Intel NUC5i5RYK Review: A Broadwell-U UCFF PC for Enthusiasts
by Ganesh T S on February 20, 2015 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
The Intel NUC5i5RYK provided us with the opportunity to take a look at what Broadwell-U can deliver when coupled with a motherboard providing premium features. The migration from 22nm to 14nm has allowed for higher base clocks while maintaining the same power envelop. The performance delta over the Haswell-U-based D54250WYKH (particularly, on the graphics side) is noticeable. That said, while migrating from Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge is a no-brainer, there is not enough on offer to recommend migrating from a Haswell-based UCFF PC.
The BIOS in our pre-production review kit had some quirks and the QVL could do with some additions (particularly, support for 2133 MHz DRAM kits would be very welcome). Hopefully, these get fixed as the official market availability date (sometime in March) draws near. We also covered aspects such as replaceable lids for added functionality (NFC and wireless chargining, for example) and customization in our launch piece. Similar to the previous generation NUCs, we also have a kit with support for a 2.5" drive.
The NUC5i5RYK provides an admirable UCFF PC option due to three major aspects:
- Availability of a M.2 PCIe 2.0 x4 slot for SSDs while retaining compatibility with M.2 SATA SSDs
- Presence of an I218-V GbE controller compared to the Realtek-based controllers in other UCFF / mini-PCs
- Upgrade to the Intel AC7265 2x2 802.11ac solution for the WLAN component
There is scope for improvement in terms of the overall feature set. For the home-consumer focused kits, it would be nice if a mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter were to be bundled. Even better would be a full-sized HDMI port - GIGABYTE, ECS and Zotac have shown that it is possible to cram in a full-sized HDMI port even in the NUC form factor. While M.2 PCIe SSD support is a welcome addition, it would be great to get Thunderbolt support back into the NUC ecosystem. For cutting-edge HTPCs, the absence of HDMI 2.0 and full hardware decoding for HEVC streams is a drawback. However, we know that those will definitely be getting fixed in the upcoming generations.
The final aspect we talk about today is the pricing. The NUC5i5RYK seems to be available for $376 on PCConnection as of today (even though Intel indicated a street price slightly north of $400). M.2 SSDs (PCIe or SATA) still carry a premium. For users wishing to keep the build cost down, the NUC5i5RYH model with support for 2.5" drives might be a better option.
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smegforbrain - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
Agreed. We initially bought a D34010WYKH1 (i3) at work as a test device last summer to see how well they worked. A couple of our employees have been using them for more than 6 months now.I ended up buying a D54250WYKH1 (i5) for myself to use at home as a media PC and other uses. I'm very happy with it, but I am slightly disappointed that they didn't go with full HDMI for the Broadwell refresh.
mavere - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
VP9 hybrid acceleration is enabled in recent Intel Broadwell drivers, and apparently Chrome 41+ (currently in Beta) has the ability to hook into Intel's VP9 decoder.In future Broadwell tests, can you check Youtube power consumption with Chrome 41+? Chrome defaults to VP9 on so most Youtube videos nowadays, so this is an important and unexplored area for mobile power usage.
TrackSmart - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
I don't much of a performance difference between the "mainstream" and the "enthusiast" versions used in this article (aside for artificial SSD benchmarks). Of course, the price difference between the configurations is only $66.Really the biggest performance difference among all of the candidates is between the one machine that has a spinning hard disk and all of the rest. Worth knowing none-the-less.
Essence_of_War - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
Should I be getting the message that intel not want us to use thunderbolt?Jaybus - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
No. It is a matter of power. Thunderbolt standard specifies that every port supply 10 W of DC power. Also, the controller itself is very high bandwidth and requires > 2 W. It adds up on a system striving to be low power and fanless.Samus - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
Wow Intel has the cleanest uefi bios interface I've ever seen. Shame they don't make motherboards anymore :(A4i - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
I got the old i5-4200U , mounted on industrial PC chassis (half inch thick aluminum side panel/radiator). It gets extremely hot, when operating at max CPU load (and ~0 GPU load). Don't hold you breath for power efficiency and productivity. Also that platform lacks any overclocking settings in BIOS or OS tools and is frustratingly painful to undervolt.KAlmquist - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
A benchmark question:The "enthusiast" version has 10-10-10-32 1866Mhz memory, while the "mainstream" version has 9-9-9-27 1600Mhz memory. So the difference in memory could account for at most a 17% difference in performance between the two versions (1866Mhz/1600Mhz). But the Cinebench R15 3D rendering multi-threaded benchmark shows the "enthusiast" version to be 34% faster, and the 7-Zip LZMA Decompression benchmark makes the "enthusiast" version 30% faster.
The only other difference between the two versions is the choice of SSD. This could in principle explain the differences listed above, but that would mean that the two benchmarks cited are largely disk I/O bound since we see the effect even with relatively fast disk drives (SSD rather than mechanical) and a relatively slow CPU (1.6 Ghz dual core). I thought those benchmarks were intended to measure computational throughput, and thus should not be affected by the storage subsystem at all. Am I wrong?
Kidster3001 - Friday, February 27, 2015 - link
If you're looking for a pur CPU benchmark that doesn't rely on other parts of teh system then you'll end up with synthetics that everyone complains about because they don't reflect the real world.Yes, Archive applications rely very heavily on I/O. If you want to use them for CPU benchmarks you should set up RAM Disks for the storage.
On a similar note, one of my pet peeves is using browser benchmarks to compare CPUs. Browser benchmarks measure the performance of the browser and it''s engine(s). They do very little good as a CPU comparison tool. Sunspider for instance can score wildly different on the exact same system just by using a different browser.
gfieldew - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
Could the FHD model drive a 4K TV/Monitor adequately? I'm not expecting HDMI 2.0 but 60Hz would be good. Thank-you!