The Intel NUC6i5SYK Skylake UCFF PC Review
by Ganesh T S on March 11, 2016 8:00 AM ESTPerformance Metrics - II
In this section, we mainly look at benchmark modes in programs used on a day-to-day basis, i.e, application performance and not synthetic workloads.
x264 Benchmark
First off, we have some video encoding benchmarks courtesy of x264 HD Benchmark v5.0. This is simply a test of CPU performance. As expected, the 35W TDP Core i3-6100T and the 28W TDP Core i5-5557U take the lead over the 15W Core i5-6260U.
7-Zip
7-Zip is a very effective and efficient compression program, often beating out OpenCL accelerated commercial programs in benchmarks even while using just the CPU power. 7-Zip has a benchmarking program that provides tons of details regarding the underlying CPU's efficiency. In this subsection, we are interested in the compression and decompression MIPS ratings when utilizing all the available threads.
TrueCrypt
As businesses (and even home consumers) become more security conscious, the importance of encryption can't be overstated. CPUs supporting the AES-NI instruction for accelerating the encryption and decryption processes used to be restricted to high-end SKUs. That has changed now, and even the consumer-focused Core i5-6260U in the NUC6i5SYK has AES-NI support. TrueCrypt, a popular open-source disk encryption program can take advantage of the AES-NI capabilities. The TrueCrypt internal benchmark provides some interesting cryptography-related numbers to ponder. In the graph below, we can get an idea of how fast a TrueCrypt volume would behave in the Intel NUC6i5SYK and how it would compare with other select PCs. This is a purely CPU feature / clock speed based test.
Agisoft Photoscan
Agisoft PhotoScan is a commercial program that converts 2D images into 3D point maps, meshes and textures. The program designers sent us a command line version in order to evaluate the efficiency of various systems that go under our review scanner. The command line version has two benchmark modes, one using the CPU and the other using both the CPU and GPU (via OpenCL). The benchmark takes around 50 photographs and does four stages of computation:
- Stage 1: Align Photographs
- Stage 2: Build Point Cloud (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 3: Build Mesh
- Stage 4: Build Textures
We record the time taken for each stage. Since various elements of the software are single threaded, others multithreaded, and some use GPUs, it is interesting to record the effects of CPU generations, speeds, number of cores, DRAM parameters and the GPU using this software.
Bringing the GPU into the picture helps the NUC6i5SYK to emerge as the Stage 2 leader, but, in other stages, the raw CPU performance is held back by the lower TDP compared to some of the other PCs in the comparison list.
Dolphin Emulator
Wrapping up our application benchmark numbers is the Dolphin Emulator benchmark mode results. This is again a test of the CPU capabilities, and the higher TDP CPUs perform better.
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ganeshts - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
As I mentioned in the Thermal Performance section, it looks like the cTDP is around 23W.. Under sustained loading, I found the instantaneous *package* power consumption between 17W and 23W. For a brief moment when the CPU and GPU were loaded simultaneously, the *package* power jumped to around 29W for a few seconds before coming down to 23W. (that is the reason for the at-wall power consumption graph briefly going to 48W before settling down to 38W in the middle of the loading period)ganeshts - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
As for Skull Canyon NUC, yes, it will use a Skylake-H processor with 45W TDP, completely different chassis design, have Alpine Ridge integrated for Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.1 Gen 2 support. Will release sometime within the next 6 months. (All this info was given to the press at CES 2016)Drazick - Monday, March 14, 2016 - link
Why can we get 90 Watt CPU with GT3e?Or even better a 6820K with GT3e and 90 Watt?
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link
When you share some of that magic fairy dust. A 125 watt HDET CPU with a GT3E GPU? That wont be under 90 watt for quite some time.And nobody would buy it. Those that need the gpu and those that need the cpu are two different markets,
Blindsay - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
A couple of quick things,1. For the lack of HDMI 2.0, couldn't you use a DisplayPort 1.2 -> HDMI 2.0 adapter to get around that issue?
2. Not quite sure what you meant by this on the first page "Skylake-U also obviously supports DDR4 (as the NUC6i5SYK only supports that), but that is not mentioned in the slide below." The i3 version supports DDR4 as well or did you mean something else? wasn't quite sure.
I grabbed the I3 version for my HTPC (mostly for plex) and it has been great so far. I was using an NVidia shield but wanted something that had better support for the HD Audio Formats.
ganeshts - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
(1) No HDCP 2.2 with that adapter (to the best of my knowledge). Obviously, one can talk about HDCP 2.2 not being relevant in the *PC* space right now since Netflix 4K isn't available on PCs yet and there are no Ultra HD Blu-ray players in the PC, but I am hoping to present HDCP 2.2 availability as a way to future-proof one's investment.(2) The slide we presented is from a 2014 briefing - so the memory interfaces mentioned in the *slide* for Skylake-U are only DDR3(L) and LPDDR3. Since then, Intel put in DDR4 support also in *Skylake-U* - not the NUC6i5SYK specifically.
DigitalFreak - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
http://www.club-3d.com/index.php/products/reader.e...Blindsay - Saturday, March 12, 2016 - link
Thanks DigitalFreak, that was the adapter I was thinking of.Ganesh - that adapter should work in this case correct?
Thanks for clearing that up about the slides, I have the i3 version and I was like "hmm I am pretty sure there is ddr4 in there"
ganeshts - Saturday, March 12, 2016 - link
I believe that adapter will still not provide you HDCP 2.2 support.jdogi74 - Saturday, March 12, 2016 - link
It does claim "Repeater for HDCP 1.3 and HDCP 2.2" in the product sheet for the club 3D adapter. I haven't seen anyone verify the claim in the real world yet.