Arctic MC101 Entertainment Center Review Network   Page 1

Reviewer: Tyler Bernath Article Publish Date: 7/24/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

Every once in a while a product is announced and you just have to have it. So the waiting begins, for it to show up on store shelves or at online retailers. This situation is very similar to when I spoke with Arctic many months ago about an upcoming entertainment center they were putting together. At that time details were a bit sketchy and I had no idea what kind of hardware it would use. All I knew was I wanted it, because their last inception of a media player was the MC001 and it was fantastic and still is to this day.

Further down the line details started trickling in that this new entertainment center would use some sort of AMD processor and graphics. This in itself had me a bit intrigued to say the least, because time and time again AMD is the innovator in high performance low power solutions and up until now Intel’s Atom line of CPUs has been the choice of SFF PCs.

About a month ago I was contacted by Arctic and was told the MC101 was ready and with that the full specifications of this entertainment center were released to the public. It was only fitting that all of my speculations would come true and that leaves us with a very powerful yet compact machine.

Hiding inside the depths of this tiny PC is the new AMD Trinity APU, the A10 4600M to be exact. This Fusion APU tucks in 4 CPU cores at 3.2Ghz supplemented by the Radeon 7660 graphics core that also packs desktop graphics performance. Add to that a full 8GB of DDR3 1600 memory and you have a very powerful home entertainment center that rivals the performance of a full desktop PC.

Honestly I have been waiting almost 7 months for this device, so let’s just get into this review and see what Arctic has come up with in this Trinity powered MC101.