ASRock CoreHT 252B HTPC

Asrock CoreHT 252B HTPC Review

Asrock had a hectic showing during this year's Taipei Computex, armed to the teeth with various new products including motherboards based on newfangled chipsets such as the Intel Z68 and AMD 990FX. Despite showcasing a bevy of boards, our interest was piqued by the latest entry in the company's long line of mini PCs. Last year we examined the Vision 3D, the successor to the Core 100HT and Asrock's first mini PC to stray from the norm by dropping Intel's Atom processor for a much snappier Core Mobile chip. With significantly more CPU power, the results were impressive, but the Core 100HT still had one major weakness: Intel's HD Graphics. To give you a quick rundown of Asrock's previous models, the Core 100HT used Intel's HM55 chipset and without the support of a discrete graphics card, it was forced to use the integrated graphics exclusively. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in by far the worst graphics performance we had seen in recent time from an Asrock mini PC. Thankfully, Asrock got its act together with the Vision 3D, outfitting the system with Intel's Core Mobile processors (the flagship model carried a Core i5-560M).