Benchmark Results: Entertainment
We’re not going to spend a lot of time gaming with the Core 100HT-BD because it has already been established that Intel's HD Graphics offers limited performance for this application. To Intel’s credit, the chipset represents the best graphics hardware it has delivered, and Intel representatives recently assured us that the company is working on fixing driver limitations. We plan to take a closer look at these driver improvements in the near future. Despite this, gaming is not the ASRock Core 100HT-BD’s forte. At best, Intel’s chipset can be used for low-fidelity games, typically massively multiplayer online (MMO) titles such as World of Warcraft, or simple Flash games at lower resolutions. Anyone interested in Intel HD Graphics game performance can check out our analysis here.
The PCMark gaming benchmark is actually a subset of the 3DMark 2009 suite. In this GPU-heavy task, the difference between the Core 100HT-BD and the Core i3-530 system doesn’t seem very notable, probably because the GPUs are identical, with only a 66 MHz difference between them.
When it comes to music playback and transcoding, the Core 100HT-BD suffers the same performance deficit we’ve come to expect compared to the desktop system, although music playback is just as smooth on either platform.
The HD video benchmark test uses two simultaneous threads, one of which transcodes HD video to a media server archive and the other plays back HD video in real-time. While both PCs are capable of performing the task smoothly, the Core i3-530 system does it with more CPU cycles to spare.