ASRock M8 Barebones Review: My Steam Box

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• brucek2 - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link

  Is the optical drive really DVD only (not Bluray?) If so that seems exactly wrong to me. I'd rather have either no optical drive at all and save the ~$70, or have one that can play Blurays.

• Death666Angel - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link

  German website tweakpc.de says it is blu ray. But I have no idea how you get $70 for a slim DVD ODD. They retail for 20€ here.

• fuhgetaboutit - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link

  Minor nit - article should use one space after a period, not two.
  
  http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/TheChannel9Team/Bil...

• IanCutress - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link

  Personal preference, was always taught to use two from the early days and it seems unnatural to my eyes to see only one. There are reams of articles, blogs and even societies and groups for each, just as there are the serial comma (which again I was taught to use, and leaving it out feels wrong), or that companies are plural entities, not singular. I always used double spacing for publishing to scientific journals, never heard a peep from their stylists.

• Johnmcl7 - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link

  I've always been taught to use two spaces after a full stop, one after a comma and still do partially because it's what I'm used to but I think it looks better as well.
  
  John

• Gigaplex - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link

  Why did they bother using the Z87 chipset? With that minimal power deliver and recommendation to avoid overclocking, it would have been cheaper to use the H87 chipset.

• theNiZer - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link

  Ian Cutress - I am surprised that you seem to take heat and noise considerations so light, especially when many other reviews point out these weaknesses in the M8. And why did you not test these aspects more systematically in the review?

• IanCutress - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link

  I didn't see any issues with heat - I stuck to ASRock's recommended power limit on the GPU and used a low powered 35W CPU rather than a full fat 4770K and overclocking. As for noise, the only equipment I own to measure noise are my android devices, which are not calibrated in any shape or form. Plus I live right next to a main road, so there is always noise of cars going past, affecting any reading. Suffice to say, it is audible at idle at 1 ft away, and does not particularly bother me at full load, but I may be biased by a large threshold due to my location.

• colonelclaw - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link

  The key issue that Valve needs to convince the public about, with regards to Steam Boxes, is that the higher up front cost is considerably offset by the savings you will make on buying games from Steam, especially in tandem with the frequent Steam Sales, Daily Deals, Midweek Madness etc.
  The problem is that long-sightedness can be a bit of a hard concept for many. $500 for a console, versus maybe $800 for a Steam Box is a hard sell, even though we all know that 20 games at $60 dollars versus 20 games at $15-$20 is a no-brainer.
  And that might even be a conservative analogy - I have over 150 games on Steam, at least a quarter of which are AAAs. Being a bit of a cheapskate, I only buy games on sale, yet I never have to wait long after release to do so. The added advantage of this is that if the release was buggy it is more likely to have been fixed by the time it goes on sale.

• teldar - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link

  You guys need an editor who knows the English language. Reading some of your stuff is brutal.