ASRock Brings Zen 2 NUC : 4X4 BOX-4800U Renoir Mini-PC Reviewed
by Ganesh T S on November 25, 2020 11:00 AM ESTUL Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark
This section deals with a selection of the UL Futuremark benchmarks - PCMark 10, PCMark 8, and 3DMark. While the first two evaluate the system as a whole, 3DMark focuses on the graphics capabilities.
PCMark 10
UL's PCMark 10 evaluates computing systems for various usage scenarios (generic / essential tasks such as web browsing and starting up applications, productivity tasks such as editing spreadsheets and documents, gaming, and digital content creation). We benchmarked select PCs with the PCMark 10 Extended profile and recorded the scores for various scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU and GPU in the system, though the RAM and storage device also play a part. The power plan was set to Balanced for all the PCs while processing the PCMark 10 benchmark.
For productivity and essentials, we see a situation similar to BAPCo's SYSmark 25 results. However, workloads involving the GPU such as gaming are a big win for the 4X4 BOX-4800U. Digital content creation can take advantage of multiple cores as well as the GPU, and that helps the 4X4 BOX-4800U score another win.
PCMark 8
We continue to present PCMark 8 benchmark results (as those have more comparison points) while our PCMark 10 scores database for systems grows in size. 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 GPU acceleration helps the 4X4 BOX-4800U get the edge over the Frost Canyon NUC. However, the Bean Canyon NUC with its Iris Plus iGPU and higher thermal headroom consistently outscorese the 4X4 BOX-4800U.
3DMark
UL's 3DMark comes with a diverse set of graphics workloads that target different Direct3D feature levels. Correspondingly, the rendering resolutions are also different. We use 3DMark 2.4.4264 to get an idea of the graphics capabilities of the system. In this section, we take a look at the performance of the ASRock 4X4 BOX-4800U across the different 3DMark workloads.
3DMark Ice Storm
This workload has three levels of varying complexity - the vanilla Ice Storm, Ice Storm Unlimited, and Ice Storm Extreme. It is a cross-platform benchmark (which means that the scores can be compared across different tablets and smartphones as well). All three use DirectX 11 (feature level 9) / OpenGL ES 2.0. While the Extreme renders at 1920 x 1080, the other two render at 1280 x 720. The graphs below present the various Ice Storm worloads' numbers for different systems that we have evaluated.
| UL 3DMark - Ice Storm Workloads | |||
3DMark Cloud Gate
The Cloud Gate workload is meant for notebooks and typical home PCs, and uses DirectX 11 (feature level 10) to render frames at 1280 x 720. The graph below presents the overall score for the workload across all the systems that are being compared.
3DMark Sky Diver
The Sky Diver workload is meant for gaming notebooks and mid-range PCs, and uses DirectX 11 (feature level 11) to render frames at 1920 x 1080. The graph below presents the overall score for the workload across all the systems that are being compared.
3DMark Fire Strike Extreme
The Fire Strike benchmark has three workloads. The base version is meant for high-performance gaming PCs. Similar to Sky Diver, it uses DirectX 11 (feature level 11) to render frames at 1920 x 1080. The Ultra version targets 4K gaming system, and renders at 3840 x 2160. However, we only deal with the Extreme version in our benchmarking - It renders at 2560 x 1440, and targets multi-GPU systems and overclocked PCs. The graph below presents the overall score for the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark across all the systems that are being compared.
3DMark Time Spy
The Time Spy workload has two levels with different complexities. Both use DirectX 12 (feature level 11). However, the plain version targets high-performance gaming PCs with a 2560 x 1440 render resolution, while the Extreme version renders at 3840 x 2160 resolution. The graphs below present both numbers for all the systems that are being compared in this review.
| UL 3DMark - Time Spy Workloads | |||
3DMark Night Raid
The Night Raid workload is a DirectX 12 benchmark test. It is less demanding than Time Spy, and is optimized for integrated graphics. The graph below presents the overall score in this workload for different system configurations.
The 3DMark workloads deliver expected results - the AMD iGPU in the Renoir APU is miles ahead of the one in the Comet Lake-U SKUs.
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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