Revo Review: Part 2

Well, I've decided to keep the Revo. Reason being: I found a way to get Hulu Desktop to run smoothly. The answer: Overclock it. I read some forum posts over at Revouser, and I found that you can actually use the Asrock Ion utility called OCTuner. It's an app that runs in the background. I have the Revo running stable at 1.98GHz, a 20% CPU increase. Not bad. Anything higher will crash, though. Someone modified one of the .inf files to work with the Revo, and guess what: I got the Revo playing flash videos of all quality levels smoothly at 1080p. Almost no skips/jitters. I also bought a cheap Chinavision remote so that I could use Windows Media Center, et al, without a keyboard and mouse. It works great. Overall, I'm pretty happy. Next up: the elusive homebrew touchscreen jukebox.

Review: Acer Aspire Revo AR1600-U910H

Recently, more and more video content has been shifting towards Internet streaming for delivery to consumers like you and I. The biggies have been Netflix, Hulu, Boxee, Youtube, and many others. I have been without a satisfactory means to consume said web video content from the comfort of my couch. A recent purchase of mine is an attempt to remedy this: the Acer Aspire Revo AR1600-U910H. I got this from a generic reseller online for $130 shipped. No a bad little score, eh? Well, that sort of remains to be seen.

Basically, I want this thing, first and foremost, to be used to playback SD and HD Flash content. This is mainly Hulu and Youtube for now. The hardware of this nettop is Intel Atom 230/Nvidia Ion-based. I upgraded the RAM from 1 to 2GB. Hardware decoding for H.264-based content. HDMI audio and video. Low power, but might do the trick with the right software. My first setup in software looks like this: Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit) running Windows Media Center as a frontend, Boxee, Hulu Desktop, XBMC, Macrotube dashboard plugins. Flash 10.1 RC2. Latest Nvidia Ion drivers. After a few days of testing, here's what I found:

1. XBMC cannot yet decode 1080p content under Windows w/ this system.
2. Media Player Classic does 1080p just fine.
3. Youtube vids up to 1080p are relatively smooth w/ 70% CPU. Some slight jerkiness.
4. Some Hulu clips play similar to #3. Some are a mess w/ 100% CPU.
5. Revision 3 shows (720p?) play fine.

Summary: So far, this little box might be a great computer for light tasks, but Flash is spotty, and 1080p H.264 movies only play w/ certain apps. At this point, I'm not setting this thing up permanently in my living room until after the offical Flash 10.1 drivers are released and I have a chance to test them. Similarly, I need to test 1080p movies w/ various media center plugins to see if a rock-solid solution exists. Stay tuned for Part 2...

Move over, Zotac. ASRock is here.

TweakTown reviewed the coming soon ASRock Ion 330-BD nettop system. This seems to be a nice alternative to my having to build a Zotac Mini-ITX system for a homebrew HD video recorder/streamer. If I can buy something off the shelf that meets my needs, I totally would and do. My previous and current desktop systems are ASRock-based, and they're an Asus brand, which definitely counts for something. Expectations are high here. Overclocking is no big thing with this unit, and power consumption is way low. No word on Flash video performance, though. Not a huge deal, but I'd like to see it. I bet overclocking this thing to 2.1GHz alleviates much of the stutter issue. Anyway, we're waiting for a more thorough review(s).

Atom 330: The future of Green PC's.

My Asus Eee PC 901 is the first Intel-based system that I've ever owned (all others were AMD-based). As I've mentioned before on this blog, I'm more that pleased with the amount of punch the 901 packs with such a tiny carbon footprint. By that I mean that it sips electricity instead of gulping it like other larger notebooks. The 901 is powered by the Atom N270, the most common chip in netbooks today. What this chip can accomplish with 4W of power is staggering. Even though the N270 netbooks use the crappy GMA 950 graphics chipset and slow hard drives or solid state drives (upgradable), I'm still digging them.

Sometime this year, the netbooks and nettops of the world will be transitioning from the N270 to the Atom 330 (8W power consumption), which is, for all intents and purposes, a dual core N270. This means that low-power, or green, systems will be on par with some desktops with regard to overall throughput. While this is rather rad in and of itself, many vendors like Asus and Dell plan on combining the 330 with a discreet graphics chipset like the new Nvidia Ion or the ATI HD 3000 or 4000 series. Oh my. That means that we can have green PC's with twice the CPU power and 10 TIMES the graphics muscle, AKA full 1080P video decoding, AND 10 TIMES less power consumption than a full size desktop, at a miniscule price? Wow. It's gonna be a good summer.