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ASRock Core HT HTPC (Sandybridge) Review

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

  • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
  • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
  • Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
  • Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
  • Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

  • SMP – Multi-Processor
  • MC – Multi-Core
  • SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
  • MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
  • GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
  • NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
  • AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
  • IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The Core i5 delivers solid performance in all areas, not as powerful as a desktop Core i5, but respectable.

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6 comments

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. Nice.

    I had an ATOM powered Sapphire system after reading the review here and it sucked. so frigging slow. never touching atom again.

  5. The back I/O is good, but why no DVI? seems bizarre when they have everything there but the kitchen sink

  6. 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.