ASRock ION3D (152B with Bluray) Review featuring Cyberlink

The ASROCK ION3D is supplied without an operating system installed, which is to keep the cost down, otherwise the end user will have to pay an additional licensing fee. This means you will already need a Windows operating system disc available.

For our build we used our OS of choice, Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit – the flagship Microsoft product.

Installation went smooth, although we could immediately feel that the internal 5,400 rpm drive was sluggish via our system install from USB drive. ASRock supply a DVD disc with a simple ‘1 click installs all' button. It then goes through various reboots installing all the necessary drivers and bundled software. A very cool option and we hope more manufacturers take note of this.

CPU-Z gives us a quick overview of the Atom D525 processor, it is clocked at 1.8ghz and is supplied with 1MB of L2 Cache. The memory onboard is 2GB of 800MHZ DDR3 by Nanya Technology.

System validation can be seen over here.

The nVidia graphics (GT218) is a capable solution for this kind of small form factor design and while it is no powerhouse it does offer a wealth of hardware acceleration to help ease the load. It has 512MB of GDDR3 onboard via a 64 bit bus and the reference clocks are 535 mhz on the core and 790mhz on the memory.

Our overall Windows 7 rating was 3.5 which is not an average of the figures, but limited to the lowest category, in this case the processor. The graphics results are quite positive, falling at 4.9 on desktop performance and 5.7 for gaming.

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