GIGABYTE GB-BSi7HAL-6500 Dual LAN Skylake BRIX Review

Performance Metrics - I

The GIGABYTE GB-BSi7HAL-6500 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.

As expected, the Core i7-6500U is one of the most powerful Skylake-U CPUs, and the GB-BSi7HAL-6500 has the best scores amongst all the Skylake-U UCFF PCs. Obviously, it is no match for the Skylake-H Core i7-6770HQ in the Skull Canyon NUC.

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. The CPU-bound scores are similar to what we saw in the SYSmark section. The benchmarks influenced by the GPU present a slightly different story, as the NUC6i5SYK's Intel Iris Graphics 540 is more powerful compared to the Intel HD Graphics 520 in the GB-BSi7HAL-6500.

Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks

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.

In the single-threaded and multi-threaded cases, the power of the Core i7-6500U comes through compared to the other Skylake-U CPUs evaluated before. In the OpenGL benchmark, the units with more powerful GPUs - the NUC6i5SYK and the Skull Canyon NUC - score better.