ASRock ION 330HT-BD 1080P Blu-Ray HTPC System Review

System performance and Power Consumption

Being based on the Intel ATOM processor, the ION 330HT-BD is not going to set any world records for performance. Any recent “Core” CPU would wipe the floor with the ATOM. The important part here is that the system uses very little power to do its job. Since almost all of our content is going to be streamed from a server, it doesn’t have to have a ton of performance to get the job done. We put it through a pretty standard series of tests to give you an idea of how it performs. On the following page we’ve also included some Task Manager screen shots to show you just how well it handles full screen HULU content as well as Blu-ray 1080p playback.

Performance numbers here are decent enough. You won’t want to use this to decode/transcode/compress/decompress or anything very CPU intensive. Gaming performance is fair at best. You’ll need to build a more powerful system if you plan to do anything remotely taxing, but such a system would not draw as little power and operate as quietly as the ASRock ION 330HT-BD.

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Seasonic Power Angel. For idle numbers, we allowed the system to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load numbers, we measured the peak wattage used by the system while playing back “The End” episode of Lost and the Blu-ray AVATAR.

Power consumption is where the ASRock ION 330HT-BD really excels! At idle it’s consuming as little as some CCL light bulbs. At nearly full load playing back Flash content on Hulu it peaks at just 41W! With so little power being used there isn’t much heat being generated and the fans are inaudible at even low playback volumes.