Introduction

Late last year, we took a look at the ASRock CoreHT 252B, a Sandy Bridge-based midrange HTPC. We liked the CoreHT quite a bit, noting that the small form factor HTPC was a solid choice for most users in this segment. It was hit all the key points, though it didn’t do anything in particular to set itself apart from the rest of the SFF crowd. Our main complaints centered around the hard drive performance, and to that end comes the ASRock CoreHT Server.

It’s very similar to the CoreHT we reviewed before, even sharing nearly the same specs. The one major difference: there’s two 500GB HDDs in the place of one, configured in RAID 0. Other than that, there’s the same mobile Sandy Bridge internals, headlined by the HM67 chipset and Core i5-2410M processor.

ASRock’s Core HTPC line is their midrange model, slotting between the entry level ION-based machines and the high-end Vision 3D units. The Server is externally exactly the same as the 252B, so I’ll refer you back to that review for more details on the unboxing experience. The CoreHT case is glossy black, mostly angular, but the industrial design is understated and fits well in an A/V cabinet. I like the two USB 3.0 ports on the front, as well as the understated nature of the design. The industrial design isn’t premium by any means, but it’s generally inoffensive and doesn’t bring attention to itself, which is perhaps the most important visual trait for an HTPC.

There’s a decent array of ports on the back, with four USB 2.0 ports, another pair of USB 3.0 ports, eSATA, SPDIF, Gigabit Ethernet, VGA, and of course HDMI. Cooling is handled with an intake vent on the front of the system and a small exhaust fan at the back.

Take a Look Inside

As with the CoreHT 252B, the Server is built around notebook internals. Let’s break it down.

CPU/GPU: Intel Core i5-2410M/HD 3000

The i5-2410M is a 32nm mobile Sandy Bridge part, clocked at 2.3GHz with a maximum turbo frequency of 2.9GHz. It’s a dual-core, 4-thread part that has a 35W TDP and a maximum clock of 1.2GHz for the on-die HD 3000 graphics core.

Chipset: Intel HM67

Interestingly, the motherboard has HM65 printed on it and the chipset even has a sticker on it identifying itself as an HM65 part. This would make any kind of RAID problematic, because the HM65 chipset doesn’t have an onboard RAID controller. This appears, however, to be a simple problem of mislabeling, because the chip is pretty clearly based on the Cougar Point HM67 platform (as identified in CPU-Z), with the two hard drives set up in RAID 0. Functionally, the only difference between HM65 and HM67 is the inclusion of the onboard RAID controller. Otherwise, the board is basically the same as the the one found in the CoreHT-252B.

Storage: 2 x 500GB 7200RPM, RAID 0

The star of the show here, the hard drive array, is made up of two 2.5” 500GB 7200RPM SATA hard drives arranged in a RAID 0 configuration to form a single 1TB volume. The two drives aren’t matched, with one being a Hitachi HTS7250 and the other being a Western Digital WD5000, but the specs are very similar. We will cover performance shortly, but it’s quite good.

Beyond the main features, there are two SoDIMMs of 2GB DDR3 1333 for a total of 4GB system memory, along with an Atheros AR9287 wireless card and the same Phillips Lite-On DS-4E1S Blu-ray combo drive as the 252B.

A special mention for the media center remote—it’s the same one as the CoreHT 252B, but I didn’t dislike it as much as Ganesh did. It feels light in hand, but not of poor build quality, and it’s relatively compact given the number of buttons on it. This leads to rather small buttons, but it’s something you can adjust to unless you have huge hands. Personally, I prefer remotes closer in form and function to the Boxee remote and such, but I found the CoreHT remote to be decent.

How Does the CoreHT Server Perform?

Application performance remains similar to the CoreHT 252B, with the major difference coming in hard drive-specific benchmarks.

For example, look at our WinRAR test, where we estimate how well WinRAR performs, particularly with respect to processing split archives. To evaluate this, we take a 4.36 GB MKV file, compress it in the 'Best' compression mode into a split archive (97.1 MB each), which results in 44 files on the hard disk. The time taken to decompress this split archive is then recorded. The performance in this benchmark is heavily influenced by the hard disk in the system.

In this test, the Server soundly beats the 252B as well as the older Core 100 model. The other possibility here is to reconfigure the hard drives in RAID 1, although performance would decrease.

Temperatures and Power

Heat characteristics under idle and load remain similar to the CoreHT 252B. We took temperatures after 10 minutes of idle after booting to the Windows desktop, as well as after 15 minutes of putting the system under intense loading with the Furmark and Prime 95 stress test benchmarks running simultaneously. The numbers were actually slightly lower than the 252B, though not significantly so. This could either be environmentally related or due to the slightly different CPU. The hard drive is not significantly stressed in either benchmark, so the change in hard drive configuration did not affect thermal load significantly.

There was about a 10% increase in power consumption in the Server versus the 252B, with idle consumption rising to 19.8W from 18W and consumption under load going to 65.6W (from 62). That’s about what would be expected from the addition of a second hard drive.

Closing Thoughts

The CoreHT Server is quite simply just a different version of the CoreHT series HTPC, and quite a good one. We really liked the CoreHT when we reviewed it last year, and the Server edition solves our major functional complaint with increased storage capacity and hard drive performance. Another way to go about improving disk-related performance would be to have a smaller solid state boot drive with a secondary 1TB hard drive for media storage, but this solution would potentially increase the cost (depending on the choice of SSD).

In terms of media handling, we didn't notice any changes with the CoreHT Server Edition. That's not necessarily a bad thing, considering the CoreHT ranked pretty high among HTPCs. However, the integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics are not at the same level in terms of media support as, for instance, the newly released HD 7750. What's more, as with the CoreHT, there's no option to upgrade the graphics to something more potent. While we understand the attraction of a small and sleek HTPC, there are reasons to go with a larger HTPC chassis.

Other than that, our conclusions remain similar to the ones we had with the CoreHT 252B. We’d like to see more premium industrial design and build quality from ASRock, with a more elegant design along with higher end touches like a slot-loading drive and a more aesthetically pleasing remote design. Otherwise, the CoreHT and CoreHT Server offer a solid and unobtrusive HTPC for a decent value, and for that we commend ASRock.