Intel NUC5i7RYH Broadwell-U Iris NUC Review
by Ganesh T S on April 20, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- HTPC
- NUC
- Broadwell-U
Performance Metrics - I
The Intel NUC5i7RYH 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 as well as the RAM speed. Even though the Core i7-5557U in the NUC5i7RYH is not as powerful as the Core i7-4770R in the BRIX Pro, we find that the scores are neck and neck, with the former even edging out the more powerful variant (possibly due to differences in the OpenCL drivers that they were tested with).
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
In the other Futuremark benchmarks, the relative performance is as expected - the Core i7-4770R leads the pack, followed by the Core i7-5557U in the NUC5i7RYH. This trend is also present in the CINEBENCH results discussed below.
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.
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damianrobertjones - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
I have the i5 version along with an 850 evo drive and, seeing as it's there, a Plextor M6e M.2 PCIe drive. The Nuc is quite fast but when it comes to using the Plextor PCIe SSD, while running VMs etc, the performance is really quite poor. We're talking the same speed or less than the 850 drive. (Stats obtained from the Samsung Magician software)Heck using video from within a VMWare OS, along with Corel Videostudio, creates stuttering etc. Previously I did the same task with a Surface Pro 3 (i7,8GB) with no such issues.
Is the M.2. spec simply not ready?
CaedenV - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
That depends a lot on your software and hardware support. For example, before I was running win10 bare metal on my desktop I was running it in VM, and on my nice big Sandy Bridge i7 desktop it could not play back simple h.264 1080p video smoothly... but trying the same thing on my newer but much more gutless i7 dual core laptop a few months later had pretty much 0 issues. It all depends on the VM platform, the OSs in use, the GPU, the drivers, etc.damianrobertjones - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
I hear you. I just expected more from the PCIe M.2. drive. It simply 'feels' slow and the speed test returns figures that are nowhere near the performance that it should hitFlunk - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
It might have to do with the controller.extide - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
You'r VMDK's are probably not properly 4K aligned.extide - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
Your*damianrobertjones - Friday, April 24, 2015 - link
I've moved to an MSI machine with 2x 850 evos. Problem solved and all working fine again.smegma11 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
I read somewhere to expect great things from the Skylake. The newest chip will open up all 3 data lines to the M.2 where the previous versions don't. I imagine this will help speeds quite a bit.nutternatter34 - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
I have to agree. I tried to use an M.2 as a boot drive and for my software. Where I might not be able to compare many SSDs in general usage, the M.2 directly hampered multi-tasking and had notable visible performance issues. Maybe I expected too much from it but in future I would be very cautious choosing an M.2 drive over something in the 2.5" form factor.damianrobertjones - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
THANK YOU! Glad that someone's got the same issue.From the Samsung Magician software
Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5"
SR: 547 SW: 504
RR: 71807 RW: 64081
Plextor PX-G128M6e
SR: 743 SW: 332
RR: 64558 RW: 47909
The whole reason for getting one was to have improved performance for my VMs! What's going on? (Not tried to update the Plextor firmware just yet)