ASRock Beebox-S 6200U Review - An Alternative to the Skylake NUC
by Ganesh T S on August 10, 2016 8:00 AM ESTPerformance Metrics - I
The ASRock Beebox-S 6200U was evaluated using our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs. Not all benchmarks were processed on all the machines due to updates in our testing procedures. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph might not be the same. In the first section, we will be looking at SYSmark 2014, as well as some of the Futuremark benchmarks.
BAPCo SYSmark 2014
BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 is an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation and data/financial analysis. Scores are meant to be compared against a reference desktop (HP ProDesk 600 G1 with a Core i3-4130, 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive) that scores 1000 in each of the scenarios. A score of, say, 2000, would imply that the system under test is twice as fast as the reference system.
Since SYSmark 2014 is one of the newer benchmarks in our suite, we only have the Intel NUC6i5SYK to compare against. In all of the components, the Intel NUC comes out ahead, thanks to its higher turbo frequency as well as bigger cache (4MB in the Core i5-6260U vs. 3MB in the Core i5-6200U).
Futuremark PCMark 8
PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU in the system.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
The Beebox-S 6200U comes in the middle of the pack when it comes to CPU-limited benchmarks. However, the GPU benchmarks show some serious shortcomings, as the Intel HD Graphics 520 is quite weak compared to the integrated GPUs in the other PCs that we are comparing against.
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
CINEBENCH R15 provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of select PCs in all three modes provided us the following results. The trends we observed in the Futuremark benchmarks are evident here also.
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Arnulf - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Where is Apollo Lake?I want one of those on a desktop-sized motherboard (uATX?).
Ro_Ja - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
The Celerons and the Pentiums? They'll be better off with Compute Sticks.maglito - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Someone needs to make something like this with passive 24v 4wire Power over Ethernet or one of the active PoE standards that supports voltage in the 48v range. I have a NUC rigged up to run off of one of these switches: https://www.netonix.com/wisp-switch.html with this PoE extractor: http://tyconsystems.com/index.php/passive-gigabit/... (using 24VH mode on the switch) but it required a bit of cutting. There isn't really any good SFF PC with PoE input anywhere on the market I've found.BedfordTim - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
On the plus side at least there are still NUCs that support 24V input.MrCommunistGen - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Wouldn't some of the Skylake NUC's performance advantage be related to the fact that the i5-6260U has 64MB of eDRAM?ganeshts - Thursday, August 11, 2016 - link
Very true. I had mentioned Iris graphics in the comparison table for the NUC6i5SYK, but didnt mention the eDRAM aspect in the text.Wineohe - Thursday, August 11, 2016 - link
I can appreciate the desire to test the unit in it's best light with a 950 Pro and the 16GB of RAM, but it seems like overkill and jacks up the price way up. You fail to even mention the base price, although I can go shopping. A more likely configuration for me is a mainstream 250gb SSD and 8GB. It would be perfect in my sailboat.Jookie - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
I would love to see a NUC/UCFF that doesn't sandwich a hot WiFi adapter between the SSD and the MoBo. I usually don't install the WiFi if I care about the data on the drive.Mathewlin - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
Cool be good for my mom! :)Detosx - Saturday, August 27, 2016 - link
Another over-priced mini PC based around a low powered ultrabook-series CPU. Wouldn't it make more sense to buy an ultrabook laptop where a screen, keyboard, trackpad... memory and storage are included in the price?! I know it's a smaller footprint an ultrabook but I feel like potential customers are getting hammered on price, or certainly here in the UK. The NUC, with the much better Iris HD 540 graphics component, seems much more appealing, to me, but again the price is the big off putter and lack of things like a Thunderbolt 3 port limit the appeal of mini PCs, at the moment. If the price were much lower, I think the things it lacks would be less conspicuous by their absence. Thanks for the review. It would be nice to think it might spark some competition but here in price fixing UK, competition seems to be a dirty word. Hopefully the next generation will make for viably priced and appealing little gaming console alternatives.