ASRock Core 100HT Home Theater PC Review

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!