Published in Reviews

ASRock Ion330HT-BD detailed

by on19 January 2010

Index




Opening the case reveals it's really crowded in there. On top you see the optical drive which comes in two flavours, either a DVD burner or the more expensive DVD-burner with Blu-ray reader.

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Removing the drive bay you see the hard drive beneath the optical drive. We are not sure, if it's wise to mount a hard drive head over, ASRock could adapt the mechanism to fit the HDD in a normal position.

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Without the drive bay, we get a good look on the board. During our photo-shot in bad light conditions we did not remove the board entirely, because you need to remove the backplate. As you can see, there are two massive aluminium heatsinks inside. The most disappointing is a 3cm mini-fan mounted to the Atom heatsink.

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While Acer with its Revo used a netbook board, ASRock went the desktop way. The VRM is pretty conservative which means, it does not really save energy. Again, if this box comes at €150 nobody would care, but with a price about €300 for the DVD edition and €395 for the BD edition we expected more.

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While we got an engineering sample, ASRock provided us with a new 3cm fan. The new fan is a YS-Tech fan, and will still not silent, but it's less high-pitched compared to the original one. When running as a home entertainment system, the noise is not audible while you enjoy 5.1 or even 7.1 sound. Because the box is not very cheap we had hoped ASRock go the extra mile and fit in something with a heatpipe and an air duct. The 5cm fan on the backpanel is oversized too, but in the ultra silent and silent modes ok.


Last modified on 24 September 2010
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