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.
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Screwville512 - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
Do you own it? I am interested in purchasing one and was wondering if you think its possible to modify the case to accept 15mm drives. Seagate now has 5TB 2.5" 15mm HDD's and I think those in RAID 1 would make the Deskmini a great portable NAS. Otherwise, I will go with 2tb SSHD in RAID 0 with an external backup drive.rgs84 - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
Can someone confirm that I can use it for example with i5-6685R, same 1151 socket, but better video onboard (Iris Pro 588)?chrismart1234 - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
Nah; it supports full desktop processors only not mobile processors.wstkwon - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link
Hey, I tried to make this pc, but my monitor is blank. WTF? ANy hel please?n13L5 - Sunday, August 5, 2018 - link
Out of all the other systems, this particular system needs an AMD version the most - to put a 2400G APU in it...For my purposes of making a sub-$500 play computer for my daughter - the ASRock DeskMini 110 is over-speced in the wrong place and under-speced in the wrong place. With an Intel i5, it simply lacks an interesting niche. Any and every other box has a CPU+RAM+SSD, including much smaller things like NUCs etc - at this size, it should have an APU to be worth the bother.