Intel NUC5i5RYK Review: A Broadwell-U UCFF PC for Enthusiasts

Performance 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.