Thankfully there's also a beefy 50mm exhaust fan which at 20mm thick, clearly shifts the majority of the air through the chassis. In short you're left with no option but to run the fan in auto mode where it sounds like a hair dryer, while simultaneously hoping the whole thing doesn't turn into a pile of molten goo.
We tried manually setting the speed to normal which was much quieter but the CPU temperature in turn topped 80☌ after just a few minutes of 1080p playback. Clearly it barely shifts any air and the noise to cooling ratio is quite simply appalling. We opened up the case to investigate, because it was also making such a vile, high pitched sound, and to our amazement saw a tiny 30mm fan cooling both the CPU and Ion chipset. Above that temperature the CPU will start throttling - because above that temperature, Intel judges that the chip's long-term reliability could be impacted. This topped out at 75☌ during 1080p playback minutes, which is a tad toasty to say the least given that the Tjunction for the Intel Atom 330 is 85.2☌. With the fan speed set to auto in the BIOS, we recorded a CPU temperature of 62☌ sitting idle at the desktop. One big issue we encountered with the ASRock was cooling. It's not that flashy, but it does the job well enough. There's even a remote control which provides an acceptable amount of control for video playback and photo browsing using Media Centre. WiFi is also built in courtesy of a 802.11b/g/n card which did a good job of picking up the office's WiFi between the digital noise of mobile phones and many other laptops.
With many budget PCs lacking a discrete graphics card, chances are you won't be able to do this with a budget PC, not to mention the ASRock will be a hell of a lot better looking in your lounge than a ghastly black and silver tin box.įor those wanting more storage or even redundancy courtesy of something such as a RAID 1 setup, there's the option to install a second 2.5in hard drive. The ASRock includes a Blu-ray DVD-RW combo drive as standard and combined with the HDMI port on the rear panel, this means it can plug straight into your HDTV. It's a bit of a tit-for-tat trade off though. These days, for £400 you can get yourself a low end Core 2 system with 3/4GB RAM, a half terabyte hard drive and the OS pre-installed. This brings the ASRock further into competition with budget desktop PCs.
Instead the price tag - which tops £300 - only includes the base unit, so remember you're also looking at another £60 for a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium.
For many of us this isn't a big deal especially (especially as Windows 7 installs in less than 15 minutes anyway) but the target audience for this kind of machine, would, we think, want to just plug in the monitor and be surfing the internet in a few minutes. The packageLike many of the net-tops we've encountered, the ASRock doesn't come with an OS pre-installed.