Intel's Haswell NUC: D54250WYK UCFF PC Review
by Ganesh T S on January 3, 2014 4:25 PM ESTThe NUC as an HTPC
The form factor and network streaming power consumption profile of the Intel D54250WYK NUC makes it a very attractive option for HTPCs. We have already covered Haswell as a HTPC platform in great detail before. So, we will just take a look at a couple of interesting aspects which may vary from one build to another.
Refresh Rate Handling:
One of the most important fixes in Haswell for HTPC users was increased display refresh rate accuracy. We have already seen 23.976 Hz working perfectly in our custom Haswell HTPC build. The gallery below presents the various refresh rates that we tested out on the Intel D54250WYK NUC.
As expected, the refresh rate accuracy is excellent across all tested points. One of the pleasantly surprising aspect was that the drivers allowed forcing of refresh rates not reported by the display through EDID. This must have come in a recent update, because, when I was evaluating our first Haswell HTPC build, the i7-4765T based PC refused to drive 50 Hz on the Sony KDL46EX720. However, the NUC was able to do it successfully after deselecting 'Hide modes not supported by this monitor'.
Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks:
Detailed decoder / renderer benchmarks for Haswell were presented in our initial review. For the NUC, we are going to concentrate on XBMC's native decoding / rendering (used by the average HTPC user) and the combination of QuickSync with EVR-CP and madVR.
We used MPC-HC v1.7.1 for evaluation. LAV Filters 0.59.1.26 come pre-integrated as the default choice with that version. madVR 0.86.11 was configured with the following options: no decoding, deinterlacing automatically activated when needed with deactivation when in doubt (decided by only looking at pixels in the frame center), chroma upscaling set to bicubic with a sharpness of 75, image upscaling and downscaling done by GPU video logic using DXVA2 calls, rendering in full screen exclusive mode with playback delayed until fill up of the render queue, a separate device for presentation, CPU and GPU queue sizes of 128 and 24, 16 frames presented in advance, smooth motion features disabled and the default quality-performance tradeoffs of 16b pixel shader results and subtitle quality optimization for performance.
A number of experiments were done with different madVR settings and this was the one with which we were able to play all our test streams without frame drops. It must be noted that the streams benchmarked are meant to stress the system. The usual media file played back is more of the 1080p24 variety which goes comparatively easy on the resources compared to the 60 fps streams used for the tables below.
| QuickSync Decoder + EVR-CP | |||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | CPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2 | 23.02 | 7.55 | 11.27 W |
| 576i50 H.264 | 20.80 | 6.68 | 10.97 W |
| 720p60 H.264 | 33.04 | 16.53 | 13.70 W |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 38.72 | 16.44 | 14.66 W |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 37.29 | 12.82 | 13.95 W |
| 1080i60 VC-1 | 35.53 | 14.31 | 14.61 W |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 41.98 | 19.88 | 16.05 W |
| QuickSync Decoder + madVR | |||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | CPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2 | 44.66 | 9.72 | 15.59 W |
| 576i50 H.264 | 49.02 | 10.98 | 16.01 W |
| 720p60 H.264 | 58.57 | 24.98 | 19.27 W |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 56.97 | 35.28 | 23.60 W |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 54.76 | 33.13 | 23.17 W |
| 1080i60 VC-1 | 56.49 | 34.00 | 23.19 W |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 60.21 | 27.92 | 27.01 W |
| XBMC 12.3 | |||
| Stream | GPU Usage % | CPU Usage % | Power Consumption |
| 480i60 MPEG-2* | 23.92 | 7.32 | 11.20 W |
| 576i50 H.264 | 11.23 | 4.44 | 9.23 W |
| 720p60 H.264 | 28.80 | 8.79 | 11.99 W |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 16.71 | 7.42 | 10.78 W |
| 1080i60 MPEG-2 | 16.52 | 6.04 | 10.22 W |
| 1080i60 VC-1** | 5.23 | 5.34 | 8.71 W |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 33.62 | 8.16 | 13.05 W |
The only disappointing aspects above are related to the native decoder / renderer used by XBMC. Interlaced VC-1 decoding is broken when hardware accelerated decoding is enabled. Deinterlacing, particularly for the 480i60 stream, was not properly performed with any combination of settings. On the other hand, QuickSync decoding works smoothly (as expected) for all the test streams when used with any renderer.
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fluxtatic - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
Yeah, but isn't having options grand? In your theoretical example, I'm now paying for a bunch of stuff I don't use - battery, screen, kb, etc. Assuming I want strictly something to plug into the TV and shove into a cabinet.For me, I'm seriously considering a NUC for when I replace my wife's PC next summer. There's currently a mid-ATX tower on the coffee table in my living room, and I'm definitely going smaller next time around. Now it's just a question of how small I can go for the money it will cost.
To be honest, though, the discussion would be very nearly settled if there were Mini-ITX options for AMD FM2 processors. Haswell's nice, but I don't know that I can bring myself to pay Intel prices when the time comes.
Gigaplex - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
If the laptop is cheaper then you're not really paying for the screen etc. You're getting a discount with the caveat that those extras that you don't want are bolted on.darwinosx - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
Interesting but I'll wait for the Haswell Mac Mini.Lundmark - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
I thought about that too. Who knows for how long we have to wait, though? The Mac mini was neglected for almost three years before the current design replaced it.TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
2014: mac mini with core i7 4750hq and iris pro.LuckyKnight - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
I've had one of these since they came out in the UK and it's a very good as a dedicated streaming device running XBMC on Linux. You can set the minimal fan speed to 20% in the BIOS and it runs practically silent. If it needs to ramp up (say when playing a game on a emulator then it can).The only bad thing is the cost of the unit (with mSSD, RAM).
airi - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
Yes, please look into writing Linux articles and integrating Linux into hardware reviews.Aikouka - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
I have i3 Haswell NUC, and it's a pretty good unit all-around. I'm currently waiting for a good fanless third-party case, because while the NUC is fairly quiet, it's still audible in a quiet room. The fan's noise is also a little whiny, which I am not a fan of. There are announcements for fanless options that will provide 2.5" drive options as well, which could be good for creating a network-based DVR.As for the inability to bitstream, I have that exact same problem, and it's rather bewildering. My NUC was fine as I could bitstream without any problems in PLEX (WASAPI is the only option for bitstreaming in PLEX). As you can guess based on my choice in verb tense, I have the problem now, but it's strange how it appeared. Everything was fine until I loaded up a TV stream (networked from an InfiniTV 6 ETH) in WMC7, and I noticed that I wasn't getting any sound. Now, I can no longer bitstream in PLEX. I also cannot bitstream on my i3-3225-based HTPC either. I've also had this problem on an i7 860 + GTX 660 Ti system as well, but that went away with a graphics driver upgrade.
Anyway, you can get a temporary fix on the problem by setting your speaker configuration up in Windows, and telling your front-end (XBMC, PLEX, etc.) that your receiver is not Dolby Digital- and DTS-compatible. So, now my AVR just says "MULTI-CH IN" all the time as it's just getting a PCM stream from the PC.
ganeshts - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
There is no problem with the bitstreaming from MPC-HC or any of the other media players which support that... It is only within XBMC in DirectSound mode and Netflix app.That said, I was able to bitstream successfully even from OpenELEC (which means users don't have to pay the Windows tax to make a very capable media streamer, except when Blu-ray menus are needed)
alpha754293 - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
I wonder how this would compare - say to a Mac Mini. It seems that if the price difference between the two systems isn't more than $100-150 - why would I want to go with something like this vs. a Mac mini? (not to be an Apple fanboy or anything - but moreso for a complete pro/con analysis of each solution/type of solution in order to determine which is better in terms of technical specifications, performance, etc...)