Logic Supply ML100G-50 Fanless Skylake vPro Industrial NUC Review
by Ganesh T S on February 27, 2017 8:00 AM ESTHTPC Credentials
The fanless nature of the ML100G-50. coupled with its compact form factor, ensures that it is a good HTPC candidate. However, Skylake doesn't support 4K Netflix, and the Intel HD Graphics 520 doesn't have full hardware decode acceleration for HEVC Main10. All of these are addressed in Kaby Lake. Given that industrial PCs are usually a generation behind the fanless consumer PCs, we would not recommend the ML100G-50 solely for HTPC duties. That said, it is interesting to look at certain aspects that are specific to the system - namely, the refresh rate accuracy and OTT streaming efficiency.
Refresh Rate Accuracy
Starting with Haswell, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have been on par with respect to display refresh rate accuracy. The most important refresh rate for videophiles is obviously 23.976 Hz (the 23 Hz setting). As expected, the Logic Supply ML100G-50 has no trouble with refreshing the display appropriately in this setting.
The gallery below presents some of the other refresh rates that we tested out. The first statistic in madVR's OSD indicates the display refresh rate.
Network Streaming Efficiency
Evaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back our standard YouTube test stream and five minutes from our standard Netflix test title. Using HTML5, the YouTube stream plays back a 1080p H.264 video. Since YouTube now defaults to HTML5 for video playback, we have stopped evaluating Adobe Flash acceleration. Note that only NVIDIA exposes GPU and VPU loads separately. Both Intel and AMD bundle the decoder load along with the GPU load. The following two graphs show the power consumption at the wall for playback of the HTML5 stream in Mozilla Firefox (v 51.0.1).
GPU load was around 16.58% for the YouTube HTML5 stream and 0.0205% for the steady state 6 Mbps Netflix streaming case.
Netflix streaming evaluation was done using the Windows 10 Netflix app. Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D). Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here.
The ML100G-50 is not particularly power efficient for OTT streaming workloads. Video decoding is now hardware accelerated on almost all systems (including Atom-based PCs), and systems such as the ECS LIVA Core (Core M with a 7W TDP CPU) and the ZBOX CI320 nano (Bay Trail-M 4.5W SDP CPU) are more power efficient compared to the ML100G-50 (which is equipped with a 15W TDP CPU).
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ddriver - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link
Yet the fins are oriented in the worst possible manner convection wise. Vertical fins on the sides would be far more efficient than the horizontal fins on top. That assumes it is oriented as pictured. If the box itself is mounted so that the fins are perpendicular to the ground then it will be fine.DarekLogic - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Hi ddriver, Darek here from Logic Supply, thanks for your comment. The fin designs for our chassis are partly driven by manufacturing methods. We utilize one-piece extrusions for their superior material properties and cost efficiencies (over say, casting or straight CNC). That does limit us somewhat in the orientations of our fin structures. Ultimately the layouts we go with are designed/tested for a balance of forced and natural convection (as well as installation flexibility for our customers and, to a lesser extent, aesthetics) in multiple orientations - like you said, with the chassis mounted on a vertical surface the fins are optimal, and that's very often how our customers deploy our systems.ddriver - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Sure, you are extruding stuff like heat sink fins, it would be crazy to machine that. But you can just extrude the box with the sides flat, then bolt on auxiliary vertical fins, in that case you are set for both unit orientation cases.Or you could punch series of square C holes to the sides and bed the inner part outward, maybe not all the way to 90 degree, like 45 or so would do it, creating less of fins and more of a cool looking "ribs".
Both solution in case you want to increase the cooling capacity, visual aesthetics aside, the way it is looks tidier. But you can't always have it both pretty and efficient at the same time.
There is a third option - hide the fins. In that case they will be more like pipes, essentially cover up the fins but leave holes on the bottom for air to come it. Also, air expands as it gets hotter, so making the holes wider towards the top will be beneficial to increasing the air flow rate.
ddriver - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
*bend, not bedAnonymousEngineer - Saturday, March 4, 2017 - link
I can't speak for this particular device, but I've bought similar-looking industrial PCs for field use in the past (made by Advantech), and they're typically mounted vertically in a cabinet or on a wall using a DIN-rail mount.SkipPerk - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
We do the same thing. It keeps them safely out of the way.dave_the_nerd - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
I think there may be a typo on the last page:"Logic Supply's ML100G-50 is a solid step up from the Broadwell-based ML100G-50"
Don't you mean the Broadwell-based ML100G-30?
evilspoons - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Seems like a pretty capable and up-to-date industrial PC for the money. I'm used to working with ones that are many, many more generations behind the curve.As an electrical engineer who builds panels for machinery I loathe the idea of an AC-DC power adapter and a barrel plug, but it looks like you can order it with DC terminals on-board so that's fine. Not bad then!
mattlach - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
The only thing I'd use one of these for would be a nice compact and power sipping pfSense router box.IN order for me to do that, I'd need dual Intel NIC's though.
Why do all of these NUC's insist on either having only one NIC or using inferior Realtek NIC's you'd never want to use in a server-type setting?
DarekLogic - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Hi mattlach, Darek here from Logic Supply. Because we don't currently do any board-level development, we're limited to the motherboards available on the market. We are in talks with a number of motherboard manufacturers about creating additional options because we also see value in offering dual NIC connectivity in this form factor with Intel Core processing.That said, our ML100G-10 system does provide 2x Intel-based LAN ports (https://www.logicsupply.com/ml100g-10) and we have a number of clients using that system for various networking applications.
Thank you for your comment.