Acer :: Aspire Revo R3600 (nVidia ION Platform) Pre-Retail Sample

Intro

Acer Aspire Revo (R3600) - Pre-Retail Sample

The Acer Aspire Revo or R3600 is one of the first media centered nettops that utilizes the Nvidia ION platorm. The Ion platform consists of an Intel Atom Processor which is in this case an N230, and the Nvidia GeForce 9400 GPU. The nettop is to the desktop, as the netbook is to the notebook. The R3600 is basically a stripped down desktop , but still with plenty of functionality as well as usability.

The specs of the R3600 are similar to many netbooks out there. The CPU tasks are performed by the basic Intel N230 Atom @ 1.6Ghz, 533Mhz (133Mhz Quad pumped) FSB with 512Kb of L2 cache. The R3600 also features 2GB of DDR 667 memory and a 160GB 2.5inch 5400RPM SATA hard disk drive. Many of the current netbooks out there have similar specs and general use of the R3600 feels about the same, although sometimes can appear sluggish due to the installation of Vista Home Premium SP1. The N230 does manage to handle multithreading due to hyper threading which has been enabled in the bios.

The GPU of the Revo is the elusive Nvidia ION based on the Geforce 9400 architecture. The ION does not feature any memory, so it shares system memory. In the case of the Revo, it has 2GB of total memory with 256MB allocated to video. This leaves only 1.75GB for system use. The full specs of the Nvidia ION can be found in the chart below.

One odd thing about the Revo is it appears to be only using one memory channel while the ION chip set supports dual channel. while supporting up to 4GB of DDR2, the memory channel is limited to 64bit mode which does reduce overall memory bandwidth. One good thing is at least the Hard disk drive is in a native SATA mode (AHCI) which will help performance somewhat.....................