ASRock Industrial NUCS BOX-1360P/D4 Review: Raptor Lake-P Impresses, plus Surprise ECC

GPU Performance: Synthetic Benchmarks

Intel did not make significant changes in the integrated GPU when moving from Alder Lake to Raptor Lake. Process maturity has allowed it to clock the iGPU a bit higher, but the number of EUs remains the same as in the previous generation. GPU performance evaluation typically involved gaming workloads, and for select PCs, GPU compute. Prior to that, we wanted to take a look at the capabilities of the iGPU in the Core i7-1360P. Unfortunately, GPU-Z doesn't yet recognize the 'new' GPU, but HWiNFO has more helpful information.

We have seen earlier that the performance of the Intel Iris Xe Graphics is miles ahead of previous iGPUs from both Intel and AMD. The benchmarks processed on the NUCS BOX-1360P/D4 back up that aspect.

GFXBench

The DirectX 12-based GFXBench tests from Kishonti are cross-platform, and available all the way down to smartphones. As such, they are not very taxing for discrete GPUs and modern integrated GPUs. We processed the offscreen versions of the 'Aztec Ruins' benchmark.

Raptor Lake-P's higher iGPU clocks enable it to come out on top, but enabling ECC makes the performance suffer badly.

UL 3DMark

Four different workload sets were processed in 3DMark - Fire Strike, Time Spy, Night Raid, and Wild Life.

3DMark Fire Strike

The Fire Strike benchmark has three workloads. The base version is meant for high-performance gaming PCs. It uses DirectX 11 (feature level 11) to render frames at 1920 x 1080. The Extreme version targets 1440p gaming requirements, while the Ultra version targets 4K gaming system, and renders at 3840 x 2160. The graph below presents the overall score for the Fire Strike Extreme and Fire Strike Ultra 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.

3DMark Wild Life

The Wild Life workload was initially introduced as a cross-platform GPU benchmark in 2020. It renders at a 2560 x 1440 resolution using Vulkan 1.1 APIs on Windows. It is a relatively short-running test, reflective of mobile GPU usage. In mid-2021, UL released the Wild Life Extreme workload that was a more demanding version that renders at 3840 x 2160 and runs for a much longer duration reflective of typical desktop gaming usage.

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 Wall Street Canyon NUC and the NUCS BOX-1360P/D4 are pretty much neck-to-neck in the 3D Mark workloads. In these benchmarks that run relatively longer than GFXBench, the PL1 also starts coming into the picture. The Wall Street Canyon NUC has an edge in that aspect. Other than that, it is no surprise that the pattern of external memory accesses generated in the 3D Mark workloads is detrimental to performance when ECC is enabled.