Acer's high? Or reserved Revo?

Friday 19 June

Netbook fever has been raging hotter than Swine Flu over the last year or so, but that could soon be replaced, with a net top pandemic! Starting the outbreak could be none other than the new Acer Aspire Revo – the first net top to ship with NVIDIA’s new powerful ION graphics processor!

That ION graphics processor isn’t dissimilar the 9400M graphics card in performance, and has been specifically designed to work with cheap, low-powered computers. The main processor, however, is a little less impressive and is more the sort you’d find in a netbook: a 1.6GHz single core Intel atom processor.

Looks-wise it’s as you’d expect: small and compact. It bristles with ports, connections and sockets, including six USB ports and HDMI socket for connecting to your HDTV. There’s no optical drive, but you do get a 160GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM. It even comes with a fetching keyboard and mouse (which is more than you can say for some tiny desktops, eh Mac Mini).

It runs Vista, which is more than most netbooks can do, and can even play some games on it, just don’t expect anything too grandiose. And as for the video playback, well, let’s just say I was pleasantly surprised, especially with how it handled HD flicks.

But that’s enough blathering on. I don’t want to give away all the Revo’s secrets in this bit of blurb. Watch the video above for my full verdict, while Dionne gets to grips with some new Nintendo games…