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.
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nonotme2 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Are there any XEON based sfx platforms?CSMR - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
The form factor has a lot of potential, but:1. Mobo makers are stuck in the past. Wasting space with VGA output which could have gone to more USB3 ports or an extra displayport or thunderbolt.
2. Please give us at least the graphics power you can get in NUCs or Brix systems with Iris Pro. The 65W processors with shared-memory graphics are unbalanced with strong CPU and weak GPU. Quad-core Iris Pros are great all-rounders but stretch the cooling systems of NUCs and Brixes.
cm2187 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Out of curiosity, what would happen if I stick an i7 6700K in there (no overclocking)? Is it a temperature or a power constraint?fanofanand - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
likely both.BedfordTim - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
It will take an i7-6700 which would make more sense if you are not overclocking.extide - Monday, June 13, 2016 - link
Those have a higher TDP -- that board may not support them. It supports 65w for sure, but maybe not the higher wattage of the K series chips, which I think is 91w.A5 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Would be interesting to mix this kind of thing with an R-series CPU if you need to do (very) light gaming.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Man, this thing would be a killer if it had Thunderbolt support.wintermute000 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Can someone pretty please test ESXi on it :)wintermute000 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
And kvm too ;)