The Intel Compute Stick (Cherry Trail) Review
by Ganesh T S on January 14, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Cherry Trail
- HDMI Stick
- CES 2016
- Compute Stick
Power Consumption and Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the Intel PPSTK1AW32SC with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.15.0 and Prime95 v28.7 (32-bit) together.
Compared to the Bay Trail Compute Stick, the Cherry Trail one has higher idle and load power consumption numbers. Given the upgraded Wi-Fi, the idle number can probably be justified. The load number is more due to the upgraded GPU which delivers much better performance while also consuming as much power as possible while staying within the acceptable thermal envelope.
Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by 30 minutes of pure CPU loading. This is followed by another 30 minutes of both CPU and GPU being loaded simultaneously. After this, the CPU load gets removed, allowing the GPU to be loaded alone for another 30 minutes. The various clocks in the system as well as the temperatures within the unit are presented below.
According to the official specifications, the junction temperature of the Atom x5-Z8300 is 90 C. The thermal solution is able to keep all temperatures around the 80C mark without excessive throttling. In the absence of any GPU loading, the CPU cores maintain a 1.6 GHz speed. We didn't observe the cores operating at the maximum burst frequency at all (1.84 GHz). With GPU loading into the picture, the cores can drop down to as low as 900 MHz even with the CPU load active. The GPU shunts between 380 MHz and 500 MHz depending on the load and available thermal headroom. One disappointing aspect is that the idling temperature of 57 C for the CPU cores is a lot higher than what we would like.
Using the Android version of the FLIR One thermal imager, we observed the chassis temperature after the CPU package temperature reached the steady state value in the above graph.
We see that the chassis remains below 66 C even when the internal SoC is at 80 C.
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074geodude - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
Very technical review, but overall not very useful if you're a consumer. Things I would like to know that weren't answered in this review:- How long does it take to boot up?
- Can it stream 4K video?
- How's gaming performance? Are casual titles like Minecraft or League of Legends playable?
- How's web browsing with only 2 GB of RAM? How well does Chrome run?
- Can you clone the eMMC drive onto a microSD card and boot from that instead? (That way your external storage acts as your primary drive and you can have a 128 GB primary drive).
fackamato - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
+1wyewye - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
testtrivor - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
Actually, I think micro PCs like the Dell 3050 or HP Stream are much better options. They have plenty of output options (4 or more USB ports, the Dell has a "real" M.2 SSD (user upgradeable up to a 2260 SSD - the 32 GB one is 2242), Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11AC WiFi, Celeron J1800). I think it will be fine as a media streamer with 13 GB left after installing the latest build of Windows 10. It may top out at 1080P but I think it's a couple of years before I'll worry about a 4K TV and 4K streaming. OBTW, I snagged the Micro 3050 over XMas @ $129. It also has both HDMI and Displayport and the RAM was easily accessible to upgrade to 8 GB for $30.ComputerExpertsCA - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
Why aren't there more ultra small PCs, tablets, and netbooks with 4GB of ram. Even smart phones have 4GB of ram. Do Microsoft's discounted OS license require a small amount of RAM?Teknobug - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
Yes 2GB ram and 32GB storage is the point where Windows 10 is free and doesn't need a key.SilverBlade - Sunday, January 24, 2016 - link
No HD audio = not interested.Sorry...
floobit - Monday, January 25, 2016 - link
Ganesh or other staff writers - The W10 space restrictions seem to be an issue for all of these "limited devices". Presumably some thought from the Microsoft marketing dept has gone into the thresholds, and I can't imagine they intend for the whole market segment to be crapware. Have you reached out to your contacts at MS (or Intel) to ask how they recommend making this category of device usable?Incidentally, some quick googling doesn't show anyone else with your deactivation issue, which doesn't sound like intended behavior. Have you reached out to MS about this?
Asherlying - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
I do not know exactly the advantage of Intel chipset, which is more commonly used in laptop, and the price exceeds the MINIX , http://www.tinydeal.com/minix-px347wp-p-157874.htm...hindi-tips - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Does this work on a 4K TV at 4K resolution?Please help me. https://hindi-tips.com/