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The top of the ASRock Core HT can be unscrewed, giving access to the internals. The Bluray drive, situated at the top of the case, blocks access to everything else, but it can also be easily removed.
The optical drive and hard drive are mounted into the same metal enclosure, ensuring a clean and tidy system build.
These are both connected directly to headers on the motherboard via proprietary connectors.
ASRock are using two quality drives, the Liteon BD Combo Drive, Model DS-4E1S and a 500GB 2.5 inch Western Digital Scorpio hard drive. No Solid State drive in this system, but it would raise the price considerably.
When the drive chamber is removed, full access is given to the motherboard. There is a flat style horizontal oriented cooler mounted on the Core i5 processor and ASRock are using 4GB (2+2GB) of SO-DIMM 1333mhz DDR3 memory – they claim the board will accept up to 16GB in total. The motherboard also supports 1066mhz and 1600mhz memory, but we will look at this in the bios later as sometimes listed specifications can vary.
There is room for expansion with another SATA port available on the board. This particular board also has wireless capabilities, via the 802.11 b/g/n (2T2R) module. This supports up to 300Mbps within a capable network. The board is supported by the Intel HD Graphics 3000.
Wow thats tiny to keep an i5 cool. very impressed with that. CPU cooler is so small……. might be borderline to keep that clean after a year or two. temps get high as it is, brand new. I remember opening my last PC and the CPu cooler was b asically blocked with dust.
That piano black looks brilliant brand new, see after a month? it is a nightmare. my TV is the same, the outter bevel is piano black and its consantlely being cleaned.
Wish they did a version in aluminum, like Apple products, that would be wicked. Id never buy apple for a media center as their OS doesnt support bluray and you need to mod it to Windows and add a player….. useless.
Nice.
I had an ATOM powered Sapphire system after reading the review here and it sucked. so frigging slow. never touching atom again.
The back I/O is good, but why no DVI? seems bizarre when they have everything there but the kitchen sink
Nice product but you could have compared the gaming performance to … well anything! Also whats with the deal with the 20+ pages for a review that really need be no more than half a dozen? Other than that nice work.