ASRock M8 Barebones Review: My Steam Box
by Ian Cutress on January 2, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Barebones
- Intel
- ASRock
- Motherboards
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Z87
Due to the high end level of the systems that Dustin has benchmarked, our M8 configuration does not appear to fair too well on some of the synthetics – however frame rates in modern games are more than applicable and should systematically beat any console title if settings were equilibrated between the systems. For the price difference, one would hope so! Given that these are all tested against laptops, we see that while our low powered CPU may not be as fast as we had liked, the gaming frame rates are still at the high end.
PCMark 7
3DMark Fire Strike
Cinebench R11.5
x264 5.0 HD Benchmark
Bioshock Infinite
Grid 2
Sleeping Dogs
Tomb Raider
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mwildtech - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
50' HDMI cable, Wireless Xbox 360 controller and Steam Big Picture = My Steam BoxBPB - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
That would be me too. The 360 wireless setup is great!56tb - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
Tek Syndicate did a video of this, you can find it on youtube. They went into a lot of detail on thermals and suchlike, so worth checking out. They even used a Velociraptor to add some extra heat to the mix.pirspilane - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
I bought an ASRock barebones system and would recommend steering clear of this. Their techs are either grossly incompetent, dishonest, or both. If you get one with a defect, they will claim your memory, processor, assembly (take your pick) is the problem and give you the runaround. You will waste endless hours of your precious time dealing with their ineptitude, not to mention the cost and time of trips to UPS.Sivar - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
Please change the photographs in the article to JPG format.PNG is the best format by far for line art, technical drawings, charts, screen captures from Excel, -- anything without a lot of random color variability -- but is an absolutely terrible format for website photographs.
The images load slowly and many mobile users have to pay for bandwidth past a certain point.
IanCutress - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
Noted for the future.nerd1 - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
At such a price, it actually seems more logical to get a powerful gaming laptop. You can spend $2K to get a 17" gaming laptop with QC cpu, 780M, SSD and that is actually mobile.nunomoreira10 - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
So true, win everywhere.Death666Angel - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
That 780M is about as fast as a GTX 660TI, which is a bit more than half as powerful as some GTX 780 / R9 290X cards, which you can fit in here (450W is fine for the current crop of high end cards as long as your CPU isn't OC'ed to the max).So I don't see how there is even the slightest comparison. And once you get into 780M SLI territory, you are way up there in price.
cgalyon - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
I've read elsewhere that the default fan configuration is not ideal (because they are oriented one up, one down in the top and bottom of the case). Has AsRock changed this? I would like a more detailed look at us thermal characteristics of the case of possible, as it was one of the main things holding me back (the other being weight).Also, I would like to see a review comparing this case to another barebones case, the Shuttle SZ86R6. Don't know how feasible that would be...