Arctic MC101-A10 Home Entertainment Centre Review

Arctic preinstall just 11 programs on the MC101. This is fantastic because it gives users the freedom to install exactly what they want without bloatware hogging the system's resources.

Respectable scores are shown by Windows' system. The 5.9 overall score is due to the fact that the MC101 uses a HDD, not SSD, as the primary drive.

The 32nm AMD Trinity A10-4600M is a quad core laptop APU with 35W TDP. Its reference speed is 2.3GHz but it utilises AMD TurboCore 3.0 technology to dynamically adjust the frequency up to a possible 3.2GHz. For the majority of our testing, the processor ran at a frequency of 2.7GHz, achieved by a 100MHz bus speed and 27x multiplier.

An AMD Radeon HD 7660G graphics processor is built into the APU. Its reference GPU frequency is purportedly 497MHz but due to the dynamic clock adjustments from power saving modes and TurboCore 3.0, we saw it operating at 438Mhz for the most part.

AMD's TurboCore 3.0 settings and adjustment profiles are shown in the above graphic. The HD 7660G GPU's clock speed can be boosted to a maximum of 685MHz (686MHz according to our GPU-Z screenshot) during certain conditions. The conditions that allow both the CPU and GPU's maximum frequencies to be reached are very limited.

Arctic splits the 1TB hard drive into two separate partitions. There is a 97.6GB C partition which should be fine for most HTPC users. An 814GB D partition leaves plenty of room for media such as games, movies and music to be installed onto.

Splitting the drive into two partitions was a good idea by Arctic, but they should have located the default directories such as Documents, Music, Pictures and Downloads on the larger D partition. I would advise you to move the directories to the drive's D partition otherwise you will quickly fill up C's 97.6GB of storage.

Software:

• 3DMark Vantage
• 3DMark 11
• PCMark 7
• SiSoft Sandra
• SuperPI
• Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
• FRAPS Professional
• Unigine Heaven Benchmark
• ATTO
• CrystalDiskMark
• Cyberlink MediaEspresso
• Battlefield 3
• Dirt 3

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