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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
85 Comments
View All Comments
aethertron - Sunday, June 12, 2016 - link
I'm new to this, does the i5 HQ version draw the same power and get the same clock as the 65 W desktop version? I was thinking of this form factor because I was hoping to put full-power desktop components in a smaller form factor.extide - Monday, June 13, 2016 - link
That IS a full power normal desktop CPU, like you can buy at newegg.Gadgety - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
@TS Ganesh " larger than the NUCs, but smaller than a mini-ITX build"Why do you not list case dimensions in the specifications as this is part of the point of evaluating this offering?
t.s - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
seconded. A review about SFF, without the dimension is quit funny.ganeshts - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Approx. 6.125" x 6.125" x 3.125" by rough measurements. That comes to ~1.9L, but ASRock claims 1.82L in their press release. I might be off by 0.1" or so in the hurried measurements that I took.Btw, you can get an idea of how small the case is from the photo here: http://www.asrock.com/news/index.us.asp?id=3303
Gadgety - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Thank you.fanofanand - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Thank you Ganesh, I am awful at visualizing dimensions, that picture changes my entire opinion of this device. I went from simply being bummed about the PCI-e being at 2.0 speeds to being stoked at the possibilities. I am still holding out hope for a usable (FB, Youtube etc.) USB stick PC, but I may give up waiting (will likely be years for that to be realized) and just go for something like this. Great article Ganesh!QChronoD - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
I was expecting to see a picture of this next to a modular PSU with the caption of "Can you guess which is which?"Michael Bay - Saturday, June 11, 2016 - link
Same here, looks just like a fancy PSU would.Eden-K121D - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Where is the GTX 1080 review ?