ASRock VisionX 471D Review – Evolutionary Upgrades for a Powerful mini-PC

ASRock has been one of the few motherboard vendors to focus on mini-PCs targeting the HTPC and portable gaming markets. Starting from the ION-based nettop days, they have consistently refreshed the mini-PC lineup in sync with Intel's product cycle. We reviewed the Haswell-based VisionX 420D last September. Instead of waiting for Broadwell / Skylake, ASRock has taken the opportunity of falling flash memory prices to bring out a mid-generation update in the form of the VisionX 471D. With a Core i7-4712MQ and a 256 GB mSATA SSD under the hood, ASRock manages to address two important improvement aspects that we noted in our VisionX 420D review. Do the additional capabilities come with any caveats? Are there tangible improvements in real-world workloads? Read on to see how the VisionX 471D fares in our mini-PC evaluation routine.