Acer Revo 3610

[Johnyboy]

Anyone had any experience with a Acer Revo 3610 as a
every day Pc, web surfing and use as a media player
with XBMC on it?

[smargh]

I use a 3600 with XP Pro and an Intel X25-V SSD (the less noise & reliability) as a crude bedside internet radio device and to run daily performance tests for my ISP, plus random half-asleep web browsing or online traffic camera viewers so that I know whether I can spare a few more minutes in bed in mornings. Works fine. Note that it does have a fan, but it's very quiet - fine in a bedroom.

Is there anything you would like me to test on it for you?

It is a pain to remove or swap the HDD though - you have to unsnap the case (breaking one or two plastic catches) and unscrew the heatsink & motherboard. It does go back together fine though.

[Johnyboy]

Just mainly interested in it as a media player really for hi-def stuff,
got a popcorn hour A110 at the moment and is great for playing most media
but has a rubbish interface, have installed YAMJ + skins but i like the look of
XBMC and what you can do with it.

Have you got XBMC installed on yours?

[jnm21]

I'm on here (for the first time in a fair while) researching Revo's - I would point you to youtube for your question - there are several XBMC on Revo vids there (I would warn you that they are a little long).

smargh, can you confirm if the single core 3600 can handle ripping DVDs? I must say that the 3600 is very tempting at £130 (ebuyer) - would consider a very similar set up to yours (have W7 & a Crucial M225 I could put in it).

Sorry to thread-knap, but could you confirm if there is any room for a 2nd HDD (i.e. use SSD as boot & HDD for DL/vids/etc. - the regularly deleted stuff)? Final question, how do you find XP on the SSD - have you done any tweaks re reducing disk writes? That is why I have the W7/m225 lying around - wanted SDD in netbook for speed & battery life, bought W7 as feared XP would kill SSD, didn't like W7, so not using either!

[Funkstar]

smargh, can you confirm if the single core 3600 can handle ripping DVDs? I must say that the 3600 is very tempting at £130 (ebuyer) - would consider a very similar set up to yours (have W7 & a Crucial M225 I could put in it).

actually ripping DVDs will be fine on a single core system, hell, you could do it on an ancient P3 or probably a P2 system without any problems. If a system can decode and play a DVD, then it can rip a DVD. So that means even a 450MHz P2 can do it

I'm tempted to get a couple of top end 3610s as MediaPortal clients to replace the two AMD 780g based systems (i can use them as actual PCs then). I'd rip out the 500GB drive and replace it with a 40GB Intel SSD, the 500GB drives could come in handy in other systems. And they come with W7, which is without a doubt the best OS for media playback, especially HD. Graphic acceleration and video system is far better than XP or Vista, EVR is far higher quality than anything previous. An example of how good W7 is compared to Vista, the MediaPortal team will probably ditch support for XP and Vista for MP2 as there are just too many cludges and work arounds needed to get things working on them, making the code horrible and potentially buggier.

[d3fiant]

I have the r3610, currently run XBMC on Ubuntu as its much quicker. Since it boots straight into XBMC I dont use it for browsing. I use the Alaska skin on XBMC and am replacing most of my collection with 1080 and 720 HD rips as we speak, it handles them flawlessly, the system is quick, practically silent. The wireless keyboard and mouse it came with was a nice touch as well although I use a MC remote 99% of the time Best £200 Ive spent in years

[jnm21]

I've decided (I think) that the ASRock A330ION MB will be the base for my system. As mentioned, I have the SSD & W7, I also have an old 250W shuttle PSU (according to the PDF manual, 20 pin ATX is fine) & am looking at 2Gb DDR3 on *bay - should mean I get the system up & running for £130 - £140.

Now to start researching that....

[thetuxedo]

AFAIK the fan in the Asrock is much louder than the fan in the Revo (which is next to silent).

Edit: sorry I might have misunderstood, do you mean the asrock ion ITX mobo or the asrock ion330 mini-PC? (this is the one with the loud fan)

[jnm21]

The motherboard. Not that worried about the fan - will likely remove & use case cooling to compensate (12cm or bigger fan pointing at the HS).

[jboy67]

jnm21, could you please give some details of your Asrock system that you are building, all the components you selected etc. And how it is working if you now have it working? Like fan noise etc.