ASRock DeskMini 110 mini-STX PC Review
by Ganesh T S on June 8, 2016 8:45 AM ESTHTPC Credentials
The DeskMini's ventilated chassis (allowing for rapid cooling) and the BIOS fan control ensure that fan noise is not a concern at all for typical office workloads or light HTPC duties. The Intel HD Graphics 530 is a known quantity when it comes to refresh rate accuracy and decoding / rendering efficiency. Therefore, we will only address the network streaming efficiency aspect in this section.
Network Streaming Efficiency
Evaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back our standard YouTube test stream and five minutes from our standard Netflix test title. Using HTML5, the YouTube stream plays back a 1080p H.264 encoding. Since YouTube now defaults to HTML5 for video playback, we have stopped evaluating Adobe Flash acceleration. Note that only NVIDIA exposes GPU and VPU loads separately. Both Intel and AMD bundle the decoder load along with the GPU load. The following two graphs show the power consumption at the wall for playback of the HTML5 stream in Mozilla Firefox (v 46.0.1).
GPU load was around 19.24% for the YouTube HTML5 stream and 0.01% for the steady state 6 Mbps Netflix streaming case.
Netflix streaming evaluation was done using the Windows 10 Netflix app. Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D). Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here.
The DeskMini is not particularly power-efficient as a HTPC platform. However, for a multi-purpose PC that might be used to play YouTube videos or the occasional Netflix video, it does help to know that power consumption and fan noise are not going to be a major concern.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
85 Comments
View All Comments
Lukart - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
That pricing looks really good! Now I want to see this thing listed..JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Might have been interesting and possibly worth a buy if it included 2 Intel Ethernet ports, to act as a pfSense box. I guess I'll pass.A5 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
You don't need a 65W CPU to do pfSense.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
$739? For that money you can buy a i5-6300HQ notebook that comes with a 960M. Even if you dont use the screen, you still get to make use of the built-in UPS of the notebook.ganeshts - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
The $739 is due to our choice of components - the Core i5 is $204, the SSD is $317, the RAM is $57 and so on.. people can budget for these components differently (using a SATA 2.5" drive could bring down that price by $250).t.s - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
And where is the sata port?nightbringer57 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Looks like there are two mounting slots under the mainboard.There doesn't seem to be a standard SATA connector, but there is a connector marked "SATA 3" (on the edge of the board, between the back USB connectors and the "chipset"). I'm assuming this is some form of non-conventional SATA port that combines data and power lines as there is no traditional PSU, but the converters must be on the motherboard, and enables to use a proprietary cable to connect the drivers.
nightbringer57 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
(addendum)If you look at the bundle photo, you can see the weird-SATAoid-thingy-to-standard-SATA-adapter in the small plastic bag.
The_Assimilator - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Well spotted, for a while I thought ASRock had given us a pair of 2.5" mounts with no way to use them...zodiacfml - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Right. I did a quick math and the price of this mini is reasonable. In my opinion, this is the only mini that I found with a decent price as most small PCs reviewed here are not cost competitive to a laptop.The price also reflects the simple quality of the case but who cares. The niche of this product is the decent price.