Intel's Haswell NUC: D54250WYK UCFF PC Review
by Ganesh T S on January 3, 2014 4:25 PM ESTThe NUC as an HTPC
The form factor and network streaming power consumption profile of the Intel D54250WYK NUC makes it a very attractive option for HTPCs. We have already covered Haswell as a HTPC platform in great detail before. So, we will just take a look at a couple of interesting aspects which may vary from one build to another.
Refresh Rate Handling:
One of the most important fixes in Haswell for HTPC users was increased display refresh rate accuracy. We have already seen 23.976 Hz working perfectly in our custom Haswell HTPC build. The gallery below presents the various refresh rates that we tested out on the Intel D54250WYK NUC.
As expected, the refresh rate accuracy is excellent across all tested points. One of the pleasantly surprising aspect was that the drivers allowed forcing of refresh rates not reported by the display through EDID. This must have come in a recent update, because, when I was evaluating our first Haswell HTPC build, the i7-4765T based PC refused to drive 50 Hz on the Sony KDL46EX720. However, the NUC was able to do it successfully after deselecting 'Hide modes not supported by this monitor'.
Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks:
Detailed decoder / renderer benchmarks for Haswell were presented in our initial review. For the NUC, we are going to concentrate on XBMC's native decoding / rendering (used by the average HTPC user) and the combination of QuickSync with EVR-CP and madVR.
We used MPC-HC v1.7.1 for evaluation. LAV Filters 0.59.1.26 come pre-integrated as the default choice with that version. madVR 0.86.11 was configured with the following options: no decoding, deinterlacing automatically activated when needed with deactivation when in doubt (decided by only looking at pixels in the frame center), chroma upscaling set to bicubic with a sharpness of 75, image upscaling and downscaling done by GPU video logic using DXVA2 calls, rendering in full screen exclusive mode with playback delayed until fill up of the render queue, a separate device for presentation, CPU and GPU queue sizes of 128 and 24, 16 frames presented in advance, smooth motion features disabled and the default quality-performance tradeoffs of 16b pixel shader results and subtitle quality optimization for performance.
A number of experiments were done with different madVR settings and this was the one with which we were able to play all our test streams without frame drops. It must be noted that the streams benchmarked are meant to stress the system. The usual media file played back is more of the 1080p24 variety which goes comparatively easy on the resources compared to the 60 fps streams used for the tables below.
| QuickSync Decoder + EVR-CP | |||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | CPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2 | 23.02 | 7.55 | 11.27 W |
| 576i50 H.264 | 20.80 | 6.68 | 10.97 W |
| 720p60 H.264 | 33.04 | 16.53 | 13.70 W |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 38.72 | 16.44 | 14.66 W |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 37.29 | 12.82 | 13.95 W |
| 1080i60 VC-1 | 35.53 | 14.31 | 14.61 W |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 41.98 | 19.88 | 16.05 W |
| QuickSync Decoder + madVR | |||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | CPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2 | 44.66 | 9.72 | 15.59 W |
| 576i50 H.264 | 49.02 | 10.98 | 16.01 W |
| 720p60 H.264 | 58.57 | 24.98 | 19.27 W |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 56.97 | 35.28 | 23.60 W |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 54.76 | 33.13 | 23.17 W |
| 1080i60 VC-1 | 56.49 | 34.00 | 23.19 W |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 60.21 | 27.92 | 27.01 W |
| XBMC 12.3 | |||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | CPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2* | 23.92 | 7.32 | 11.20 W |
| 576i50 H.264 | 11.23 | 4.44 | 9.23 W |
| 720p60 H.264 | 28.80 | 8.79 | 11.99 W |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 16.71 | 7.42 | 10.78 W |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 16.52 | 6.04 | 10.22 W |
| 1080i60 VC-1** | 5.23 | 5.34 | 8.71 W |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 33.62 | 8.16 | 13.05 W |
The only disappointing aspects above are related to the native decoder / renderer used by XBMC. Interlaced VC-1 decoding is broken when hardware accelerated decoding is enabled. Deinterlacing, particularly for the 480i60 stream, was not properly performed with any combination of settings. On the other hand, QuickSync decoding works smoothly (as expected) for all the test streams when used with any renderer.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
107 Comments
View All Comments
nico_mach - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
That's why apple fans (repeat customers) purchase their PCs as soon as they're released, which is good for Apple PR.I think that difference is seriously overblown, however. The processor details, especially on a desktop PC, are getting more irrelevant.
For HTPCs, the performance has been good enough for a while.
Jan-Willem Arnold - Sunday, January 25, 2015 - link
Yes, the price will get close to a Mac Mini.And then:
- A Mac Mini will retain its value over time very well. You can sell it after some years for a good price.With a NUC, you can probably forget about that.
- OSX - which is great.
- Thunderbolt ports
- Better case
- Built in power supply
- Supports high end audio when you use a DAC, the clock form the DAC can trigger OSX, which is great.
- Great drivers, everything works out of the box
- They built it, tested it and will support it for you. Apple takes a lot of responsibility to make sure everything works well together, where other manufacturers offer just the bare hardware and ask almost the same amount.
cgalyon - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
I am curious how this compares to the less expensive BRIX models and the less expensive version of the NUC (around $250 at Newegg).hfm - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
I must be the only one that didn't know what the F** a NUC was...Even their own site doesn't say unless you can see behind the play button on the video intro on the bottom..
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/overvie...
That said, how is this different from other VESA mount units in the past?
xodusgenesis - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Why would you choose this over a Raspberry PI for XBMC? $45<$600+Alketi - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
xodusgenesis, the i3 NUC is more like $400, but to answer the question:1. Flawless playback of high-bit rate bluray rips.
2. Support/passthrough for _all_ forms of HD multichannel audio.
There are others, but those are my main reasons.
patterson32 - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Are there quieter 3rd party fans available? I'd get one of the fanless cases but they're huge and can cost a lot compared to the board.patterson32 - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
I hope this board layout, nano-ITX or pico-ITX gets more popular among motherboard and case makers. Sometimes, I want to put something together that may not actually be super small but want to have a lot of internal space for other things.morganf - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
No comment on the CIR sensor? Did you try testing it with one or more types of remote controls to see how well it works and what it is compatible with?quillaja - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
I have almost this same NUC build (but I went with 16gb RAM and a 240gb Intel SSD). So far I'm quite happy with it. My favorite thing is using DP 1.2 MST to drive 2 monitors. I'm glad all 4 usb ports are USB3, though I don't have any USB3 devices.The bad thing I encountered is drivers. Win 8.1 x64 didn't detect and install drivers for the AC7260 wifi card automatically, which of course handicapped the rest of the install due to lack of internet connection. Therefore I had to install most of the drivers manually, which, these days, is pretty lame in my opinion. There are still 3 "unknown" devices in device manager which haven't been addressed by windows.
I've had this NUC since Thanksgiving, so hopefully MS/Intel have corrected the driver issue I experienced.