ASRock ION3D (152B with Bluray) Review featuring Cyberlink

1. Introduction2. The ASRock ION3D3. System Setup Methodology4. The Bios and Overclocking5. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra6. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.57. BluRay Playback With PowerDVD 10 Ultra8. Media Encoding with MediaEspresso9. ASRock App Charger (with iPad) & USB 3.010. HQV Benchmark 2.011. Flash Content12. Gaming: Left 4 Dead 213. Power Consumption14. Acoustics Performance15. Thermal Dynamics16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

As this is the first time we have analysed the Intel Atom D525 processor on this platform we thought it would be worthwhile to run a few tests to get an overall view of performance against other hardware. Synthetic testing is not a major point for the ATOM/ION platform, so if this holds no interest, skip ahead to the BluRay page.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

For an Atom based product, the D525 is a very good performer, especially at 2.1ghz. It certainly isn't going to be breaking any records, but considering the 13W power demand at full load this is extremely impressive.

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