Compact Windows PCs such as for instance Intel’s NUC have been steadily becoming a far more common sight across the industry in recent times, and we’ve seen none cuter than Acer’s compact Revo One RL85. The model sent in for review runs Windows 8.1 64-bit with Bing, and crams a fourth-generation Intel Core i3-4005U CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 2TB hard disk into an incident that’s little larger than a coffee caddy. It’s a pretty small thing. From the front side, its soft curves and glossy white finish make it look more like a swanky Bluetooth speaker or an extrovert air freshener. Happily, it’s a little more helpful than both. Look around the back of the Revo and you are going to see a stack of PC-style ports arranged in a narrow strip. At the top is a pair of USB 2 ports for the text of keyboard, mice and other low-speed devices.
There’s a Gigabit Ethernet port below these, followed by another couple of USB sockets – USB 3 this time around. Video outputs come next: you get HDMI and Some variations of the Revo One come with a double-sided media-centre remote control mini-DisplayPort, then a 3.5mm headset jack and a Kensington Lock slot. At the top sit four white status LEDs and an SD slot. A wireless keyboard and mouse ended up being included in the box with our review sample, and these work passably, but feel rather inexpensive. In a slightly crazy bit of design, however, you need to use up one of your precious four USB slots with all the accompanying wireless dongle. We would much instead have the double-sided remote control, which is sold with some other models of the Revo One. It has a clickable touchpad/ fi ve-way D-pad alongside play, pause, skip and volume controls on one side, and a rubber-keyed Qwerty keyboard on the opposite side for thumbing in search phrases. If you’re intending to attach the Revo One to your television, however, we’d counsel downloading and installing third-party media-center software such as for example XBMC or Plex, since the included Acer software isn’t particularly feature-packed. Nevertheless, there’s plenty else to like about the Revo’s design. Impressively for such a tiny PC, access to your internals is great. During the press of a button, it is possible to quickly whip of the top of the truth and acquire inside, as if it were a little Mac Pro.
Beneath the white plastic sheath are two free 2.5in hard-disk bays, complete with quick-release caddies. And, with a small screwdriver and a little bit of patience, it’s additionally possible to access the system drive sandwiched among them, the solitary RAM slot and the dual-band 802.11n wireless card, which here is of the singleband 802.11n variety. There’s even RAID capability included. Our Revo arrived with a single 2TB drive mounted at all accessible of the system’s three drive bays, but add further storage devices and it’s really possible to configure your drives in RAID0, RAID1 or even RAID5, depending on your own demands. Performance is perfectly respectable, but you won’t be utilizing this as a video editing rig. Inside our benchmarks, the mobile, Haswell-generation Core i3-4005U CPU and 4GB of RAM powered our Revo One RL85 to an overall score of 18. That’s closer to your rating of the Core M-powered Asus Transformer Book T300 Chi hybrid than a full-blown desktop Core i3. It is what we’d expect for the cash. Intel’s even smaller bare bones NUC PC, for instance, can be developed to a similar specifi cation – with a 1.7GHz Core i34010U Intel NUC, 120GB mSATA hard disk, 8GB of RAM, Windows 8.1 and a wireless card – for around the same price. You won’t get the same neat chassis and multiple hard disk capability, however. There is a cheaper model available. The Revo One RL85 (component number: DT.SYUSA.004) comes with a far more basic 1.4GHz Intel Celeron 2957U, 4GB of RAM and a 60GB SSD costing $419. The Revo One RL85 is a pretty good deal: it is neat, properly designed and reasonably priced, and the extensive storage and RAID options mean it could work not only as most of your desk bound PC and media hub, but also as the primary data repository for your house. It’s worth considering.