ASRock Vision 3D System Review

The optical drive and hard drive are attached to the top part of the chassis and it ‘folds out' to reveal the motherboard and other components.

This ASRock HM55-MXM motherboard is created for high end multimedia demands. The layout of the PCB offers a spare Sata 3.0GB/s port with a mini PCI Express port which is populated with an Atheros AR9287 wireless network adapter. The hard drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 SATA which is supplied unformatted.

The Gigabit Ethernet adapter is a Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCI E model. Next to this is an NEC uPD720200 USB 3.0 controller to offer fast connectivity for backups and streaming. This board only supports 1.5 volt DDR3 SoDIMM memory and can take a total of 8GB of ram. Asrock install two Kingston branded SSZ3128M8-EDJ1D dual-channel 2GB DDR3-1333 (667MHz) SoDIMM modules.

The Intel Core i3 370M is equipped with 3MB of Intel Smart Cache memory via a 32nm process which includes Intel's 64 bit instruction set. The i3 370M is a 35 Watt TDP processor. The ASRock system utilises a low profile heatpipe design which cools both CPU and GPU.

The nVidia Geforce GT 425M has 96 unified shaders and 1GB of GDDR3 connected to a 128bit bus. This discrete solution delivers 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth and offers 16 ROPS and 96 unified shaders. It is no powerhouse but it should be more than capable of gaming with the eye candy lowered.

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