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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BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link
Most people have that extra space, but these systems aren't intended for desktop use. They're targeted at industrial environments where dust ingestion due to active cooling would contribute to the early demise of a conventional computer. Consumers rarely need this kind of hardware unless they're doing something like HAM radio or another chore that needs a passively cooled design.fanofanand - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link
Yeah I kind of gathered that after posting my comment, but I think my comment is still applicable beyond this one specific box. The SFF space is one of the last bastions of "premium pricing" outside of corporate and "gaming". I mean what we have here is a super low power CPU, with an IGP, and basic RAM selling for the price of an alienware laptop. It's just hard to wrap my head around. I get it for industrial applications but not for everyday consumers.milkod2001 - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Market is big enough that even NUCs while they are useless and overpriced for what they offer still sell. Good thing is: you don't have to buy them, you can just completely ignore them and move on :)nowayandnohow - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
"you can just completely ignore them and move on"Exactly, stop whining and go to the market segment that targets what you need.
nowayandnohow - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Look, I am a prime customer for this solution: I need a somewhat capable small server for a location - on this location I also need to run 2VM's which each uses their own NIC (I am looking at their Xeon equipped server with 6 x NIC, 32GB ECC RAM, and 4 drives in RAID6). All of this is going to be supporting a low maintenance, long periods of no-computers-and-very-little-web-traffic location. This is perfect.What sets this one apart is that it is small, really small, and it has ZERO moving parts. It will not have a fan failure, it will not have a spinning disk doing all the things spinning disks do. It'll be dead quiet, run what I need for it to run, hidden away in a closet, running 24/7.
Of course i could build my very own, for probably half the price and double the specs, but this is not what I am looking for. This is not intended for home tinkers, and the price comes with turnkey (with warranty) setup, and I am willing to pay for that.
We need to end this "it can be done cheaper", someone needs to make a buck on putting capable systems together, with purpose not only to support gamers that would never buy it in the first place, and uses components that are not the 'cheapest possible available'. Otherwise all computers will just be either super expensive for coorporations, or super low budget like half of the SFF units out there today. Who the hell wants an i3 with cheap-ass RAM, slow spinning HD and then the capacity to push out 4k? Who ever buys that is an idiot. You want to build, build... You want to buy a gaming machine, buy a gaming machine, but if you don't understand the target segment of the market does not make it shit. You see computers as a commodity, I see them as things that cost does not really matter, but build quality and purpose does.
Buying this can will last me 5 years in the setting that I am looking for, the components are perhaps not the newest, but HQ stuff, and with no moving parts, protecting it through a HQ UPS, this bad boy will run quietly and smooth.
SkipPerk - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
There are quite a few solutions that really require small form factor, although fanless is not always essential. I have had good luck with dust filters, although a sealed case would be awesome for humidity. Sometimes you simply need to tuck a tiny computer somewhere (often wall mounted between other equipment). That said, I have used tiny Atom boxes and run VM's through them, but they are not so stable. You can set up a Linux box and forget about it.benzosaurus - Sunday, March 12, 2017 - link
Almost specced one of these at work the other day.