ASRock ION3D (152B with Bluray) Review featuring Cyberlink

It would be remiss of us to omit some of the applications that ASRock are bundling and while we have no interest in the ASRock AiWi (which allows you to turn your iPhone into a Gamejoystick), we were extremely curious when reading about the ‘ASRock App Charger'.

This is a driver based software package that apparently ‘makes your iPhone charge up to 40% faster than before'. ASRock App Charger supports continuous charging when the PC enters Standby mode (S1), Suspend to RAM (S3), hibernation mode (S4) or power off (S5). The App Charger technology has been fully applied on ASRock Full series motherboards.

Those of you who have an Apple iPad will know that very few, if any, computer based USB ports send enough current to charge the iPad at the same rate as the plug adapter. The iPad will often say ‘not charging' and it is a technical issue that Apple themselves have even addressed. Even expensive motherboards I have used do not deliver the full current and it can often mean that the iPad will charge at half the speed, or not at all if you are using it at the same time.

We charged the iPad three times from a 20% reading, until it registered as fully charged.

The results speak for themselves, the ASROCK system with driver manages to perform at the same level as the offical power socket based charger, even when the ION3D is in sleep mode. I found this extremely impressive, particularly as it is one of the few systems that the iPad registers with the correct ‘charging' response when plugged in.

The front ports on the ASRock ION3D are USB 3.0 capable so we decided to test the performance with a Kingston Data Traveler Ultimate 64GB drive.

A great performance figure when using a USB 3.0 drive cutting the time down from 6 mins 17 seconds to 2 minutes 42 seconds.

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