ASRock Brings Zen 2 NUC : 4X4 BOX-4800U Renoir Mini-PC Reviewed
by Ganesh T S on November 25, 2020 11:00 AM ESTConcluding Remarks
NUCs such as the 4X4 BOX series from ASRock Industrial have enabled AMD to participate in the burgeoning UCFF PC market. ASRock Industrial has quickly learnt from its mistakes in the 4X4 BOX-V1000M - the 4X4 BOX-4000 series brings support for M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs (compared the M.2 2242-only support in the previous generation). The WLAN component is also the best that is available in this particular form-factor (2x2 Wi-Fi 6 compared to the 1x1 Wi-Fi 5 card in the previous generation). Reducing the physical footprint of the system is also welcome. The fan curve / noise profile has also improved.
The key face-off for the 4X4 BOX-4000 series is against systems based on Comet Lake-U. Tiger Lake-U is on the way, but no UCFF system based on TGL-U is currently available for purchase. To get a good idea of how Renoir compares against Comet Lake, we went back to our Frost Canyon NUC sample and revamped its internals to match the ASRock-suggested 4X4 BOX-4800U configuration. We replaced the 16GB DDR4 SODIMMs with 64GB DDR4-2666 SODIMMs (maximum supported frequency in CML-U) and the 256GB Kingston A1000 with a 1TB Crucial P5 SSD. On the pricing front, the two systems end up costing almost the same when the storage and RAM are also considered. The preceding pages presented benchmarks that are essentially apples-to-apples comparison.
The user experience with SFF desktops relies on multiple pillars - single-threaded performance, multi-threaded performance, energy efficiency, and last, but not the least, driver/software support. In the last few years, Intel has stalled a bit in delivering improvements in these pillars from one generation to the next. With the first-generation Ryzen, we saw AMD tackling the multi-threaded performance aspect with aplomb. Zen 2 has delivered updates across the first three of those pillars - single-threaded performance improvement is good enough to actually challenge CML-U across a large number of workloads within the power envelop dictated by the form factor of NUC-like systems. The 7nm fabrication process has delivered power efficiency gains, though it still doesn't match Intel's when it comes to race to idle (as shown by the gulf in the idle power numbers for the Frost Canyon NUC and the 4X4 BOX-4800U). It is in the drivers/software segment that AMD gives us cause for complaint. For example, we faced issues playing back YouTube HDR content in MS Edge (with Windows 10 20H2 and the latest AMD drives), and madVR usage resulted in playback issues. Both of these might well turn out to be application bugs over which AMD may not have control. But that is scant consolation for the end-user. It is an unfortunate fact that most QA is done on Intel-based systems, leaving the experience with AMD systems a little less than ideal. Hopefully, with AMD gaining market share, these types of software compatibility issues become a thing of the past.
On the pricing front, the barebones version of the 4X4 BOX-4800U is available for $600 - it pretty much matches the launch price of the Frost Canyon NUC10i7FNH. For the same price, the Renoir NUC surpasses the CML-U system by including support for NBASE-T with a 2.5 Gbps LAN port (backed by the Realtek RTL8125BG controller), native support for DDR4-3200 without overclocking, and support for four simultaneous 4Kp60 display outputs. Intel will be playing catch-up with TGL-U here, but at the moment, the 4X4 BOX-4000 series wins the features-per-dollar battle. Given the benchmark numbers we have just seen, the performance-per-dollar metric is also firmly in favor of the 4X4 BOX-4800U. On the performance-per-watt front, there is still scope for improvement. Overall, the ASRock 4X4 BOX-4800U has given us the opportunity to finally evaluate an AMD NUC that can go head-to-head against Intel's current flagship in the same market segment. This has been a remarkable turnaround for AMD. The renewed competition in this market is also excellent news for consumers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
53 Comments
View All Comments
redwingsbb - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link
I don't think spikebike was saying that they would wait 2 years to buy I think they were saying it would be interesting to wait until CES in a couple of months to see whether there could be Zen 3 based NUC coming out in the next few months which in their opinion would be a big enough upgrade over a Ryzen 4000 based NUC to last them a full year or two longer.ifThenError - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
You are very right, Zen3 in a small form factor would be a formidable plattform for many use cases. I'd happily swap my old box for such a device.Unfortunately I wouldn't expect this to happen anytime soon. Currently there is no such thing as a Zen3 based APU. The Zen2 based Renoir has just been released and still seems to have limited availability. It is more than a year behind the desktop and server Zen2 chips. Even if a Zen3 mobile chip was anounced in January, we would probably still be at least a year away from any SFF using it.
Looks like the devices from Asus and ASRock are your best bet, or you need a lot of patience.
Valantar - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Pretty damn impressive seeing this hit above 1300 in Time Spy and nearly 14000 in night raid. My ITX 4650G with the iGPU@2100, RAM @3800c16 and IF@1900 hits >1600 TS and >17000 NR, but that also consumes ~100W from the wall. With this sitting in the 50s of watts except for initial spikes, that's very good performance for the tiny power draw.Really looking forward to how boxes like this evolve with DDR5.
Oh, and the dual NICs are brilliant. The 4350G version of this would make for a great PFSense box.
DanaGoyette - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Realtek Virtual IPMI, on the Platform Analysis page....huh, does this have out-of-band management capabilities? If so, it could be useful as a server.
ganeshts - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Yes, the 1G port has Realtek DASH enabled. I am actually investigating that feature right now (couldn't complete it in time for publishing the review), but information / guides are hard to come by. Realtek's own software that talks to DASH clients is a mess / very user unfriendly.watersb - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
And here (for reference) is the DASH overview article. Excellent!https://www.anandtech.com/show/16319/asrock-4x4-bo...
zakelwe - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
Who cares about this? Where are the graphics card reviews from Amd and nVidia ?abufrejoval - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
I had ordered the PN50 in summer with the Ryzen 4800U when a major EU retailer promised only 2-3 days deliver delays. Alas, the only thing that moved was the delivery delay, which increased and wound up as unknown. The Ryzen 4800U SoCs requires perfectly binned Renoir chips and those are likely to remain rare even while they are being replaced by 5800U chips (eve more attractive and harder to get?).I had to resort to team blue, which has some advantages in my KVM live-migration scenarios and could become especially interesting: if I can get Thunderbolt 40Gbit networking to work, I’d use that for the cluster/gluster interconnect and switch the USB 2.5Gbit NICs to the front-end. ASRock is doing the right thing here, I wish 2.5Gbit had long since become default everywhere, especially since I can’t believe Realtek charges more than a few cents extra for the speed uplift.
In the mean-time I’d just like to report that the NUC8i7BEH has had its price reduced to around €300 including EU VAT, while the BXNUC10I7FNH currently goes for €450. That comes down to €75/core and pretty much to core/€ parity with the 4800H at €600, which is why I got one of each in the end. Their combined idle power may actually not be higher than the AMD unit, while peak heat and noise are very well managed via OS independent BIOS settings on Intel NUCs these days.
The Bean Canyon’s Iris 655 iGPU main advantage is that it doesn’t cost one cent extra vs the ordinary i7-10700U UHD630, just as the 128MB eDRAM are given away for free and that L4 cache does at least deliver measurable performance advantages to the CPU, even if they aren’t noticeable. Both give an i7-7700K a run for its money on bursty desktop/server workloads, but less so as members of a render or compile farm.
While I’ll use both pretty much only for CentOS/oVirt, I did test them intensively on Windows with all sorts of graphics loads. AT basically infected me with curiosity about these larger Iris iGPUs years ago. 3DMark Night Raid at 1920x1080 IMHO shows their basic potential and why Apple used them as their main staple for a while, but the most impressive demo remains Google Maps with their AI created 3D view in Chrome (much slower in Firefox, unfortunately), which not only runs smoother on my 4k display, than Microsoft’s 2020 FlightSim on my RTX 2080ti/Ryzen 7 5800X game rig, but actually reflects what’s on the ground. FlightSim resorts to pure parametric random algorithms, which create ground structures and traffic patterns that not only carry no resemblance with ground truth, but don’t make sense, even at propeller speeds.
While I would probably still rationally prefer NUC innards as Mini-ITX boards for better options on cooling and general modularity, I’ve come to appreciate those NUCs mostly because the chassis and power supply come basically for free and at excellent build quality, while expansion on mobile SoCs is mostly external anyway.
Gadgety - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link
Nothing on physical size or noise?Gadgety - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link
110.0 x 117.5 x 47.85mm