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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8steve8 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Am the only one surprised this got beat by the skull canyon with its 45W CPU in many non-GPU related benchmarks? Would a 65W i7 with HT in this change that outcome ( I assume so? )ganeshts - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Note that the eDRAM might also play a role. (eDRAM is available for both CPU and GPU workloads)8steve8 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
true... i wish that skull canyon cpu or any skylake with eDRAM was in the anandtech bench databaseValantar - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Platforms like this are begging for Thunderbolt 3 and similarly sized eGPU chassis.peterfares - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Why exactly do you want to have two boxes with a wire connecting them and a second power supply? Doesn't it make a little more sense for the case just to be larger and hold a GPU internally? Way cheaper that way too.piasabird - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
Seems like 120 watts is awfully low on the power. It is basically just a box with a motherboard in it.peterfares - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
65W CPU. I don't think everything else will add up to 55W.cm2187 - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
I'm surprised the Skull Canyon toasts this config in pretty much all benchmarks. When comparing the specs side by side, the Skull Canyon CPU is pretty much inferior or equal to the i5 6500 on all metrics other than hyper threading:http://ark.intel.com/compare/93341,88184
Does hyper threading make such a big difference?
nirolf - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
There's also that 128 MB of eDRAM that works like a big fat cache for the CPU.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
I agree with the comment section, this box would be much more impressive if it was an inch wider, and had room to hold something like the low profile dual slot 750ti.