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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dj_aris - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
What if mini-STX boards came with an MXM slot? That would spawn a really fresh and interesting form factor...DanNeely - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Unless the OEM was also able to solve the problem of MXM cards not being readily available on the aftermarket (and what is available tending to be obscenely priced) I suspect it'd be more likely to spawn frustration and rage.bill.rookard - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Well, that's the point of putting it out there. If you make it available, and people do start to use it, companies will start to produce boards for it, competition ensues, prices drop and availability goes up.nathanddrews - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
But MXM has been available for over a decade (laptops) and it hasn't helped anything. I still remember trying to upgrade my Dell laptop to a 7950GTX and the MXM chip was $900 on eBay. even now, the 980M is over $800. If it hasn't caught on by now...xchaotic - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Basically MXM, if priced exactly the same as desktop PCIE boards should give vendors more margin. So IMO MXM should be prices identically to their big cousins and that wouldn't be bad for both consumers and OEMswolrah - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Except that it would make no sense for them to be priced the same considering the same parts would have to be packed much more densely in to the MXM board compared to a desktop board.That's like saying a laptop should be the same price as a comparable desktop + monitor + keyboard + touchpad.
xenol - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Probably the reason why MXM boards are so expensive is that there are no official markets for them. People complain why Mini-ITX boards can be as pricey as ATX boards or why SFX power supplies are as pricey as ATX ones. They're probably pricey because there's a niche demand for them (though I'd argue mITX boards tend to have more core features than ATX ones)Morawka - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
No cooling fan, no heatsink, no display outputs, reduced bill of materialsNamisecond - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
You're asking for 80 square inches of board real estate to be miniaturized and crammed into about 5., and then to be sold at the same rate as that bigger item.You may as well demand all labor to be priced at the same rate as that of a Shenzhen assembly line worker.
barleyguy - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
I had an Asus laptop with an MXM slot. The major problem there was compatibility. Asus put custom firmware on the boards that was required for the computer to function. Basically the first 512K (I think) of the firmware was Asus specific, and the remaining part came from NVidia.I think that's been the issue with MXM all along: You can't just buy any laptop with the slot, buy any card for the slot, and expect it to work without serious technical wizardry.
Low profile PCI Express probably makes more sense. It wouldn't greatly increase the size of a box like this.