Acer Aspire Revo SFF NVIDIA Ion PC

Opening up the Acer Aspire Revo is nice and easy. There is a single screw on the bottom of the unit, beneath a warranty sticker in the slot where the stand slides in. Remove that screw and the side of the Revo can literally be snapped off by disengaging a few plastic clips around the system's perimeter.

Once opened, the system's motherboard and other components are readily accessible. In one corner you can see the Revo's standard 2.5" Seagate hard drive, right next to the system's wireless networking controller, which itself is connected a small metal antenna that resides in the same corner of the system. The black wire coming from the WiFi controller, however, runs under the motherboard to another antenna, which sits on the opposite side of the Revo.

There is a single fan in the Acer Aspire Revo, mounted right to the sole heatsink in the system, which sits atop the Intel Atom CPU and NVIDIA Ion platform processor. When the system is first powered up, this fan spins up to its maximum speed briefly, which produces a relatively loud high-pitched whine reminiscent of some notebooks, but it quickly spins down to almost inaudible levels. We should also note that during heavy use, the fan in the Revo never spun back up to its maximum level. At most it kicked in just slightly and was still very quiet.

Next to the system's cooler you can see the two standard SO-DIMMs used in the Revo. Our test system was equipped with 2GB (1GB x 2) of DDR2-800 memory.

Also visible within the Revo is a small, secondary PCB which houses a pair of the system's USB ports, which is just below the second WiFi antenna in the image on the left. The top-side of the Revo's flash card reader, its backup battery, and its piezo speaker can also be seen, in addition to a few of the system's various ports.