ASRock Core 100HT Home Theater PC Review
We’ve reviewed the previous generation of ASRock HTPC SFF systems in the past, and we were pleased with their price/size/performance. It’s good to see ASRock continues to develop this line, and while this isn’t brand new, you always learn new things from different reviewers. Plus it’s been a slow news week 🙂
Streaming HD Content from Netflix was a slightly different story given that Microsoft Silverlight is not optimized nearly as much as Flash. Here we see the ASRock Core 100HT had its CPU utilization elevated regularly on three of the four threads with the average hovering around 25%. This means that if anything is running in the background that also heavily depends on the CPU, you will run the risk of stuttering HD content. While this is not necessarily the fault of the Core i3 processor, it is the nature of the Silverlight beast.