MSI Cubi 2 Plus vPro Skylake mini-STX PC Review

HTPC 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.