ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1360P/D5 Review: Raptor Lake-P on the Leading Edge

System Performance: Miscellaneous Workloads

Standardized benchmarks such as UL's PCMark 10 and BAPCo's SYSmark take a holistic view of the system and process a wide range of workloads to arrive at a single score. Some systems are required to excel at specific tasks - so it is often helpful to see how a computer performs in specific scenarios such as rendering, transcoding, JavaScript execution (web browsing), etc. This section presents focused benchmark numbers for specific application scenarios.

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R23

We use CINEBENCH R23 for 3D rendering evaluation. R23 provides two benchmark modes - single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of different PC configurations in both supported modes provided us the following results.

Intel's Arena Canyon NUC calls the shots in the CINEBENCH workloads - both in the single-threaded and multi-threaded versions. The NUC BOX-1360P/D5 manages to sneak in to the second spot, but surprisingly does it in the normal mode (28W PL1) for the single-threaded case, and in the performance mode (40W PL1) for the multi-threaded one.

Transcoding: Handbrake 1.5.1

Handbrake is one of the most user-friendly open source transcoding front-ends in the market. It allows users to opt for either software-based higher quality processing or hardware-based fast processing in their transcoding jobs. Our new test suite uses the 'Tears of Steel' 4K AVC video as input and transcodes it with a quality setting of 19 to create a 720p AVC stream and a 1080p HEVC stream.

Intel's Arena Canyon NUC again has the upper hand over the NUC BOX-1360P/D5 in both software transcoding cases. Additionally, the presence of eight high-performance cores in the 4X4 BOX-7735U makes it an excellent performance in the x265 case. In both workloads, the 40W PL1 setting handily outperforms the 28W PL1 setting for the NUC BOX-1360P/D5 - just as one would expect.

Hardware transcoding frame rates within the same GPU generation are a matter of clock rates and power budget. Here, we see the NUC BOX-1360P/D5 and Arena Canyon NUCs performing very similar to each other, with the 40W PL1 setting not providing the former with any significant advantage.

Archiving: 7-Zip 21.7

The 7-Zip benchmark is carried over from our previous test suite with an update to the latest version of the open source compression / decompression software.

The higher power budget enables the performance mode-enabled NUC BOX-1360P to deliver the highest compression rates. However, that budget is not quite helpful for decompression, as the AMD models rule the roost by taking up all the top four spots.

Web Browsing: JetStream, Speedometer, and Principled Technologies WebXPRT4

Web browser-based workloads have emerged as a major component of the typical home and business PC usage scenarios. For headless systems, many applications based on JavaScript are becoming relevant too. In order to evaluate systems for their JavaScript execution efficiency, we are carrying over the browser-focused benchmarks from the WebKit developers used in our notebook reviews. Hosted at BrowserBench, JetStream 2.0 benchmarks JavaScript and WebAssembly performance, while Speedometer measures web application responsiveness.

From a real-life workload perspective, we also process WebXPRT4 from Principled Technologies. WebXPRT4 benchmarks the performance of some popular JavaScript libraries that are widely used in websites.

The NUC BOX-1360P/D5 configurations make up the top spots in all three benchmarks, but there exists no significant gilf between the units representing the latest generation of products from both processor vendors.

Application Startup: GIMP 2.10.30

A new addition to our systems test suite is AppTimer - a benchmark that loads up a program and determines how long it takes for it to accept user inputs. We use GIMP 2.10.30 with a 50MB multi-layered xcf file as input. What we test here is the first run as well as the cached run - normally on the first time a user loads the GIMP package from a fresh install, the system has to configure a few dozen files that remain optimized on subsequent opening. For our test we delete those configured optimized files in order to force a 'fresh load' every second time the software is run.

As it turns out, GIMP does optimizations for every CPU thread in the system, which requires that higher thread-count processors take a lot longer to run. So the test runs quick on systems with fewer threads, however fast cores are also needed. Interestingly, the 28W PL1 setting is the best across the board, but the Arena Canyon NUC performs just as well.

Cryptography Benchmarks

Cryptography has become an indispensable part of our interaction with computing systems. Almost all modern systems have some sort of hardware-acceleration for making cryptographic operations faster and more power efficient. In the case of IoT servers, many applications - including web server functionality and VPN - need cryptography acceleration.

BitLocker is a Windows features that encrypts entire disk volumes. While drives that offer encryption capabilities are dealt with using that feature, most legacy systems and external drives have to use the host system implementation. Windows has no direct benchmark for BitLocker. However, we cooked up a BitLocker operation sequence to determine the adeptness of the system at handling BitLocker operations. We start off with a 4.5GB RAM drive in which a 4GB VHD (virtual hard disk) is created. This VHD is then mounted, and BitLocker is enabled on the volume. Once the BitLocker encryption process gets done, BitLocker is disabled. This triggers a decryption process. The times taken to complete the encryption and decryption are recorded. This process is repeated 25 times, and the average of the last 20 iterations is graphed below.

Hardware acceleration is available for the operations in all of the systems. The time taken for processing is directly dependent on the available power budget. The recent AMD systems fare better than the Intel ones, and the NUC BOX-1360P/D5 lands in the middle of the pack in both workload components.