The ASRock DeskMini 310 Mini-PC Review: A Cost-Effective Mini-STX Platform

Small form-factor PCs and gaming systems have emerged as bright spots in the mature PC market over the last decade or so. Intel's NUC form-factor introduction was the turning point in the SFF segment, though it came with a few limitations for DIY enthusiasts. While mini-ITX systems are quite flexible and compact, Intel realized that the market could do with an option between the NUC and the mini-ITX systems. The mini-STX (5-inch by 5-inch, known as '5x5') form-factor was launched in 2015. ASRock and ECS have introduced a number of mini-STX form-factor boards and systems. Today, we are taking a look at a low-cost H310 chipset-based mini-STX system from ASRock: the DeskMini 310.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

Image
Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series (codenamed Kittson) processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture. The current-generation octa and quad-core Itanium 9700-series processors were introduced by Intel in 2017, in the process becoming the final processors based on the IA-64 ISA. Kittson for its part was a clockspeed-enhanced version of the Itanium 9500-series ‘Poulson’ microarchitecture launched in 2012, and featured a 12 instructions per cycle issue width, 4-way Hyper-Threading, and multiple RAS capabiliti...
Read more

Intel Axes 10nm CPU Based NUC

Image
Intel has notified its partners about plans to discontinue its only 10nm small form factor NUC in the market. The NUC, which went under the code name of Crimson Canyon, is/was Intel's only 10nm device in this market - it used Cannon Lake processors made on its 10 nm technology, and paired with AMD’s Radeon 540 graphics.  The fate of Intel’s Cannon Lake processors has been, to put it mildly, 'dead on arrival'. Delayed by over a year because of problems with 10 nm fabrication process, the CPUs suffered low yields and had design selections made that resulted in a non-functioning integrated GPU, as well as high power consumption: the Core i3-8121U processor at the heart of Intel's first generation 10nm ended up in a few China-only laptops ( which we reviewed ), and in a small number of Crimson Canyon NUC devices. Intel advises parties interested in its Crimson Canyon NUC SFF PCs to make their final orders by December 27, 2019, or ...
Read more

HighPoint Releases the SSD7102: A Bootable Quad M.2 PCIe x16 NVMe SSD RAID Card

Image
In the upper echelons of commercial workhouses, having access to copious amounts of local NVMe storage is more of a requirement than ‘something nice to have’. We’ve seen solutions in this space include custom FPGAs to software breakout boxes, and more recently a number of the motherboard vendors have provided PCIe x16 Quad M.2 cards for the market. The only downside is that they rely on the processor bifurcation, i.e. the ability for the processor to drive multiple devices from a single PCIe x16 slot. HighPoint has got around that limitation. The current way of getting four NVMe M.2 drives in a single PCIe x16 slot sounds fairly easy. There are 16 lanes in the slot, and each drive can take up to four lanes, so what is all the fuss? The problem arises from the CPU side of the equation: that PCIe slot connects directly to one PCIe x16 root complex on the chip, and depending on the configuration it may only be expecting one device to be connected to it. The minut...
Read more