GIGABYTE GB-BSi7HAL-6500 Dual LAN Skylake BRIX Review
by Ganesh T S on September 21, 2016 8:00 AM ESTPerformance 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.
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Ro_Ja - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
It's true. Infact, the Intel Iris Pro Graphics HD 6200 is on par with GT 750M in most benchmarks.powerarmour - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
They need to test Kodi on native Linux too instead of Windows, LibreELEC runs and performs much better as a dedicated HTPC.A Braswell based NUC or Mini-ITX board is often all you'll need for HQ 4K playback, and for 1080p a Raspberry Pi3 is more than adequate for media consumption.
Vlad_Da_Great - Friday, September 23, 2016 - link
So many cheap whiners here. It is amazing. But those who value the Intel quality are paying, producing and collecting. Intel is the best to ever do it, bruh.zodiacfml - Saturday, September 24, 2016 - link
Too expensive for any firewall/router task.Xajel - Sunday, September 25, 2016 - link
naaah, not good enough for HTPC.. and cost too much also@Anandtech... still waiting for this new generation GPU shootout for HTPC applications, which is better now latest gen. dGPU or latest gen. iGPU ?