ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1165G7 Mini-PC Review: An Ultra-Compact Tiger Lake Desktop
by Ganesh T S on August 26, 2021 8:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- NUC
- UCFF
- Willow Cove
- ASRock Industrial
- Tiger Lake-U
Power Consumption and Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 4K display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the ASRock NUC BOX-1165G7 with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, as well as a combination of Prime95 and Furmark, and noted the maximum sustained power consumption at the wall.
The load power consumption of the NUC BOX-1165G7 actually turned out to be the least of all systems. It doesn't idle as nicely, possibly due to the presence of 64GB of DRAM and the PCIe 4.0 SSD.
Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by four stages of different system loading profiles using the AIDA64 System Stability Test (each of 30 minutes duration). In the first stage, we stress the CPU, caches and RAM. In the second stage, we add the GPU to the above list. In the third stage, we stress the GPU standalone. In the final stage, we stress all the system components (including the disks). Beyond this, we leave the unit idle in order to determine how quickly the various temperatures in the system can come back to normal idling range. The various clocks, temperatures and power consumption numbers for the system during the above routine are presented in the graphs below.
ASRock NUC BOX-1165G7 System Loading with the AIDA64 System Stability Test | |||
The active cooling solution has no trouble keeping the package temperature below 95C even under extreme stress. The thermal strip over the ADATA XPG GAMMMIX S50 Lite also prevents the SSD from going higher than 70C under extended traffic. The overall air movement ensures that the SSD idles at a sub-40C temperature. On the power front, we see that the package power remains constant at 28W in all scenarios where the CPU is involved. This shows that the thermal solution is good enough to sustain the 28W TDP.
An artificial stress routine using Prime95 and Furmark was also processed. Each workload runs for 60 minutes, with a 30 minute overlap between them. Prime95, configured for maximum power consumption, goes in first, and is followed after 30 minutes by Furmark. The system is then left idle for another 30 minutes. The metrics graphed for the AIDA64 SST case are also graphed for the custom stress test.
ASRock NUC BOX-1165G7 System Loading with Prime95 and Furmark | |||
The custom stress test also shows that the system is able to sustain 28W package power consumption. The Furmark test is more stressful in terms of GPU power consumption compared to AIDA64's SST GPU workload.
Overall, the NUC BOX-1165G7's thermal solution is good enough for the Tiger Lake-U processor to provide its best possible performance.
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alpha754293 - Friday, August 27, 2021 - link
It's nice to see some form a NUC that doesn't thermal throttle itself just to keep itself from committing suicide because it has a proper thermal management solution.It would be interesting to see how that fan will fair over time (with accumulation of dust, etc.).
Oxford Guy - Saturday, August 28, 2021 - link
Dual-channel RAM operating at a good speed? 3D TLC NAND?Better than the over $1000 small form factor machine reviewed here recently. It came with a single RAM SO-DIMM and, as far as I recall, QLC.
Psionic Potato - Monday, August 30, 2021 - link
I have had an Asrock Beebox-S Series for an HTPC and will be replacing it soon because it started hard crashing when playing 4K MKVs a few months ago. generating graphical glitches upon rebooting, and generally becoming a PITA. Anything I buy from Gigabyte, Asus, Supermicro, and MSI I've gotten to last for 7+ years, but not Asrock, so I won't be buying their stuff again.I've got my eye on the Minisforum Zen3 mini PC that xsoft7 mentioned. Everyone seems to be raving about it and 8 cores to add to the 16 Zen3 cores my desktop PC has when I'm ripping BluRays? Why not?