberal.

            I’m thinking that if I want to use my Pentium G3258 for 4K playback anytime soon, I’m going to handbrake my videos to h264.

          2. H.265 is suppose to be much easier to play but Encoding support is the main problem, Intel for example tends to only provide their mobile devices with the full range of hardware accelerated encoding… So Handbreak’s Quick Sync support is pretty useless for H.265 on their regular PC parts… but does work with H.264…

            So no immediate joy for those who like to upload their own videos after even a quick edit or conversion…

            Not all players support H.265 yet either…

          3. Yeah, Braswell uses the Intel Gen 8 (Broadwell) GPU… Just like Cherry Trail… and Intel claims it’ll support 1080p H.265 videos at 120 frames per second for decoding (bit rate not mentioned)…

    1. HEVC performance aside, I really like the concept of this product. But I wouldn’t be using it for HTPC purposes.

      I would like something like this (even a bit bigger), but I would like it to use it for a server. A CPU like the C2750 would be amazing (maybe even support for ECC ram).

      1. intel’s charging way too much for their 8-core Avoton and Rangely procs right now if retail prices are anything to go by.

        1. Intel’s tray price on the C2750 is $171. Thats quite a bit lower than the i5-5XXXU series CPUs ($250+)

          But I don’t know if they are directly comparable in price, I have a feeling Intel’s tray prices for their U-series CPUs are probably for the entire board (sata controller, etc), where as the Avoton boards might be might be more barebones to allow manufacturers to pick their own raid controllers, etc.

          1. Don’t mind me, I was just being alarmist. So far I haven’t seen many board makers jump into this market, Supermicro, Asrock, Asus, and now MSI and all of them charge a hefty price for their boards. I think I saw a C2758 board for $330 and that was the cheapest relatively no frills board I’ve seen. Some of them go up to $450+. I can see where you’re going with the tray prices, but I couldn’t even guess at actual costs. Considering these are classed as server boards, they could be more expensive due to engineering and pricier components.

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