ASRock Core 100HT Home Theater PC Review

By jw

Youtube HD and Netflix HD Playback

YouTube HD Playback

For our YouTube HD playback test, we streamed the Thor HD Trailer at 1080p while the system monitor recorded the CPU usage in the foreground. No applications other than the Google Chrome browser were running while the video played in full-screen mode.

Thor HD Trailer

YoutubeHD Playback CPU Utilization

Here we see the ASRock Core 100HT is able to stream YouTube in HD with little effort. The CPU Utilization rarely spikes and the average usage is lower than 5%!

Netflix HD Playback

For the Netflix HD playback, we ran Heroes: Season 1 Episode 1 from Netflix’s HD Content List through Google Chrome with the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight installed. Like the YouTube HD playback test, no other applications were running during the test. We were able to verify the video was streaming in HD by checking the “HD” icon in the embedded video player’s window.

Heroes: Season 1 Episode 1

Netflix HD Playback CPU Utilization

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.

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