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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Acarney - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
I'm confused by the comments about the Brix Pro. I still haven't seen a price or even release date for it. Do you guys have inside knowledge of it? I kinda thought it might have been cancelled...elian123 - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
I haven't found much information either, although this did look good to me: https://twitter.com/IntelGaming/status/41454908150... Ganesh's remark that he has a review unit (http://www.anandtech.com/comments/7566/intels-hasw... is even better of course.cen - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
I never understood why Anandtech never mentiones anything about Linux in their hardware reviews. This seems like a perfect htpc device to put Linux on and I am sure that some readers would be happy to know what are the hoops to go through on the Linux side, the state of Netflix, any driver issues etc. Why pay the Windows tax if you can get the same or pehaps even better experience for free?fackamato - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
Just check out the HD5000 GPU support under Linux, that should give you a good idea about the HTPC capabilities.patterson32 - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
There are other components where it would be nice if they were tested on Linux especially as part of a particular system like the BRIX and NUC. Scouring for info for each component is less desirable than having the entire system tested and reviewed in a single article.patterson32 - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
I always hope AT will write more on Linux topics but they never do. The focus is almost solely on Windows. It'd be nice if they did hardware reviews with Linux and give the usual details of what works and what doesn't and other very detailed information.The only okay site I know of that does Linux hardware stuff is Phoronix but that site uses tests that aren't that meaningful especially for non-GPU hardware and desktop use. For other hardware, they just gloss over many details. Their "analysis" are often blurbs like the power consumption is less than system x. Useless, I can see that on the graph and the system x is some much higher performing non-comparable device.
jason64 - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
Phoronix hardware "reviews" aren't very useful for potential buyers who want to use Linux apart from Michael's GPU driver tests. It'd nice if AnandTech started writing Linux articles.chizow - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
Main limitation I think for HTPC use for people like me is lack of ability to play CableCARD DRM content. I've looked into the alternatives, and there still isn't anything on the Linux/Android/iOS market yet that can replace Windows Media Center for Premium CableCARD content (HBO, MAX, SHO etc.) DLNA is enabling some workarounds (PS3, native SmartTV Apps), but the end-product still isn't as good or as fast as WMC's interface.Lundmark - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
HD audio. I don't think you can get HD audio on Linux.ganeshts - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
Just testing out OpenELEC right now and HD audio passthrough support is great in the latest dev build. That is an embedded Linux system :)