Acer's Revo One RL85, Another Small PC For Your Living Room

Acer's Revo One RL85 PCs are designed to compete with media PCs, HTPCs, and other similar living room devices commonly used for Web browsing and watching videos. The Revo One RL85 is a PC line that features mid-range performance and size, as well as some specialized applications.

The market is rife with ARM-based devices in the form of Android TV boxes, dongles and other small streamers. These devices tend to be low-power systems that take up very little space, but consequently, they also typically feature lower performance.

Other devices that serve this purpose, however, are mini-ITX PCs. Mini-ITX systems typically use desktop processors by AMD or Intel, or less commonly use mobile processors from the likes of ARM. Mini-ITX systems often can use low-end graphics cards, too. These components allow for much greater performance, but the tradeoff is larger size, more heat, more power consumption, and (at times) noise.

ARM-based devices and mini-ITX PCs are both designed to watch videos, provide a reasonably fast Web browsing experience, and at times play low-end games, while also maintaining a compact form factor.

Acer is attempting to provide the best of both worlds with its new Revo One RL85 PCs. Measuring 4.19 x 4.19 x 6.1 inches (W x D x H), they're larger than most ARM-based devices that serve this purpose, but they are smaller than a mini-ITX system.

In terms of performance, the Revo One RL85 PCs fall in the middle area again by using mobile Intel processors. Two Revo One RL85 PCs feature lower-performance 1.4 GHz Celeron processors, while the faster units feature either an i3-5010U at 2.1 GHz or an i5-5200U 2.2 GHz.

Although the CPUs inside of these devices are going to be slower than the higher-clocked desktop CPUs used inside of many mini-ITX devices that use modern Intel processors, the Core i3 and Core i5 models should be notably faster than the ARM cores.

The other system specs for the Celeron models include a 60 GB SSD and a 2 GB DDR3L. The Core i3 and Core i5 devices both feature a 1 TB HDD, but they differ in RAM quantity, with the Core i3 and Core i5 models containing 4 GB and 8 GB of DDR3L, respectively.

All of the Revo One RL85 PCs come with Windows 8.1 and share the same connection configuration. The rear I/O features two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a headset connection, an Ethernet connection, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort, which is more akin to the I/O you'd see on a desktop than on a small living room box.

In addition to the external ports, inside are two SATA connections, allowing users to add storage. The system supports RAID 0, 1, and 5 for the storage, which is helpful for one of the main features of the device called BYOC.

BYOC, or "Build Your Own Cloud," enables the Revo One RL85 to become a cloud server that you can access from anywhere. Acer made a mobile app, allowing you to control the Revo One with your phone, but the company did not specify which platforms it works on.

The Acer Revo One RL85 PCs start at $249.99 and are available in the U.S. today.

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