Gemini Lake SFF PC Showdown: Intel's June Canyon (NUC7PJYH) and ECS's LIVA Z2 Reviewed
by Ganesh T S on December 20, 2018 8:00 AM ESTNetworking and Storage Performance
Networking and storage are two major aspects which influence our experience with any computing system. This section presents results from our evaluation of these aspects in the Intel NUC7PJYH. On the storage side, one option would be repetition of our strenuous SSD review tests on the drive(s) in the PC. Fortunately, to avoid that overkill, PCMark 8 has a storage bench where certain common workloads such as loading games and document processing are replayed on the target drive. Results are presented in two forms, one being a benchmark number and the other, a bandwidth figure. We ran the PCMark 8 storage bench on selected PCs and the results are presented below.
There is really not much to choose from between the three systems - our choice of storage drives (Crucial BX300) was the same for both the Gemini Lake units, and that is reflected in the above graphs.
On the networking side, we restricted ourselves to the evaluation of the WLAN component. Our standard test router is the Netgear R7000 Nighthawk configured with both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks. The router is placed approximately 20 ft. away, separated by a drywall (as in a typical US building). A wired client is connected to the R7000 and serves as one endpoint for iperf evaluation. The PC under test is made to connect to either the 5 GHz (preferred) or 2.4 GHz SSID and iperf tests are conducted for both TCP and UDP transfers. It is ensured that the PC under test is the only wireless client for the Netgear R7000. We evaluate total throughput for up to 32 simultaneous TCP connections using iperf and present the highest number in the graph below.
In the UDP case, we try to transfer data at the highest rate possible for which we get less than 1% packet loss.
Despite all the WLAN modules being 1x1, the June Canyon NUC has much better numbers. In part, this is due to the availability of antenna diversity in the AC 9462 (which allows the better of two antennae to be utilized for communication).
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Death666Angel - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
One of the few times Intel ark is wrong in my experience. A lot of the Atom SKUs have wrong max memory sizes.mczak - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
It is not really wrong per se. This is intel's official stance, those chips only support 8GB in total, apparently they want to sell you Core-based chips if you need more.But luckily intel didn't go that far and actually really limited them to 8GB, so yes from a technical perspective the ark pages are wrong.
Noone (at least for home use) should ever care about the official max memory limit (well as long as they know it's only a marketing limitation...).
Jorgp2 - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
Gemini Lake was also originally listed as supporting HDR10, but was later correctedRyan Smith - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
"The configuration comparison table on the first page is broken."Fixed! Thanks for the heads up.
fackamato - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
Any chance you can include non-NUC systems on the charts? The graphs are great to see which of the 3 NUCs are faster... but that does not give me a sense of how much slower (if any) these are to a mATX PC, or a 45w CPU, or an AMD APU etc.ganeshts - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
These are results based on our new Fall 2018+ benchmark suite - We actually re-benched a whole lot of systems (starting with the Coffee Lake SODIMM memory scaling piece). I have some other results from systems targeting a different market segment, and I will add them in for the next Gemini Lake review (probably mid Q1 2019)mode_13h - Friday, December 21, 2018 - link
Please do.Thanks.
Mikewind Dale - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
In the meantime, the Cinebench R15 scores are useful for comparisons. That benchmark is widely available for a variety of CPUs.Just for comparison, I have a Core i7-7500U dual core laptop that gets 145/345 in Cinebench R15.
And online, I see the Core i7-8550U gets a median of 164/558.
drzzz - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
Thanks for fixing the table on page 1. Now my question is why is a the Liva with one 4GB stick (single channel memory mode) even being compared to the 32GB NUC? That is really a big configuration difference. Or is the table wrong it was 2 4GB sticks?ganeshts - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
We reviewed the configuration that was sampled to us by ECS. I complained to them about the single-channel configuration holding back performance a bit, but they didn't care :)As I mentioned in another comment, the 32GB was just to show everyone that the NUC could support it even though it is unofficial.
To be honest, the *amount* of RAM has very little impact on most of the benchmark numbers. Yes, I do agree single vs. dual slot fill up makes a bit of a difference.