Intel NUC5i5RYK Review: A Broadwell-U UCFF PC for Enthusiasts
by Ganesh T S on February 20, 2015 8:00 AM ESTPerformance Metrics - I
The Intel NUC5i5RYK was evaluated using our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs. We revamped our benchmark suite early last year after the publication of the Intel D54250WYK NUC review. We reran some of the new benchmarks on the older PCs also, but some of them couldn't be run on loaner samples. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph might not be the same.
Futuremark PCMark 8
PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU in the system. The Core i5-5250U is obviously not as powerful as the Iris Pro-equipped Core i7-4770R in the BRIX Pro. However, note that the M.2 PCIe SSD and the faster DRAM (despite the lower latency) help the enthusiast configuration take a handy lead over the mainstream configuration in all the PCMark benchmarks.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
PCMark 7 seems to favor the Core i7 models much more compared to the PCMark 8 benches. However, even in this suite, the enthusiast configuration performs better (similar to what we saw in the previous sub-section). The faster memory also helps the GPU post better scores under the enthusiast configuration for the 3DMark benches. Surprisingly, HD 6000 doesn't perform better than the HD 5500 in the Broadwell BRIX s when the 3DMark 2013 scores are considered. However, 3DMark 11 clearly favors the HD 6000.
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
We have moved on from R11.5 to R15 for 3D rendering evaluation. CINEBENCH R15 provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of select PCs in all three modes provided us the following results.
As far as 3D rendering goes, the Broadwell-U NUC really doesn't provide any great benefits compared to the Haswell-U NUC. Faster memory helps with the multi-threaded and OpenGL-accelerated rendering a bit, but, other than that, there is really not much to talk about with this benchmark in terms of performance improvement.
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smegforbrain - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
Agreed. We initially bought a D34010WYKH1 (i3) at work as a test device last summer to see how well they worked. A couple of our employees have been using them for more than 6 months now.I ended up buying a D54250WYKH1 (i5) for myself to use at home as a media PC and other uses. I'm very happy with it, but I am slightly disappointed that they didn't go with full HDMI for the Broadwell refresh.
mavere - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
VP9 hybrid acceleration is enabled in recent Intel Broadwell drivers, and apparently Chrome 41+ (currently in Beta) has the ability to hook into Intel's VP9 decoder.In future Broadwell tests, can you check Youtube power consumption with Chrome 41+? Chrome defaults to VP9 on so most Youtube videos nowadays, so this is an important and unexplored area for mobile power usage.
TrackSmart - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
I don't much of a performance difference between the "mainstream" and the "enthusiast" versions used in this article (aside for artificial SSD benchmarks). Of course, the price difference between the configurations is only $66.Really the biggest performance difference among all of the candidates is between the one machine that has a spinning hard disk and all of the rest. Worth knowing none-the-less.
Essence_of_War - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
Should I be getting the message that intel not want us to use thunderbolt?Jaybus - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
No. It is a matter of power. Thunderbolt standard specifies that every port supply 10 W of DC power. Also, the controller itself is very high bandwidth and requires > 2 W. It adds up on a system striving to be low power and fanless.Samus - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
Wow Intel has the cleanest uefi bios interface I've ever seen. Shame they don't make motherboards anymore :(A4i - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
I got the old i5-4200U , mounted on industrial PC chassis (half inch thick aluminum side panel/radiator). It gets extremely hot, when operating at max CPU load (and ~0 GPU load). Don't hold you breath for power efficiency and productivity. Also that platform lacks any overclocking settings in BIOS or OS tools and is frustratingly painful to undervolt.KAlmquist - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
A benchmark question:The "enthusiast" version has 10-10-10-32 1866Mhz memory, while the "mainstream" version has 9-9-9-27 1600Mhz memory. So the difference in memory could account for at most a 17% difference in performance between the two versions (1866Mhz/1600Mhz). But the Cinebench R15 3D rendering multi-threaded benchmark shows the "enthusiast" version to be 34% faster, and the 7-Zip LZMA Decompression benchmark makes the "enthusiast" version 30% faster.
The only other difference between the two versions is the choice of SSD. This could in principle explain the differences listed above, but that would mean that the two benchmarks cited are largely disk I/O bound since we see the effect even with relatively fast disk drives (SSD rather than mechanical) and a relatively slow CPU (1.6 Ghz dual core). I thought those benchmarks were intended to measure computational throughput, and thus should not be affected by the storage subsystem at all. Am I wrong?
Kidster3001 - Friday, February 27, 2015 - link
If you're looking for a pur CPU benchmark that doesn't rely on other parts of teh system then you'll end up with synthetics that everyone complains about because they don't reflect the real world.Yes, Archive applications rely very heavily on I/O. If you want to use them for CPU benchmarks you should set up RAM Disks for the storage.
On a similar note, one of my pet peeves is using browser benchmarks to compare CPUs. Browser benchmarks measure the performance of the browser and it''s engine(s). They do very little good as a CPU comparison tool. Sunspider for instance can score wildly different on the exact same system just by using a different browser.
gfieldew - Saturday, February 21, 2015 - link
Could the FHD model drive a 4K TV/Monitor adequately? I'm not expecting HDMI 2.0 but 60Hz would be good. Thank-you!