Acer Aspire Revo R3600 - NVIDIA ION Nettop Review

Written by Stuyo

Friday, 26 June 2009

 

Page 6 - CUDA , power consumption and some thoughts

Of course not the pure computing power is what's important in Acer Aspire Revo R3600 - its multimedia capabilities are. The integrated NVIDIA graphical accelerator besides having enough muscles to run some of the more recent games, while still enjoying the Windows Vista visual beauty to the full, utilizes one very interesting technology – CUDA. It allows the GPU to execute media function previously tasked to the CPU. And it is exactly this that makes running Full HD possible on such system. But that's not all, there are plenty of applications that use CUDA, thus allowing for higher performance should you have a NVidia video controller of a more recent generation.

Synthetic 3D performance tests

Let's start off with few synthetic tests for 3D performance. We have compared Revo only with the desktop machine, because only it has real adequate performance from the rest of the ones in the review.

oZone3D Furmark 1.6.5

3DMark 06

Points actually don't have much of a value, except confirming that Acer Aspire Revo R3600 is a lot behind a mid-class gaming machine. We never expected anything else.

CUDA

Badaboom 1.1.1

Badaboom is one of the first application using CUDA. Generally it is a software for converting between different video formats, which also has presets for mobile devices. To determine the advantage CUDA gives to Acer Aspire Revo R3600 we compared it to the performance of the desktop machine coupled with equivalent converting software (it doesn't use CUDA). We used a PSP profile in both applications – i.e. we converted with the same parameters for the output file. We did not include compression without CUDA with Acer Aspire Revo R3600, because it was indeed slow and tedious. Tests include 3 standard clips provided by NVIDIA especially for testing with Badaboom, namely:

• Terminator Trailer – Mov формат, 640х276, 1:02 мин.
• Call of Duty 4 HD – WMV3 формат,1280x720, 1:10мин.
• Pirates of the Caribbean Trailer – XVID формат, 1280x528, 2:06 мин.

yes, while it converts faster (in real time even) Acer Aspire Revo R3600 is still not powerful enough and despite the CUDA acceleration is still no match to the standard desktop system.

Other thoughts

Visual design - nicely touched, cool and interesting. Acer designers have definitely worked hard on it. One thing though - it is bigger than the referent NVIDIA machine, apparently there is room ti miniaturize it further.

Comfortability – installation is fast and easy. In mere minutes you get from closed box to fully functional computer. The mouse is normal, but the Apple - styled (and miniature at that) keyboard is far from being comfy to use. The on/off button is hard to press and sometimes a substantial force is required, not something we would cheer about in such small and delicate machine.

Noise – Acer Aspire Revo R3600 is very quiet system. Even under substantial load the noise levels it generated were insignificant.

HD performance – yes, Acer Aspire Revo R3600 can play full HD 1080р video, finely too. Problems with it you get only when the window of the video player is resized or when you're searching through the movie, because in those instances the Atom CPU itself is in charge and as we said - it's not all that powerful and will cause the video to skip a bit (until you stop agitating it with such actions). Overall Acer Aspire Revo R3600 could be used as HD media player, but we wouldn't recommend using it.

Subjective performance evaluation -- we did of course use Acer Aspire Revo R3600 for common daily activities. Its overall performance with browsers and office products (mostly common everyday tasks) were a tad sluggish compared to MSI Wind. But that's entirely to be blamed on the limited memory capacity (only 2GB)and the heavy OS (Windows Vista). If you insist on using this OS an upgrade to $GB of Ram is highly reccommended.

Power consumption

As you can see even at full load Acer Aspire Revo R3600 consumes very little energy, bear in mind though that this figure does not include the consumption of a monitor!