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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r3loaded - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Yeah, MXM was invented to make life easy for OEMs, not consumers.Flunk - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
I think the ship has sailed on that idea, people want smaller and smaller notebooks, not huge ones with huge upgradability.CharonPDX - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Heck even a transverse (on a riser, across the top of the CPU,) half-height, short-length PCIe x16 slot would be nice, there are "decent", (although not "super powerful) video cards available for half-height, short-length slots.Valantar - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Thunderbolt 3 alongside similarly sized (stackable?) (MXM-based) external GPUs would be better. Want a small system with just what you need for office/HTPC duty? Skip the GPU. Want a compact gaming rig? Get the extra chassis and (given proper availability and firmware standardization) whatever MXM GPU you want. You could easily fit the "MXM+" GTX 980 (and thus 1080, whenever it's out) in a 5" by 5" form factor, and cooling would be a breeze with a heatsink filling two dimensions of the chassis fitted with a downward blowing 120mm fan.marc1000 - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
MXM has lots of issues.I believe if you wanna go this small, it is better to stick with NUCs. if you need some more power, go for mITX + standard GPU.
Calista - Sunday, June 12, 2016 - link
Problem is a mITX case could easily handle a 1000 watt system, going with a full-sized ATX PSU and a high-end GPU/CPU combo and a large bunch of drives. It would be noisy when going full tilt, but it would be doable. What people seem to be asking for is a <200 watt tiny system with interchangeable parts. A 200 watt TDP would allow for a small but efficient PSU to fit within a small case, a 65W CPU and a 100 watt GPU, meaning even a modern high-end GPU like the GTX 970.The mSTX form factor just sounds like the answer to a question no one has asked.
repoman27 - Friday, June 10, 2016 - link
The switch to HBM and stacking the memory and GPU on interposers will enable socketed GPUs in near future. Hopefully that becomes a thing.Namisecond - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
You'd have the same problems with MXM there as you do with them on laptops, with maybe marginally more volume for a cooling system.MXM was not designed to be a user serviceable interface. The sooner you realize that, the happier you'll be. :3
SeanFL - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Glad to see more vendors gearing up in the small space PC's. Have changed over to NUC's and other small form factors in the house and at work and they work fantastic for almost everything. The monster 6 core machine (i7-5930k) only gets used for video editing now.blackice85 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Agreed, I'm glad that these have become pretty viable now. I'm looking to replace my big PC with a smaller machine as well, but would like to still do some medium-ish quality gaming on occasion. I'm hoping the new AMD Zen APUs next year fit the bill, I'll have to see how they review. It would just be cool if a discrete GPU wasn't really a requirement anymore.