ASRock's High-End Vision 3D 252B HTPC Review
by Ganesh T S on May 7, 2012 6:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Sandy Bridge
- HTPC
- GT 540M
- NVIDIA
In the CoreHT 252B review, we devoted a section to XBMC and how to configure it to play nice with that particular system. XBMC's DXVA2 decoder works better on the ASRock Vision 3D 252B compared to the CoreHT 252B, thanks to NVIDIA's well supported DXVA infrastructure. However, HD audio bitstreaming is not yet officially available on XBMC (though I have tried a few alternative builds, none of them have worked in a reliable manner). Also, users wishing to use madVR as the renderer within XBMC are yet to see their wishes fulfilled. That said, there are some resources online to get your XBMC setup up and running if you are on a Linux machine.
For Windows users, MPC-HC is the software I would recommend for the best experience. Some customization is needed if the user wants madVR as the renderer. In general, the LAV filters pack is the best supported splitter / decoder combo. Again, some customization is needed in MPC-HC in order to utilize these filters. For those wanting things to work out of the box, JRiver Media Center 17 is highly recommended. I usually only recommend free open source software for HTPC users (except for Blu-ray playback, where there is no alternative but to pony up for one of the software Blu-ray players). However, a majority of HTPC owners don't have time to play around with different codecs and their merits and other settings. Codec packs were designed to solve this problem, but they have a tendency to mess up the system even more. JRiver Media Center 17 is a $50 player with self-contained filters (which can be further configured, if necessary). It also has a mode in which it can use system filters, but that is not of interest to us in this section. JRiver's Red October initiative enables users to enjoy LAV Filters and the madVR renderer out of the box.
We took JRiver MC 17 for a test drive with the Vision 3D 252B, and came away quite satisfied. In the default configuration (Red October - Standard), the software uses LAV Video Filters with avcodec as the video decoder and EVR as the renderer. JRiver has their own subtitle filter which supports multiple varieties of subtitles and can be active with both EVR and madVR. As we saw in an earlier section, using software decode with EVR doesn't choke the system even with 1080p60 content. However, it is not very power efficient. For users wanting to tinker further, there is also a setting to enable hardware acceleration (under Options > Video > General Video Settings). This shifts LAV Video Decoder to one of the hardware decoding modes (probably DXVA2 Native).
Our next step was to check out Red October - HQ, which uses madVR as the renderer. With software decode, we did drop frames for high frame rate content (as noted in the previous section). Enabling hardware acceleration did help a little bit, but we still had too many dropped frames for our liking. Since we knew that the system was more than capable of handling madVR for all the content we tested, we decided to go the Custom route for the Video mode. The gallery below shows the settings we used in order to get playback without dropped frames in JRiver MC 17. Below that, we have the usage graph captured during the playback of our benchmark rendering clips.
The usage graph shows that the GPU's core loading is north of 90%, but we found that the presentation and render queues in madVR didn't underrun even once after a couple of seconds into the clip.
JRiver Media Center 17 has a large number of other features which we haven't touched upon (maybe in a dedicated review down the line). It is possible to integrate Netflix and Hulu Plus into the MC 17 experience, and while they don't play back with madVR as the renderer, YouTube clips do. In fact, you can even force the Video settings to play back YouTube clips at the highest possible bitrate.
I can definitely say that XBMC is the winner when it comes to eye candy, but JRiver MC 17's 10-foot UI as well as automatic scraping capabilities are no slouch. The gallery below presents some 10-foot UI shots.
We are still playing around with the JRiver Media Center 17, but if you have any MC 17-specific questions, feel free to post them in the comments below. Our intent in using MC 17 in this review was to present it as an alternative to MPC-HC for users who want to obtain a simple and working out-of-the-box experience. That said, if you need to get the best out of madVR with the MC 17 on the Vision 3D 252B, you will still need to play around a little bit in the Custom mode.
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LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, May 9, 2012 - link
As nice as it looks, I'll pass.Cool PC, bro --but there are options that will get this job done equally well, for far less. Ones that don't have Asrock's track record for awful customer support if something goes wrong (having owned one of their high-end mainboards briefly, I experienced that personally).
Less expensive options have desktop CPU upgrade options too. The mobile Sandy Bridge systems currently out aren't upgradeable to mobile Ivy Bridge, so I doubt this is, either.
cjmccarthy72 - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
I almost dare not admit to owning one of these- I can imagine the comments especially from the build your own brigade....But I got one just before Christmas and it is a real box of joy. I stuck a SSD from my previous HTPC inside it and this goes like the wind. Large photo, music and movie collection load really quick in WMC. Streams HD media with ease. Extremely quiet- the fans on my plasma are more audible!
Very small- and yet it is truly a one box solution- despite this review I can play most games like Street Fighter IV at full spec on it.
I live in tiny city centre flat and so yes it is expensive, but it beats having a laptop or desktop on the floor, taking up space. Paired with a soundbar and HD tv it means very little space is taken up with my equipment and so my wife is happy. It means that my AV cabinet is now taken up with more family friendly boxes- Scrabble, Monopoly, Battleships!
Last, but not least, it has Blu-Ray- now if only Windows 8 supported it natively....
allensays - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
I can do the same things with my similarly spec'd Asus K73S laptop, then unplug it, go out on the deck or take it to the beach......For much LESS $.
What a waste.
cjmccarthy72 - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
I'm happy for you- no beach or deck where I am I am afraid- & lots of rain at the moment here unfortunately... but also no USA Amazon so no "similarly spec'd Asus K73S laptop". Our Amazon has listed only an Asus K73S- but this only has an i3 cpu, dvd only, 4gb ram only, 320gb hard-drive only - all for $852 equivalent price in dollars. So you clearly have the better deal your end.I have a company laptop which sounds like a jet taking off so I like the silence of this HTPC but I also use it as my PVR so want it hooked up all the time- yet hidden away without my family needing to plug it in and hook it up. + I can do some limited upgrades with it. My last HTPC, a Sony VGX-XL, was also relatively expensive- but I had it for over 5 years before I sold it and so thought that was a reasonable investment.
But clearly for some people this would be a waste- I agree- no argument. However as an owner I thought I would add an opinion about this HTPC, as the majority of comments here only deal with the price.
iq100 - Thursday, May 24, 2012 - link
There are better alternatives to the $50 JRiver MediaCenter game. Did you know that JRiver will charge you again and again for each new release? Worse is their censorship. Criticize them, post about alternatives, and you will be BANNED for life. And they will get their 'commercial friends' to do the same. These folks are NOT like anandtech. They are not about sharing ideas. They add on free GNU softward without embracing the spirit of open source code. They are about commercial money wars. If they were Egypt, or Iran, or Iraq, the would kill your right to speak.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltoQwSpHQBA
iq100
the best way to delete an idea is to post one of your own.
ix400 - Sunday, June 3, 2012 - link
Or is there an alternative tool for finding out the exact refresh rate of the display?iq100 - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
With MPC-HC:http://www.homecinema-hd.com/autofrequency_en.html
iq100
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltoQwSpHQBA
ix400 - Thursday, June 7, 2012 - link
... but this tool doesn't show me a precise value of the refresh rate that is actually set.iq100 - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
>http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.awt/screen_Sc...You can do this in java:
http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.awt/screen_Sc...
iq100
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltoQwSpHQBA
shurik_1 - Thursday, August 2, 2012 - link
try to create couple of dozen gig archive on another PC. create a parity set. corrupt a few bits. transfer to Vision 3D. try to repair and see for yourself what happens...I have complained to ASRock about this and was forced to send entire PC for repairs (no they do not refund shipping costs you have to swallow it). Only change is that BIOS now is 1.10c instead of 1.10. A friend of mine managed to get from their support the actual BIOS without shipping back and indeed it solved his issues as well.
Now I try to update memory to 16GB and the issue is back. Had to go back to 8GB. It's been over a month since I reported this new issue to them and still no fix.
Note that they never acknowledged the issue and never posted updated BIOS to their site. Customers data gets silently corrupted meanwhile...
Other than that is has everything I wanted in HTPC.