ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-V1000M Ryzen Mini-PC Review: Finding Zen In The Small Things

HTPC Credentials - Display Outputs and Streaming Capabilities

The comes with display outputs, and their characteristics are summarized in the table below. From a HTPC use-case perspective, the entries of interest include the ability to support UHD (3840 x 2160) or higher resolutions, along with HDCP 2.2. The latter enables the display output to be used for viewing protected content such as 4K Netflix streams and play back UltraHD Blu-rays. It must be noted that this is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

Supporting the display of high-resolution protected video content is a requirement for even a casual HTPC user. In addition, HTPC enthusiasts also want their systems to support refresh rates that either match or be an integral multiple of the frame rate of the video being displayed. Most displays / AVRs are able to transmit the supported refresh rates to the PC using the EDID metadata. In some cases, the desired refresh rate might be missing in the list of supported modes.

Refresh Rates Support

Our evaluation of the as a HTPC was done using the native HDMI output connected to a TCL 55P607 4K HDR TV via a Denon AVR-X3400H AV receiver. We tested out various display refresh rates ranging from 23.976 Hz to 59.94 Hz. Of particular interest is the 23.976 Hz (23p) setting, which Intel used to have trouble with in the pre-Broadwell days.

The gallery below presents screenshots from the other refresh rates that were tested. The system has no trouble maintaining a fairly accurate refresh rate throughout the duration of the video playback.

Streaming Services

Despite supporting HDCP 2.2, the absence of a supported secure enclave prevents UltraHD Blu-ray playback on the 4X4 BOX-V1000M. Additionally, PlayReady 3.0 was also not available at the time of review - this meant that 4K and HDR Netflix streams were unavailable, and the maximum quality was limited to 5.8 Mbps / 1080p.

The move to 4K, and the need to evaluate HDR support as part of our HTPC testing have made us choose Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video as our YouTube test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.

The system has no trouble playing back the VP9 Profile 2 HDR video with hardware acceleration, as evident from the dropped frame statistics in the above screenshot.

Various metrics of interest such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption were recorded for the first four minutes of the playback of the above video. The numbers are graphed below.

The GPU usage is around 70% and the at-wall power consumption is slightly south of 40W for the 4K HDR YouTube playback test.