WiFi is also built in courtesy of a 802.11b/g/n card which did a good job of picking up the office's WiFi between the digital noise of mobile phones and many other laptops. With many budget PCs lacking a discrete graphics card, chances are you won't be able to do this with a budget PC, not to mention the ASRock will be a hell of a lot better looking in your lounge than a ghastly black and silver tin box.įor those wanting more storage or even redundancy courtesy of something such as a RAID 1 setup, there's the option to install a second 2.5in hard drive. The ASRock includes a Blu-ray DVD-RW combo drive as standard and combined with the HDMI port on the rear panel, this means it can plug straight into your HDTV. It's a bit of a tit-for-tat trade off though. These days, for £400 you can get yourself a low end Core 2 system with 3/4GB RAM, a half terabyte hard drive and the OS pre-installed. This brings the ASRock further into competition with budget desktop PCs. Instead the price tag - which tops £300 - only includes the base unit, so remember you're also looking at another £60 for a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. For many of us this isn't a big deal especially (especially as Windows 7 installs in less than 15 minutes anyway) but the target audience for this kind of machine, would, we think, want to just plug in the monitor and be surfing the internet in a few minutes. The packageLike many of the net-tops we've encountered, the ASRock doesn't come with an OS pre-installed.

Asrock ion 330 bios upgrade