ASRock's High-End Vision 3D HTPC Reviewed

HTPC enthusiasts are rightly concerned about the noise factor, heat and power consumption, ease of usage and many other criteria. We will tackle each of these concerns one by one in this section.

Noise

ASRock doesn't make any claims about the quietness of the system in their marketing material. We were pleasantly surprised upon looking at the noise reports. In the set of pictures below, a professional sound level detector was placed 2 ft away from the Vision 3D, and the sound level measurements were taken in various HTPC scenarios. The unit has a noise level of less than 35 dB at full load (for both CPU and GPU). In this respect, it is actually similar in performance to the Core 100. In fact, it is slightly better because of the elimination of one of the fans.

23.5 dB at Idle

23.6 dB at Multimedia File Playback

30 dB during Disc Playback

33.8 dB at Full Load (Prime95 + Furmark)

Power Consumption

In order to get an idea of the power consumption numbers, the Prime95 and Furmark benchmarks were let run overnight to keep both the CPU and GPU completely loaded for an extended duration. Under these extreme conditions, we found the average power consumption to be around 82 W. At idle, the average power consumption was around 20 W.

These type of power consumption numbers have been enabled by ASRock's choice of going in for an Arrandale instead of a Clarkdale platform. This has resulted in a smaller form factor case design for the mini-ITX motherboard. Since there is not much heat to be dissipated, the cooling system is also appropriately small and silent.

Ease of Use

HTPC enthusiasts are concerned about how easy it is for their system to come out of standby. Existence of HDMI handshake issues upon return from standby is also a deal breaker for many. Fortunately, the Vision 3D has no issues in these two aspects. As long as the AC power adapter is connected to the system, the bundled MCE remote can be used to boot the system (even if the PC had been shut down previously). In order to shorten the boot times, ASRock supplies an Instant Boot utility. Using this, whenver the Vision 3D is shut down, it boots up once again and shuts down before the power can be safely removed. Upon power up, the boot up is instantaneous. If the user wants to put the PC in sleep mode, ASRock also supplies a Goodnight LED feature in the BIOS, which turns off the bright blue blinking LED in front. The MCE remote can also be used to bring the PC out of sleep mode.

Within Windows, the MCE remote can be made to work with a variety of applications such as XBMC, MediaPortal, MPC-HC and of course, Windows 7 Media Center. Blu Ray players such as PowerDVD and ArcSoft TMT can also be controlled with the help of the MCE remote. For the ideal I/O scenario, one probably needs to purchase a wireless keyboard / mouse combo.

It was seen in an earlier section that the Vision 3D happened to get a perfect score in the Anandtech Media Streamer Test Suite. The unit could playback all files using one program or the other, and people expect nothing else from a HTPC. Unfortunately, there is no single unified interface (from XBMC or MediaPortal or any other similar program) which could successfully play back all the files from within. There is definitely an ease of use issue existing here. However, this is not ASRock's fault, and will probably continue to exist on all HTPC platforms. Hopefully, projects such as XBMC's DSPlayer mature rapidly to alleviate this problem.