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Acer Revo One RL85: A pint-sized PC for the snug

Compact living room Core i5 put through its paces

Will it blend?

With prices for a basic system starting out at around £200, it's a fair bet that some people are going to be tempted to run something other than Windows on the Revo One. It is possible? Fortunately, the answer turns out to be “Yes,” though you may need to do a bit of fiddling.

Acer Revo One

Access to drives is easy enough and the caddies simply pull out

On the test system, I used Windows to restart into the UEFI. Next, I disabled secure boot and set the system to use CSM instead, and boot from removable storage. I pulled the two Sata RAID drives, and set the controller to standard mode.

Then, with a fresh Hyper X SSD installed in one of the bays (and the 60GB Windows system SSD still in place), I popped a USB flash key in, loaded up with the OpenBSD 5.7 miniroot. Why OpenBSD? Because this is The Register, and why not?

Installation was quick and trouble-free, and I even got X Windows up and running, albeit with a couple of graphics driver glitches. In short, if you want to buy one of these little boxes with a view to using it with something other than Windows, yes, you very likely can.

A quick 'load defaults' in the BIOS, plus slotting the original drives back in, was all it took to get the original OS back, just as I'd left it.

Acer Revo One

Compact performer

The Reg Verdict

The Revo One is a very compact little PC. It's very quiet too, and I can easily see it sitting in a living room, perhaps providing access to services like Amazon and Netflix via the TV, doubling up as a NAS, or controlling home automation gadgets.

All that said, while the entry level is fairly affordable, the top spec reviewed here is rather less so. It's broadly on a par with speccing up the Intel NUC reviewed recently.

As with many systems like this, you're paying a premium for the compact packaging and the smart design. Nevertheless, if you want something to hook up to your entertainment system, and not take over the living room, I still reckon it's worth a look, especially the cheaper models. ®

Acer Revo One RL85

Acer Revo One RL85: A pint-sized PC for the snug

A compact living room PC features two 2.5in drive bays plus an SSD slot available in dual-core Intel Celeron or Core i3 and i5 configurations
Price: £650 RRP

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