ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-N97 and GMKtec NucBox G2 Review: Contrasting Compact ADL-N Options

HTPC Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated HTPC evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the ASRock NUC BOX-N97 and the GMKtec NucBox G2 as part of the HTPC suite.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our HTPC test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.

ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-N97 Plus YouTube Streaming Statistics

GMKtec NucBox G2 YouTube Streaming Statistics

The iGPUs in both systems support the hardware decoding of VP9 Profile 2, and we see the stream encoded with that codec being played back. The streaming is perfect, thanks to the powerful GPU and hardware decoding support, but it needs to be noted that activation of overlays of any sort triggers dropped frames.

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

The lower-clocked iGPU in the NucBox G2 is sufficient to ensure seamless playback. A welcome side-effect is that it ends up consuming lesser energy for the whole playback compared to the NUC BOX-N97 with its faster iGPU.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the QuickSync encoder within Handbrake's framework. The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker. The output is the same for both systems.

Video Decoding Hardware Acceleration in the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-N97 and the GMKtec NucBox G2

ADL-N includes HEVC 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 12-bit decode support. It also supports AV1.

Local Media Playback

Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.18
• Kodi 20.0b1
• mpv 0.35 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.35 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

Fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.

It must be kept in mind that the T8 Plus number graphed above is for non-HDR playback. Despite AV1 acceleration being reported in DXVAChecker, the decoding of the AV1 clip in software resulted in a slideshow with more than 50% of the frames getting dropped. In terms of energy consumption, it is no surprise that the lower clock rate in the iGPU of the NucBox G2 helps it achieve low numbers compared to the rest.

Kodi is also yet to take advantage of AV1 decode acceleration in ADL-N. Other than that clip, the rest played back successfully. The NucBox G2 turns out to be the most energy-efficient of the HDR lot.

AV1 hardware decode is selected and activated, but some rendering issues prevent the actual presentation on screen. The 8Kp60 AV1 clip dropped approximately half the frames, but it is clearly a software issue that needs to be overcome.

With GPU shader activity in the picture, the playback of most streams with the GPU-HQ profile in mpv 0.35.1 ended up being unwatchable due to the unreasonable D3D usage graphed above.