Voyo V3 Review - A Fanless Intel Atom x7-Z8700 (Cherry Trail) mini-PC
by Ganesh T S on March 1, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Atom
- Passive Cooling
- Mini-PC
- Cherry Trail
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 Voyo V3 with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together. Given that the BIOS of the machine is not really optimized, the idle power being more than most comparable PCs is not surprising.
The load power consumption numbers can also be easily explained. The Atom x7-Z8700 has a SDP of only 2W, and it is definitely less power hungry compared to the Intel Celeron N3000 in the ASRock Beebox. However, it does lose out to the Bay Trail Compute Stick - this could be due to the power consumption of the extra components on the board such as the PCIe - SATA bridge and the faster clocks in the Cherry Trail SoC.
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.
The core clocks briefly operate at the maximum turbo frequency (2.4 GHz), but gradually scale down to the base clock (1.6 GHz) as the load is sustained. Thankfully, the thermal solution is decent enough to prevent the SoC from throttling. The GPU clock measurement has the usual Intel 'bug' where the measured clock is the maximum clock rate even when the GPU is not loaded. As soon as the GPU starts getting loaded, it moves between 200 - 300 MHz while keeping the power consumption of the whole system around 10 W.
According to the official specifications, the junction temperature of the Atom x7-Z8700 is 90C. Fortunately, after enabling DTS in the BIOS, we find that the maximum temperature of any of the board components is kept below 85C even under extreme stress.
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 after the CPU package temperature reached the steady state value in the above graph. Note that the picture below was taken after manually turning up the operating unit to expose the underside (metallic part abutting the black thermal film which covers the main board components).
We have additional thermal images in the gallery below.
The good part here is that even under extreme stress, the chassis doesn't heat up beyond 50 C. The bad part is that a lot of performance is left on the table (in terms of allowing the SoC to sustain turbo clocks for a longer duration) due to inefficient thermal design. Allowing for the metallic segment to be on top to aid convective cooling would have definitely helped in making the thermal performance better.
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close - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
"The Type-C port in the system is only for power delivery and not available for data transfer"If the wiring for data is missing no adapter in the world will allow you to transfer any kind of data over that port. That is a power connector in the shape of USB Type-C.
nathanddrews - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
D'oh!watzupken - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
One of the rare manufacturer that seems to be able to keep the temperature in check without the chip throttling and in a slim profile. But to be honest, I wonder will these fanless systems last since they seem to run significantly hotter than one that has an active cooling.Nonetheless, this can be a great low power HTPC if the price is right.
Flunk - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
A lot of companies sell decent fanless Atom products.Teknobug - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
Kangaroo Plus.ET - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
Thanks for reviewing a Chinese PC. I recently started looking at GearBest, and looks like there are 2-in-1s, laptops and mini PC's which look quite attractive and sold at very good prices. Problem is with Chinese devices, it's hit and miss (I have a few Chinese brand tablets and phones), so it's good to have a professional review of such a device. I hope that you'll do some more reviews of what's available at GearBest.jimbo2779 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Do not go anywhere near gearbest. They are the absolute worst vendor. They do not have any stock and will hold your order to enough people have ordered something before arranging delivery.Their trustpilot reviews are faked, they have had hundreds of fake positive reviews removed and still hammer tge site with positive reviews. Look on any other site and you will see nothing but terrible experiences with them.
It took me 2 month to drag a refund out of them for something that was never delivered that I cancelled because after 2weeks beyond my delivery period they still had not sent the item. They sent some cheap accessories as proof of postage to try and pass that off as the full order to try and win the PayPal dispute.
Just do your research on gearbest before dealing with them. If you get your order within 2 months you are very lucky and they do not do refunds, you have force it via PayPal or credit card which drags the whole ordeal out unnecessarily.
itanium86 - Monday, March 21, 2016 - link
Just registered to second this comment. Do not engage business with them unless you are buying a flash drive or a neck strap. They have a horrifying customer relations. Took 9 months to get a package refused by customs and after they have received it back, they wouldn't refund me no more than 100USD (bought OPO64G when it was 400USD, late 2014).Teknobug - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
That is a very attractive device, now if only Intel could find a way to fit an i3-U or Core m3 or such into a fanless setup like that.Michael Wilding - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
Hi Ganesh,Are we seeing low GPU clock speeds (200-300MHz) when stressed due to TDP or Thermal throttling?