MSI Cubi 2 Plus vPro Skylake mini-STX PC Review

Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the MSI Cubi 2 Plus vPro with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together. The numbers are typical for the combination of hardware components in the machine.

The MSI Cubi 2 Plus vPro is able to sustain a much higher load (despite having a processor with the same TDP as the Cubi 2 Plus).

Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by 30 minutes of pure CPU loading. This is followed by another 30 minutes of both CPU and GPU being loaded simultaneously. After this, the CPU load gets removed, allowing the GPU to be loaded alone for another 30 minutes. The various clocks in the system as well as the temperatures within the unit are presented below. Starting with this review, we are also presenting the instaneous power consumption numbers of the internal components as reported by HWiNFO.

According to the official specifications, the junction temperature of the processors is 100 C. While the Core i3-6100T is kept comfortably below that limit, the thermal solution is just about sufficient for the Core i5-6500T. Note that the CPU package power starts going up rapidly above 60W for the vPro system, but 'power throttling' kicks in before thermal throttling to keep things within limits.

Another important aspect to keep note of while evaluating fanless PCs is the chassis temperature. Using the Android version of the FLIR One thermal imager, we observed the chassis temperature for the vPro model after the CPU package temperature reached the steady state value in the above graph.

We have additional thermal images in the gallery below.

The active thermal solution ensure that the chassis temperature doesn't become a big concern even under very heavy loading conditions.