Intel NUC 13 Pro Arena Canyon Review: Raptor Lake Brings Incremental Gains
by Ganesh T S on March 27, 2023 9:00 AM ESTPower Consumption and Thermal Characteristics
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 4K display being driven through the HDMI port of the system. In the graph below, we compare the idle and load power of the Intel NUC13ANKi7 (Arena Canyon) with other systems evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, as well as our custom stress test with Prime95 / Furmark, and noted the peak as well as idling power consumption at the wall.
The numbers are consistent with the TDP and suggested PL1 / PL2 values for the processors in the systems, and do not come as any surprise. The load number is affected by the PL2 value (64W for the Core i7-1360P in the NUC13ANKi7). The idling numbers are excellent, with the low power state achieved by the Arena Canyon NUC matched only by the Wall Street Canyon NUCs.
Stress Testing
Our thermal stress routine is a combination of Prime95, Furmark, and Finalwire's AIDA64 System Stability Test. The following 9-step sequence is followed, starting with the system at idle:
- Start with the Prime95 stress test configured for maximum power consumption
- After 30 minutes, add Furmark GPU stress workload
- After 30 minutes, terminate the Prime95 workload
- After 30 minutes, terminate the Furmark workload and let the system idle
- After 30 minutes of idling, start the AIDA64 System Stress Test (SST) with CPU, caches, and RAM activated
- After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the GPU, CPU, caches, and RAM activated
- After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with only the GPU activated
- After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the CPU, GPU, caches, RAM, and SSD activated
- After 30 minutes, terminate the AIDA64 SST and let the system idle for 30 minutes
Traditionally, this test used to record the clock frequencies - however, with the increasing number of cores in modern processors and fine-grained clock control, frequency information makes the graphs cluttered and doesn't contribute much to understanding the thermal performance of the system. The focus is now on the power consumption and temperature profiles to determine if throttling is in play.
The system has no trouble maintaining a 40W package power throughout the loading period. The iGPU seems to have a maximum power budget of around 32W, with 18W being guaranteed even during high CPU load. The package temperature does reach around 92C, but never high enough for throttling to kick in. The SSD temperatures stay below 60C even when the disk is subject to stress.
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PeachNCream - Tuesday, March 28, 2023 - link
I congratulate you. Your bait caught a lot of them this time. And, like a true troll, you didn't waste keystrokes doing it. Though, admittedly, computer enthusiasts are low hanging fruit that get riled up with minimal work.MrCommunistGen - Monday, March 27, 2023 - link
I'm pretty pleased that there are P-series chips and not just U-series - as many (but not all) previous SFF NUCs used 15W TDP chips rather than 28W and higher TDP mobile CPUs. As long as the cooler can handle the heat load and isn't too terribly loud (or can have its performance/fan curves adjusted) then this could be a really cool SFF PC.I currently have a NUC8i7BEH i7-8559U (28W 4c/8t + eDRAM) which I'm not YET looking to upgrade, but this new 13th Gen NUC is the first model that's gotten me excited about a new NUC in this form factor.
Samus - Tuesday, March 28, 2023 - link
I agree. The P-series was a solid move on Intel's part to stay competitive against Ryzen mobile parts. Even though most notebooks don't seem to utilize the TDP Up (if its a thin plastic laptop kiss PL2 goodbye entirely) the single-threaded boost performance is above U-series parts, and general workflow at low-loads benefit from the stronger E-core headroom. Intel competitively prices the P chips against the U chips as well, which is why you see them in cheaper laptops.abufrejoval - Tuesday, March 28, 2023 - link
The latest U-series to me represent an attempt to have at least a toenail in a fully passive market and that's not an economy niche, even if Intel can put more of them on a wafer: sometimes Intel is strangely insensitive to wasting die area!And since NUCs have always used active cooling even for their Atom models, U-series SoCs simply have no business there.
I am also a fan of the great NUC fan curves, because they allow you to achieve unobtrusiveness, which is only beaten by "never need cleaning out fans and grills", but not at the price of crippled performance or an Akasa case.
I have the same NUC and it's younger cousins, a hexacore NUC10 and a Tiger Lake NUC11. And that last "custom Apple" SoC with the Iris 655 iGPU in the i7-8559U spends more than half its die area on an iGPU that Intel never charged for, but mostly because it didn't actually pay of in performance.
The Tiger Lake trounces NUC8 and 10 by 25% on scalar peformance while the 6 cores of Gen10 and 4 cores of Gen11 draw even on multicore.
The Tiger Lake's 96EU Xe iGPU puts the Iris 48EU iGPU to shame, which only gets 50% performance increase over an 24EU iGPU from the NUC10 for twice the EUs and without needing the eDRAM, which doesn't help nearly as much as it must have cost in production. It marks the turning point for Apple, which wanted much more GPU power at mobile power budgets.
Yes, you can expect a tempting performance uplift from one of these, should you make the switch. But a gaming engine it won't be, because 4x the speed of a lame duck is still pretty lame.
ekon - Monday, March 27, 2023 - link
I like the multitasking benchmarks; don't see that attempted very often as it's not an off-the-shelf test and involves the time and risk of coming up with your own methodology, but it's teased out some interesting results.cruiseliu - Monday, March 27, 2023 - link
Kinda surprised it's still DDR4.Samus - Tuesday, March 28, 2023 - link
I was surprised to see that too. Even 6 months ago I wouldn't be since DDR5 SODIMMs were still elusive unicorns but nowadays they are plentiful and price competitive with DDR4. I've seen 32GB 16x2 kits of Crucial DDR5 5200(?) SODIMMs from B&H for $100 shipped yet nothing mobile seems to take DDR5, and if it does, it's non-upgradable (looking at you XPS 13)Fenturi - Tuesday, March 28, 2023 - link
U690 6800hx based with swappable ddr5MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, March 28, 2023 - link
Me too. I was going to write a follow-up comment about that, but then got a bit derailed writing my anti-rant comment.I suspect that the re-use of DDR4 was a cost saving measure so that they could (mostly) re-use the memory traces, etc from previous NUC boards instead of having to rework that for DDR5.
DDR5 doesn't help all workloads, particularly at JEDEC speeds, but there's definitely some where it helps. Having that little bit of extra performance in this form factor would be appreciated.
Einy0 - Tuesday, March 28, 2023 - link
In response to all the Mac mini comments. I've wanted to dip my toe into the OSX pond for a while now. I do some moonlighting for a business that uses a lot of Macs, and I feel like more hands on time with a Mac would be useful. The ancient Macbook own gives me some exposure but a lot was changed since OSX 10.6.8 . I just can't bring myself to get a mini with only 8GB or RAM. My Macbook has 4GB and a decent SSD and it is SLOW! I imagine newer versions of OSX are more memory hungry, like everything else. I also WILL NOT pay $200 more for $25 worth of RAM. It is plain insulting! Shame on Apple...