ASRock Beebox-S 6200U Review - An Alternative to the Skylake NUC
by Ganesh T S on August 10, 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 lower turbo frequency of the Core i5-6200U and operation of the platform at its default TDP make the Beebox-S 6200U come in the lower half of the pack in this benchmark.
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. Results are similar to what we observed for the video encoding case.
TrueCrypt
As businesses (and even home consumers) become more security conscious, the importance of encryption can't be overstated. Hardware-acceleration for the same is available in the Core i5-6200U in the form of AES-NI support. TrueCrypt, a popular open-source disk encryption program can take advantage of the AES-NI capabilities, and it comes with an internal benchmark. In the graph below, we can get an idea of how fast a TrueCrypt volume would behave in the ASRock Beebox-S 6200U 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.
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 configuration of the Beebox-S platform unfortunately make it end up at the bottom of the lot.
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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.