Legit Mods and Ends Reviews
ASRock Core 100HT Home Theater PC Review
| Manufacturer: | ASRock |
| Product: | Core 100HT HTPC |
| Date: | Fri, Mar 25, 2011 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Justin West - |
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x264 HD Encoding and Blu-Ray ISO Playback
x264 HD Encoding
Simply put, it is a reproducible measure of fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It's nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other.
In many cases, HTPC's also double as a trans-coding machine. The x264 benchmark is a great way to get an idea of how well your system will perform while re-encoding videos. When comparing the ASRock Core 100HT to the AMD E350 APU we see the Core 100HT can re-encode almost 3 times faster than the AMD E350 when utilizing the CPU.
Blu-Ray ISO Playback
Even though the ASRock Core 100HT does not have a Blu-Ray player, that does not mean that you will never want to add a Blu-Ray optical drive in the future. So we took a Blu-Ray ISO and mounted it to a virtual drive and played it with Cyberlink's PowerDVD 10. The Blu-Ray we played was Gamer during the opening battle scene and recorded CPU utilization in the background.
ASRock Core 100HT Blu-Ray CPU Utilization
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 Blu-Ray CPU Utilization
Here we see the ASRock Core 100HT HTPC had minimal CPU utilization most of the time throughout our Blu-Ray playback. The AMD E350 APU on the other hand, hovered around 20-25% utilization throughout the scene. If you setup your HTPC to record multiple shows, multiple remote processes, or even Folding@Home for fun, then having as little CPU utilization as possible during Blu-Ray playback will ensure that none of those other processes will interfere with your Blu-Ray experience!
Next Page - Youtube HD and Netflix HD Playback
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - An Incredibly Small HTPC
Page 2 - The ASRock Core 100HT: Inside and Out Page 3 - ASRock Core 100HT BIOS Page 4 - 3DMark Vantage Page 5 - PCMark Vantage Page 6 - Peacekeeper Browser Benchmark Page 7 - Geekbench Page 8 - x264 HD Encoding and Blu-Ray ISO Playback Page 9 - Youtube HD and Netflix HD Playback Page 10 - Power Consumption Page 11 - Final Thoughts on the ASRock Core 100HT HTPC |
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