AC Ryan Playon!HD Essential Review

1. Introduction2. The A.C. Ryan Essential Bundle3. The Essential (External)4. The Essential (Internal)5. Playon! GUI 2.06. Real World Testing7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

When the four screws are removed, the tray slides out to reveal the hard drive and components.

As we expected, the hard drive of choice is a Samsung HD103Si model, 1TB in size and with a 32meg cache. This is a good choice for a media player as it runs quiet, doesn't emit a lot of heat and is very reliable.

The hard drive attaches to the motherboard with a universal sata power and data cable.

At the rear is a 40mm low noise fan to ensure that the internal hard drive is adequately cooled. We always hate to see fans this small being used, but we will look into the noise factor later in the review.

At the front is an LED light which is controlled from the motherboard. As can be seen in the images above, the PCB only fills around half of the internal space.

The processor controlling the Essential is a RTD1055DD, which is paired up with Nanya NT5TU64M16GG-AC DDR2 memory.

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