Acer Revo L80/RL80

[jcjefferies]

Is anyone using a Acer Revo L80 1.5GHZ Celeron micro pc? I am thinking of buying one as a NextPVR client but there is no info on the "Intel HD" graphics. One customer review inferred that hardware acceleration for H264 HD video is not supported. The other option for the same price is a Revo RL70 with a lower spec 1.65GHZ AMD E450 processor but with AMD HD6320 graphics with known hardware acceleration capabilities.

Chris

[jcjefferies]

I asked on Acer's forum and didnt get a definate answer but was given several web pages to look at. One said that "Quick Sync" is Intel's hardware video encoding and decoding technology which is built into some processors. However looking at the spec of the Celeron 887 processor used in the cheaper Acer Revo RL80 it does not support Quick Sync so has no hardware video acceleration in spite of being described as “HD Graphics”. More expensive models have the i3 processor which does support hardware acceleration.

I bought the L80 model with the slower AMD E450 processor but with a GPU built in. It is a bit slow loading and running windows but has no problem with HD video. A BBC 1080p demo played with the CPU running at around 35% and GPU at 25%. The BBC iPlayer in HD which is notoriously heavy on the processor runs at around 45% processor and around 4% GPU downloading and playing 720p content in Internet Explorer. It will replace my current around 8 year old “Slimline” 3GHz Pentium desktop PC on which the TV stands as my NextPVR client. Using OpenELEC XBMC gave similar processor levels in the same situations.