Acer Revo AR1600 PC – 1.6GHz, 1G, 160G, HDMI, XP - $159 fs refurb - Back in Stock

Running my Revo as a Hackintosh and it works really well...at this price it's a no-brainer.

I've got mine set up with XBMC and an external 2TB drive and it is great. My wife and I use it nightly for watching TV shows and movies.

In for one. Thanx OP

Any suggestions on how to utilize the printer rebate to offset the price somehow?

How did you install Hackintosh? Everything works? sleep/wakeup?

1lossir said: Running my Revo as a Hackintosh and it works really well...at this price it's a no-brainer.

I wish they'd have some of the dual core models on sale once in a while, seems all the refurbs at good prices are single core.

As for advice, if you're going to add an extra GB of ram (which you really dont need) and windows 7, just buy the dual core model and get the 2gb/win7 included for not that much more than buying one of these and upgrading it.

I've run all sorts of software on one of these and never come anywhere near using >1GB. Windows 7 would use it for precaching I suppose but I've run XP and win7 and seen that the ram in use with a movie playing is well under 1GB.

With any OS you run, I'd disable any unneeded services because that poor little single core atom really cant do a whole lot of things at once.

These single core units CAN be tweaked to play most video types without a lot of undue hiccups but it can be some real work. I really wish I'd bought the dual core version but after looking at the price on those, I'd probably rather get a small form factor i3 box for about the same price, use just a little more electricity, and take up just a little more space...and never worry about using up my cpu budget.

I recommend running XP slimmed down (google any of the 9000 ten year old "how to make windows xp run faster" articles) with MPC-HC from the shark007 site and the shark007 codecs, along with the coreavc codec if you dont mind blowing another ten bucks for coreavc. The shark007 version of mpc-hc gives you more flexibility with codecs by having the player use the system installed/default codecs instead of defaulting to the built in ones. I found coreavc gave me the best h.264 playback especially on 1080p with the fewest hiccups.

Also, dont get discouraged if it takes you some time to get this to work the way you want it to. I read no end of "Oh, I just slapped this image on it and it worked great!" posts only to find that it may have worked that easily for that user with their videos but I had to mess with it for a week with a bunch of different XP and XBMC until I got it to work the way I wanted it to. But I wanted it to play a lot of different formats, ripped dvd's and blu-rays, etc not just some mkv files. Seemed like every time I got one part of it to work the way I wanted it to, something else would crap out.

waletwalet said: Any suggestions on how to utilize the printer rebate to offset the price somehow?

FYI - The Refurbs come in a brown box without a MFG UPC, so good luck with the rebates where you need a PC too.

I have the foxconn (same as Viewsonic VOT132). It is working well, though the fan can be heard if you are in a small room, it is not speed controlled, so as soon as the cpu reaches a certain temp, it goes not, then it turns off when the thermal requirements are met. I originally installed DDR2-667 Memory and when using a 1920x1200 display, running videos at full screen where choppy even though CPU utilization was under 30%. Turns out since the machine uses main memory for video memory, when using this slower memory, I guess the system cannot move data fast enough to avoid the choppy video. Using DDR2-800 fixed the issue. I now have 1080p full screen playback without issues. If you use a 720p TV/Monitor, then there's no choppy video, only happens when you go 1080p on a 1080p monitor. This thing runs Ubuntu with XBMC like a champ as well as Windows 7 home premium. Install the windows 7 codecs and enable DXVA and it will play mkv files inside the Media Center app. Also note that the foxconn already includes Wifi and even has an external antenna. The Revo must does have the empty miniPCIe slot but you need to buy the module and rig up the antenna internally. The foxconn also comes with a dual core Atom and it supports hyperthreading so it shows up as a quad process cpu with 2 cpu's and 4 threads.

The one thing this unit has which I wish the Foxconn had is the E-Sata port, other than that, I prefer the foxconn's footprint over this one.

I don't think the ion 2 will buy you anything for video playback and unless you couple it with a much faster CPU I don't think you'll be playing any games.

For the guy that tried the 667mhz ram, that's a common misunderstanding. The CPU runs at fab 667 but there isn't a typical fsb in the ion platform. The ion chip runs the ram at 800 if you put 800 in it and steps down when communicating with the atom using a clock divisor. So you'll get better system perfornance with 800 MHz ram than 667. A lot if people saved a couple of bucks on ram on the ion boxes and lowered the system performance by about 15%.

Thanks a lot oldfartgamer! It is too late to read your post since my order has been shipped. I thought Foxconn is a good deal at $180 because I have some spare memory/hdd from my old laptop, but I did not realize only DDR2-800 can avoid a choppy video.

I heard the acer nettop is quiet, and it had pretty good reviews.

I plan to install ubuntu + xbmc in this foxconn and we'll see how it runs.

noodle04 said: How did you install Hackintosh? Everything works? sleep/wakeup?

1lossir said: Running my Revo as a Hackintosh and it works really well...at this price it's a no-brainer.

Start here. More info at this link.

Don't use sleep/wakeup as it boots pretty fast. On-board audio is iffy but I already have an external sound card. ION kext still slow on hardware acceleration but that's not an issue for me.

oopsz said: 1lossir said: noodle04 said: How did you install Hackintosh? Everything works? sleep/wakeup?

1lossir said: Running my Revo as a Hackintosh and it works really well...at this price it's a no-brainer.

Start here. More info at this link.

Don't use sleep/wakeup as it boots pretty fast. On-board audio is iffy but I already have an external sound card. ION kext still slow on hardware acceleration but that's not an issue for me.

I'm really curious, would you mind running XBench (http://www.xbench.com/) and posting your results? (You can anonymously submit to the XBench results site and link that page, or just take a screenshot and post it).

I wonder if it'd be worth replacing a G4 mac mini with a hackintosh..

Done. Look for "ARMacMini" Mac mini (Intel). Baseline was 22.89.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.25620
this usb sound card will add spdif to this HTPC

yone2002 said: Nvidia Ion 2 is coming out this summer. I will wait for the price drop.

Actually, the ION2 is already out (Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11, Shuttle XS35, Shuttle X50V2 to name 3) ... However, Newer technology does not equate to better technology ... the ION2 is not just an "upgrade" over the ION, more an alternative technology ...

the original ATOM utilized the AGTL+ FSB to communicate with the chipset ... nVidia was licensed to produce chipsets using AGTL+, so that's what they did ...

When nVidia decided to produce a chipset for the Atom, Intel got upset ... They wanted the market to themselves. When they decided to re-engineer the Atom processors and produced the new Pineview Atom, they removed support for AGTL+ FSB, and switched to DMI (Direct Media Interface) 2GB/s bus only. They then overpriced the licensing for the DMI bus, withdrawing nVidia's ability to support the new processors directly. The only company capable of producing chipsets for the Pineview is Intel (The new NM10 chipset).

The good news, is that the NM10 provides 4x PCIe 1.0 channels... and it is here that the ION2 connects to the system. However, with only 4 channels available, the motherboard manufacturers are restricting the GPU to only having 1x PCIe 1.0 (250MB/s) barely enough for the job ...

On the plus side, the ION2 does have either 8 or 16 cores (depending as much on the maximum resolution) as well as built in H.264 video decode acceleration and support for 8-channel LPCM over HDMI.

The D510+ION2 is reporting about 10% quicker than the 330+ION ... the onboard video decode makes true HD possible, the 16 cores (on nettops) makes gaming possible (still not recommended). Lack of Flash support currently restricts flash video to 480p ... hopefully nVidia will be release new drivers soon to resolve Flash issues...

waletwalet said: Any suggestions on how to utilize the printer rebate to offset the price somehow?

I am thinking the same thing. But HP printer seems very expensive from this store. Need to find one somewhere. You just need to purchase two items same day to qualify the rebate, not need to be in the same store.

1lossir said: oopsz said: 1lossir said: noodle04 said: How did you install Hackintosh? Everything works? sleep/wakeup?

1lossir said: Running my Revo as a Hackintosh and it works really well...at this price it's a no-brainer.

Start here. More info at this link.

Don't use sleep/wakeup as it boots pretty fast. On-board audio is iffy but I already have an external sound card. ION kext still slow on hardware acceleration but that's not an issue for me.

I'm really curious, would you mind running XBench (http://www.xbench.com/) and posting your results? (You can anonymously submit to the XBench results site and link that page, or just take a screenshot and post it).

I wonder if it'd be worth replacing a G4 mac mini with a hackintosh..

Done. Look for "ARMacMini" Mac mini (Intel). Baseline was 22.89.

Interesting. Thanks for the benchmark. Looks like its okay at quartz, but since there's no support for ION acceleration, it gets killed on Quartz extreme. How snappy does it run? Is expose realtime or is there a buffer delay?

Here's a comparison to my desktop, an 8 year old dual G4:
http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=445765&doc2=445271

and a comparison to a five year old mac mini G4:
http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=238002&doc2=445271

I'd classify my G4 as "adequate", but not speedy. It's my main work computer, can put out 720p video without any trouble, but bogs down on flash and can only handle youtube using html5.

Maybe I need to wait for the new generation of dual-core atoms before I give the hackintoshes a try.

(Xbench is only useful for comparing OS X performance. I'm sure the Revo runs windows like a pro.)