Admittedly there’s an intrinsic enjoyment to learning how the bits inside your PC case fit together, where the web of scary cables must be affixed on your motherboard, and how to fish out that one screw you drop between the backplate and mobo every time you try to upgrade any component. But wouldn’t it be nice if everything just plugged together like power-hungry Duplo? I think so, and Acer do too.
Their Revo Build PC has just been unveiled at Berlin’s IFA tech show, designed as a completely modular set of blocks which fit together to form a working, easily upgradable PC.
The Revo Build’s modules affix via a proprietary pin-based connection fitted to the top and bottom of each part. The concept’s apparentlt been inspired by advances in mobile tech, though I’d argue the past few decades of PC gamers bellowing obscenities into their non-booting, opened up PCs must have had at least a small hand in it.
It’s planned for an October release, withthe cheapest base unit comprising a CPU and 8GB RAM retailing at £199. At release, the only additional module will be a 500GB/1TB HDD. However in the following months, you’ll be able to slap on a graphics module to increase visual heft, a power bank to run the PC when it isn’t plugged into a power source, and an audio bank adding speakers and a mic.
Okay, there are a lot of unanswered questions. What about cooling? Overclocking? Will AMD and NVIDIA release Revo-compatible versions of their latest GPUs? If so, it feels like we’re a long way away from that. But it’s a start, isn’t it?