Completed Little ION HTPC (1 Viewer)

[jfirth8187]

I've got an Acer Aspire Revo R3600 (Vista Version) as a client in my bedroom. Only an Atom 230, 2Gb RAM, ION Graphics. Sits on the back of your monitor in the VESA mount, or you can custom fit the supplied bracket as I did to the back of your LCD TV/Monitor or your wall bracket. It plays all the media I want. Granted no Optical drive but works a treat on SD/HD TV, all my DVD rips and even BD Rips in MKV (8Gb + Files).

One thing with this PC. Please take off Vista and install XP otherwise you've got no chance.

Also if you don't need or won't miss an optical drive they do a R3610 which has a dual core Atom!! That one might replace my lounge PC due to it's bulky Silverstone GD02 as I agree nice looking small HTPC cases for full height graphics cards still are not discreet enough fo me.

I'll try and get some pics up if anybody is interested in my Revo?

ACER Aspire Revo R3600

Jon.

 

[jonm]

Interesting - why do you say "no chance" with Vista?

 

[jfirth8187]

Took a rediculous amount of time to boot up. Vista wastes resources, so no good on a laptop spec PC. Also the performance was not very good, didn't get good results with Media Portal in either Video playback or Audio??

Easier to stick with XP, plus it boots up now in 16 secs. Tweaked as per the specs on the MP website, no logins, no messy boot screens, login screens. Just still my choice of OS for the time being.

Jon.

 

[captcol]

I think if you spent the same amount of time with vista or now win7 you would see similar results, experiementation with codecs and cpu offloading of vid processing and personally I find vista and only more ram hungry than xp, and with 2gig ram that shouldn't be an issue anyway

 

[pilehave]

With XP and Windows 7 in play I see no reason to go with Vista. XP performs better than Vista on almost everything but filetransfer, and 7 kicks ass on both XP and Vista. But RAM-usage on 7 is 3x bigger than on XP, even when disabling all the turbo-caching-nobody-needs-in-a-htpc stuff.

 

[captcol]

My media centre is running vista atm due to the fact that is what I have the license for and I get better picture quality than I ever did with evr and the likes than in xp, I agree that windows7 out performs vista but at the same time I do not run xp on any of the 8 computers that I own or look after for family etc. Vista has proven more reliable for me on my hardware.

Having said all of that I don't think the point of this thread is vista or xp or win7 better, but the question was asked why would this pc not handle vista, personally I think it would and it would handle win7 as well all dependant on how many bells and whistles you want. The point that I was trying to make that is if you tweak vista to the same extent that xp is tweaked for htpc purposes you would end up with good performance.

/end rant

 

[jfirth8187]

Having all gone off track. I still think this little PC is exceptional. The R3610 with the dual core atom is a very good option for very small form factor HTPC. Let's hope we keep getting more of these NetTops built.

From the fist post in this thread can we have some pics. I'd like to see the build.

I'm moving towards very small PC's. Love em!

 

[khael]

Can it play blue-ray?

ups forgot. Please upload some pictures..

yes with ion you can play br and also 1080p dvd rip

which silverstone you have

I can say that there is also the sugo05 which is a very good case
[Official Thread] Silverstone SG05: Mini ITX & Max Performance insieme... - Hardware Upgrade Forum

 

[Shurik]

Hey guys,

Sorry for disappearing and not posting pictures or answering questions - I'm away from my place in Canada where the TV and the computer are, so all I can is post few pictures which show the box itself (attached to the post). Unfortunately cannot post any pictures of the actual setup I've got, but the pictures here are exact pictures of the case with everything in it. Front panel is removable with 2 USB ports available under which can be used for attaching anything small and permanent (I use one for bluetooth module for my keyboard and mouse).

Hopefully I will get my computer shipped to where I am now quite soon with the only issue of incompatible VESA mounts of my new TV here - the computer case has mount holes for 100 mm VESA while my new TV (and all TVs bigger that 32-37", I would guess) has 200mm mounts. There is always a chance of getting some sort of brackets, but I will look into that later.

 

[finrudd341]

Interesting about the Vesa Mounts - I have bought almost the same setup, with the -A variation on the motherboard, and it was delivered this week! In England... so I just have to wait for the next visitor to come and see me in Brazil and bring it over.

I loved the USB mounts behind the panel - thought that was a great idea, and I might finally have a use for my blutooth USB adapter. I have an old, but never used HP iPaq with blutooth, so am looking for some sort of MediaPortal remote to run over this.

For now (when it arrives) I am using a rubbish Dell widescreen monitor that only has VGA input, but it does have the vesa mounts, as I want a proof-of-concept machine for mounting out of sight behind a screen. The next step will be to integrate some mini-speakers into the Dell monitor casing if I can, and if the blutooth control doesn't work, then it's going to need to use the MCE Remote...glue gun at the ready I await my delivery.

Good to read your post, as I am going to be doing almost exactly the same as you, so hope it all works as well for me! I'll be interested to hear about your bracket for TV's - increasingly, I am not seeing the mount holes on many monitors these days including the Samsung and LG ones, hence I am using the Dell thing just because I can. I suspect after a few hours of VGA I will forget the mounted plan and look at double-sided velcro!