ASRock DeskMini 110 mini-STX PC Review
by Ganesh T S on June 8, 2016 8:45 AM ESTPower Consumption and Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the ASRock DeskMini 110 with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together. The numbers are what one might expect for the combination of hardware components in the machine.
Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by 30 minutes of pure CPU loading. This is followed by another 30 minutes of both CPU and GPU being loaded simultaneously. After this, the CPU load gets removed, allowing the GPU to be loaded alone for another 30 minutes. The various clocks in the system as well as the temperatures within the unit are presented below.
According to the official specifications, the Tcase of the Core i5-6500 is 71C, and the BIOS performance curves are set to ensure that the processor doesn't go beyond that even under stress. Therefore, we see very strange package power / at-wall power consumption in the pure CPU loading case. However, things do stabilize at a higher power number when both the CPU and the GPU are loaded together.
Another important aspect to keep note of while evaluating small form-factor PCs is the chassis temperature. Using the Android version of the FLIR One thermal imager, we observed the chassis temperature after the CPU package temperature reached the steady state value in the above graph.
We have additional thermal images in the gallery below. The chassis temperatures are not a big concern even under extreme loading conditions.
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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 ;)