High-speed transfer tests, plus multimedia
Nothing wrong with the high-speed data-transfer tests.
Multimedia
While we have thus far focused on regular benchmarks, a Mini-ITX board's appeal largely lies with how well it can perform the dual role of a regular and home theatre PC.
Hooked up to a SATA-connected Blu-ray drive, we played a hardware-intensive, two-minute section of Inception. Average CPU load showed up as eight per cent. Playing a 1080p clip from YouTube returned an average CPU utilisation of nine per cent, and Running the Fishbowl benchmark on Internet Explorer 9 returned a score of 310 fish at 60fps. Read these as 'good' figures from an APU-only machine.
AMD's UVD 3 video-processing block is the key technology here and forgetting the actual numbers for a second, the A8-3850 APU and ASRock A75M-ITX combination deal just fine with high-definition content.