Arctic MC001-BD Entertainment Center
Jan 8th, 2012 | By SimonThe Intel Atom D525 will most certainly be the weakest link when compared against other desktop machines. It just wouldn’t be a fair fight to put the Arctic MC001-BD against a Q6600 or an i5 let alone an i7 so I won’t. What will be presented below will give you a baseline as to where the Arctic MC001-BD falls if you want to compare it against your own machine. All of the benchmarks below were executed independently three times and the results were then averaged.
I monitored the power draw of the Arctic MC001 under three different conditions: idle, video playback and full load.
I also monitored the temperature. Under idle conditions I let the computer sit for thirty minutes before taking a set of data. For the full load condition I ran FurMark and OCCT to stress the CPU and GPU. This combination created the most amount of heat and it didn’t take very long for the temperatures to plateau out. These temperatures are pretty hot but when you consider the fact that the system has no fans to push all the hot air out it’s a remarkable feat the system didn’t crash!
When it came down to regular day to day use, the Arctic MC001-BD had more than enough power. I never waited long for applications to load, video and audio playback was flawless when streamed over the network, played off my hard drive or from the Blu-Ray reader.
During my time with the MC001-BD I never found it to be very noisy. The base has a rubber pad which helps dampen any vibration generated by the BluRay drive. The loudest component would be the hard drive. You can hear the platter spin up but from my couch it’s not really noticeable, you have to listen for it to catch it. By the time you start a movie up then it will most certainly drown it out.
