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ASRock N3700-ITX Braswell SoC Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Braswell line up isn’t a common item you will find among our recommended retailers list, this is something that would likely be bundled into pre-built HTPC or found in a local high street retailer. The average price for the ASRock N3700-ITX is around £80.

Summary

After the tests, it’s clear that this option isn’t aimed at the mainstream market, but the power consumption is extremely low and the ability to play 1080p videos with very little power consumption increase. This particular option is also able to playback 4k video if connected to a 4K monitor. This makes it perfect for use in an HTPC for the living room or bedroom. This could also be bundled into a small computer case with multiple storage drives and used as a cheap NAS option.

By trying to keep the price down, ASRock has used the basic colour schemes and features. That means the board isn’t a great looking option, but when you consider that it is just £80; it makes perfect sense to use it in an HTPC or low power home desktop computer.

The performance was obviously poor, it took the same amount of time to run a basic Cinebench multicore test as an i7-4770k did with a single core. The IGP lacked the grunt to smoothly run a 1080p gaming benchmark on the lowest settings. However, I’m comparing these scores with tests that it would likely never deal with in real world usage and against a CPU that is one of the most powerful options currently available.

The one key feature which I thought was good with this motherboard was the Power Gear Technology. When switched into Eco mode, the performance and power consumption dropped as expected. However, when the Sport mode was enabled, it seemed to draw more power for very little performance gain. I believe that due to the extremely low power consumption and performance in the first place, that this feature is misplaced. If this was used on low range options such as an i3 an acceptable ASRock mini-ITX motherboard, I believe we would see bigger changes.

One thing I see hindering this option compared to say the slightly lower speed N3150-ITX is the price; yes its more powerful, but at £80, you can start to look at options such as an Intel Pentium G3258 and ASRock H81M-DGS. This alternative would not only be more powerful, but also lead itself to updatability to higher specification CPU’s and the use of a PCIe x16 slot.

Pros