MSI Cubi 2 Plus vPro Skylake mini-STX PC Review
by Ganesh T S on April 27, 2016 8:05 AM ESTHTPC Credentials
The MSI Cubi 2 Plus is relatively quiet considering the fact that it has an actively cooled 35W CPU inside. Consumers looking for high-end / fanless HTPCs need to look elsewhere. However, the Cubi 2 Plus is more than capable enough when it comes to basic HTPC duties - OTT streaming and playback of various media codecs flawlessly in an efficient manner.
The vPro model is meant for business use and it doesn't make sense to evaluate it for HTPC duties. So, this section deals only with the Core i3-6100T model. In addition, we have already seen the HTPC capabilities of the Core i3-6100T in the ECS LIVA One review. The treatment in this section will, therefore, be cursory in nature.
Refresh Rate Accurancy
Starting with Haswell, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have been on par with respect to display refresh rate accuracy. The most important refresh rate for videophiles is obviously 23.976 Hz (the 23 Hz setting). As expected, the MSI Cubi 2 Plus has no trouble with refreshing the display appropriately in this setting.
The gallery below presents some of the other refresh rates that we tested out. The first statistic in madVR's OSD indicates the display refresh rate.
Network Streaming Efficiency
Evaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back our standard YouTube test stream and five minutes from our standard Netflix test title. Using HTML5, the YouTube stream plays back a 1080p encoding. Since YouTube now defaults to HTML5 for video playback, we have stopped evaluating Adobe Flash acceleration. Note that only NVIDIA exposes GPU and VPU loads separately. Both Intel and AMD bundle the decoder load along with the GPU load. The following two graphs show the power consumption at the wall for playback of the HTML5 stream in Mozilla Firefox (v 45.0.3). Being a full-blown desktop platform means that the Cubi 2 Plus, like the LIVA One, is not particularly power-efficient when it comes to these HTPC workloads.
Netflix streaming evaluation was done using the Windows 10 Netflix app. Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D). Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here.
Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks
In order to evaluate local file playback, we concentrate on EVR-CP and madVR. We already know that EVR works quite well even with the Intel IGP for our test streams. Under madVR, we used the DXVA2 scaling logic (as it is well known that the stressful configurations don't work even on the Iris Pro-equipped processors). We considered four different cases while evaluating the ECS LIVA One. In this review, we dropped the testing with Kodi and Quick Sync.
In our earlier reviews, we focused on presenting the GPU loading and power consumption at the wall in a table (with problematic streams in bold). Starting with the Broadwell NUC review, we decided to represent the GPU load and power consumption in a graph with dual Y-axes. Nine different test streams of 90 seconds each were played back with a gap of 30 seconds between each of them. The characteristics of each stream are annotated at the bottom of the graph. Since the Intel Skylake GPU load reported by third-party tools is only the EU load, it doesn't particularly reflect the actual load. Fortunately, Intel also provides instantaneous power consumption numbers for the GPU block. Note that the GPU usage is graphed in red and needs to be considered against the left axis, while the GPU and at-wall power consumption need to be considered against the right axis.
Frame drops are evident whenever the GPU load consistently stays above the 85 - 90% mark.
No frame drops were observed in any of the cases other than the 4Kp30 H.264 clip with madVR.
One of the aspects I wish to clarify in our video decoding and rendering benchmarks is the absence of any HEVC clips in our test suite. In addition to waiting for widespread adoption (i.e, the licensing issues currently being played out with the MPEG-LA, HEVC Advance and others), we also want to coincide HEVC playback evaluation with a shift in our HTPC testbed from a 1080p display to a 4K one.
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ganeshts - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
Yes, but I have seen that type of behavior (load power higher than PSU rating) in some of the other mini-PCs that we have evaluated before.KateH - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
The 90W rating is on the DC side; the draw from the wall will always be higher than the system consumption due to heat losses in the power supply. The 102W reading on the AC side means the system is probably consuming around 80-85W DC.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Thanks both of you. I'd neglected to take into account inefficiencies in the PSU. Still, that is cutting things a bit close. An inexpensive PSU running at 80-90% of its max rated output might not last very long under adverse conditions like say, sitting under a desk in a hot room on top of a shaggy carpet.ganeshts - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Well, I suspect no one is going to run Prime 95 + Furmark 24x7 on their PC :) It is just a check for how much the max. power consumption of the unit is going to be.HomeworldFound - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
All of these devices are a let down to me, I want one yet it fails to meet my expectation every time. So many different Intel configurations exist that the market is flooded by products that barely differ outside of the case. Why do none of these manufacturers team up and offer a better alternative to the Intel GPU even in the larger more accommodating products?I guess what I have to ask is if I want something like this with the ability to game, is AMD really ahead of the competition or will they be with an improved CPU/GPU combo?
abufrejoval - Saturday, April 30, 2016 - link
I guess the biggest issue is about what you consider "game ready". To you it may mean the equivalent of a GTX 980 ti or even a dual AMD Fury or about 300 Watts of TDP.Others are happy enough with the on-board GPU or would love to see an AMD Nano (175 Watts) matched to this form factor.
This large range of TDP cannot be solved with a single physical design in this form factor and the result is loss of economy of scale, which is what these systems are mostly about: Selling large volumes.
And that unfortunately means that the TDP is pretty much set in stone and either excludes an external GPU or uses one so weak, it doesn't do any better than what an APU or Intel HD graphics can deliver by themselves.
AMD is ahead only in terms of the openness of their platform, of where they could go theoretically as proven out by the PS4 and Xbox 2 designs.
In that theory someone could go and have AMD design a custom SoC a couple of notches above the likes of a PS4, using either 16 GB GDDR5 for OS and graphics or even 16GB of HBM2, 8 juicy CPU cores (4GHz class) and Fury class graphics with a combined TDP of 200 Watts and cooled by something really massive and slow moving.
At the space and weight equivalent of a gallon of milk you could have a gaming PC, that's even portable (thanks to the handle on that milk bottle) from room to room or party to party.
Better yet, I'd like to be able to stack two, four (or eight?) of these together, to build an even larger NUMA/SLI rig.
PCs are still designed far too CPU centric, even if GPUs have long since taken over a much larger part of the silicon real-estate and the value creation.
Let's move what's left of the PC onto the GPU board (or SoC) and turn the motherboard into a passive backplane with slot form factor sockets for additional (2-4/8) APUs.
And make the memory system GPU centric with the CPU being allowed to use some of that to bootstrap the games (or even run Excel/SAP during business hours).
AMD could execute that vision, if somebody were to provide the required cash up front. The result would be an open PC, which unfortunately means that recovering the invest could be much more difficult than it already is on locked-in systems like the PS4 or the Xbox.
RayRoy - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Will there be a Skylake U model in the original Cubi size?ganeshts - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
I have pinged MSI, but they have neither confirmed nor denied plans for a Skylake Cubi-mini. We will probably know more at Computex. If it is not shown at Computex, I think it will not be coming.potf - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Sorry, only thing missing imho in the article photos is where is the hdd if you want to put one ?I would guess on the bottom as there seems to be room for it.
Asus competition the vc65 / VC65R has at least 2 2.5 hdd slots , 4 in some VC65R versions, and an optical drive (but have no M2)
MSI cubi broadwell small factors had the option to have msata plus 2.5 drive, and it seems to me that the bottom would be removable in the 2 plus version also, in order to choose between a smaller form factor and more ports, but now it only seems that is a differentator between normal and pro version.
Otherwise, still waiting to see how MSI will sell them in europe : for now only ref is MSI Cubi 2 Plus-B3610T4GXXDXX Intel Core i3-6100T 2x 3.20 GHz, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, no OS and I do not know whether the ssd is in M2 factor or 2.5. Street price is around 500 euros vat included (400 USD equivalent).
The nice thing with selling them barebones is the flexibility, the less nice one is that T processors are less easy to find than standard cpus (55-65W).
ganeshts - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
It is is one of the teardown gallery photos, where the removable bottom part is shown separately, and there is a rectangular 'hole' corresponding to where the 2.5" drive is mounted. The 'proprietary' cable to connect the drive to the main board on the bigger segment is supplied along with the unit (you can see it in the package photo on the right side)