Intel D54250WYKH Haswell NUC Kit with 2.5" Drive Slot Mini-Review

Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

The power consumption at the wall was measured with the display being driven through the mini-HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the D54250WYK with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together.

In order to evaluate thermal performance, we first ran our test for load power consumption and made sure that the unit wasn't getting throttled. Given that the D54250WYKH is an actively cooled system, it had no problems passing this test. In order to determine the efficiency of the cooling system, we first loaded up the CPU alone using just Prime 95 for around 30 minutes. This was followed by addition of the GPU load (FurMark) for another 30 minutes, and then removal of the CPU load for 10 minutes. The system was then left idle. The various frequencies and temperatures during this loading process are recorded in the graphs below.

We find that under pure CPU load, the maximum temperature inside the system was less than 80 C. With both CPU and GPU loading, we see the DRAM temperatures rise, but the CPU package temperature goes down. Looking at the frequency graph, we find that the cores and the GPU adjust themselves to stay within the thermal budget (this doesn't show up as thermal throttling in the hardware monitoring programs as the temperatures are nowhere near T_JUNCTION). After removal of load, temperatures get back to idling (around 40 C) in less than a hour.