Asrock Mini Q190D Review

Home Theatre system on the cheap



This unit was reviewed as an HTPC for my baby boomer folks that wanted to connect to the internet for their emails, youtube and some light surfing in the comfort of their living room. Additional requirement that I added for them is the ability to rip their audio collections to the onboard HDD as I intend to slowly phase out the need of a dedicated home audio system unit as seen being stacked above. With that in mind, the system should also have the ability to smoothly playback their DVDs.

This unit is purchased from a local retailer at 329SGD. This is a barebone unit that excludes memory and storage. I installed 4GB DDR3 crucial SODIMM and 500GB WD Black 2.5". The total price of this unit including all accessories, excluding the TV and the sound system is 520SGD.

The added requirement of  an optical drive remove my ability to procure the more popular NUC series from Intel. Even without the optical drive, the mainboard is significantly larger than NUC's. Compared to the Intel NUC as similar price range, Asrock provide a faster quad core Celeron compared to dual core. This comes at a price since the quad core is 10W as is unable to dissipate its heat efficiently from the heatsink within the case. I tried to briefly run in on passive, but with a idle CPU temperature of 55C and measurable rise of case temperature, its apparent the heat will quickly shorten its components lifespan.

This barebone has the ability to have 2 memory slot compared to 1 in Intel. Storage option allows 2 2.5" plus a laptop pop out style optical drive, while Intel model allows only 1 2.5" with no optical drive possibility.

As mention, it is a pop out style optical drive which feels very flimsy and the loading of the disk is as unintuitive as we recalled in our pre-2010 optical drive loaded laptops (its the part of tech nostalgia we don't want to be reminded about...). I would have sacrificed 1" more height to the external case in exchange for a full sized mechanized 3.5" drive.

The best addition Asrock had over have over Intel offering is the inclusion of large amount of ports, including legacy ones like vga and dvi. Furthermore, there's a total of 6 USB ports available, 4X 3.0 and 2X 2.0, similar to Intel. Asrock included a full array of audio outputs , which is really useful considering this device is marketed as a HTPC.

Installation wise, its pretty straight forward with some surprises. The RAM installation is peculiar, with 1 vertical like our usual ATX boards and 1 horizontal, usually found on laptops. I almost missed out the vertical RAM slot as it is pretty well hidden at the corner while blending in with the CPU heat sink.

There is a tray to allow installation of the optical drive and 2 2.5" hard disk, which is rather unintuitive. Not that I am expecting to see tool less installation from my ATX casing present here, but I believe there is tremendous room for improvement. The second HDD installation isn't as straight forward and the small images attached and vague language in the included documentation doesn't do much help either.


The mainboard with Optical drive + hard drive tray at the side


Much of the frustration from installation comes from the lack of the user manual in my package. The quick guide included is too vague and the full user manual wasn't well written to say the least. Coming from an existing Asrock mainboard user, I have to say the documentation of this barebone is both lacking and of poor quality, even by Taiwan OEM standards.

Due to its low power consumption, I originally planned to install Windows Server on it and promote it to a domain controller to better manage my growing fleet of personal devices running Windows. However, the WiFi driver was incompatible with Windows Server and due to barebone inconvenient location to wire it up via Ethernet, the plan was quickly dropped. It is currently running 64bit Windows 8.1 .

Performance wise, slow boot up of 1 minute++ is as of expected with traditional mechanical drives. The CPU performance, even much faster than Intel's offering N2820, still left much to be desired. DVD playback is smooth, but highly compressed video in mp4 or mkv container struggles with some shuttering at default MPC-HC settings. Changing the internal LAV filter to use Intel QuickSync instead of DVXA2 yield some beneficial improvement. But if you intend to run highly compressed 1080 videos at high bit rate, this is not the HTPC you are looking for.

But the most offending aspect of this product goes to... the driver CD.

Asrock teamed up with Google to shove their browser and what not during driver installation. In my humble opinion, this is a legit and ethical way to capitalize your software from your non paying user base (e.g. Piriform does that with their famous CCleaner). It is downright offensive when the driver autorun application of a fully paid hardware product does it. Not only do they give it a huge splash screen, their "Install all" option for drivers automatically push these software down WITHOUT opt out options. So the only way to install the drivers without the bloatware being pushed, is to run them ONE BY ONE. Even Piriform  has the decency to politely ask you if you like those bloatware installed, with easy opt out option. Pfft.

That is an utterly disgusting practice, and the worse thing is, what does Asrock stand to gain? Next to nothing. Like Lenovo's superfish, Asrock does not stand to profit in any meaningful way out of it. How much revenue can Asrock generate for pushing bloatware in such obtrusive way in such a low volume product? At best, throw a party for the entire product team. At worst, just enough to pay the developer's effort in compiling the driver CD...

In conclusion, this product performs well in what it set out to do, at a reasonable price. However, it is marred by poor corporate decision and that  finishing touch to the overall package consumers come to expect at 2015. In case you are wondering, I would give this product an 7 or 8 without that offensive bloatware cum digital deepthroat that Asrock just assaulted on every buyer of this product.

Overall: 6/10
Pros
Wide variety of ports
2X HDD bay
1X DVD drive included
2X RAM slots
Reasonably priced

Cons
Offensive driver CD with bloatware installation
Bad documentation
Unintuitive 2nd hard disk installation
Active cooling
Pop out DVD drive is flimsy