MSI Cubi 2 Kaby Lake UCFF PC Review

HTPC Credentials

Subjectively speaking, the only time I could hear the Cbi2-005BUS fan was in our Prime95 and Furmark testing. For media playback workloads, the fan noise couldn't be heard at all. This is an acceptable HTPC for most users when it comes to the acoustic profile.

Refresh Rate Accuracy

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 Cubi2-005B 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 H.264 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 50.1.0).

GPU load was around 14.19% for the YouTube HTML5 stream and 0.009% for the steady state 6 Mbps Netflix streaming case.

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.

Given the configuration of the PC with a SATA SSD, and the overall power efficiency of Kaby Lake, it is no surprise that the Cubi2-005BUS is one of the most power efficient platforms for online streaming services.

We didn't evaluate 4K Netflix streaming on this PC because there is no HDCP 2.2 support.

Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks

In order to evaluate local file playback, we concentrate on EVR-CP and Kodi 16.1. We already know that EVR works quite well even with the Intel IGP for our test streams. The decoder used was LAV Filters bundled with MPC-HC v1.7.10.276. We have now added HEVC streams to our test suite

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. Eleven 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. Note that the GPU usage is graphed in red and needs to be considered against the left axis, while the at-wall power consumption is graphed in green and needs to be considered against the right axis.

Frame drops are evident whenever the GPU load consistently stays above the 85 - 90% mark. The Cubi2-005BUS has absolutely no trouble in keeping up with the media playback use-cases

Moving on to the codec support, the Intel HD Graphics 620 is a known quantity with respect to the scope of supported hardware accelerated codecs (based on Intel's claims). DXVA Checker serves as a confirmation.

Kaby Lake-U has one of the most comprehensive codec supports in the market after Intel decided to add HEVC 8b and 10b full hardware decode. In fact, there is also support for 10-bit VP9 in the GPU. It is a pity that the display engine still doesn't support HDMI 2.0 natively.