ASRock Industrial NUCS BOX-1360P/D4 Review: Raptor Lake-P Impresses, plus Surprise ECC

System Performance: UL and BAPCo Benchmarks

Our 2022 Q4 update to the test suite for Windows 11-based systems carries over some of the standard benchmarks we have been using over the last several years, including UL's PCMark. New additions include BAPCo's CrossMark multi-platform benchmarking tool, as well as UL's Procyon benchmark suite. BPACo recently updated their SYSmark benchmark suite - while operational at a basic level, it is missing key features such as energy consumption measurement. We will start including SYSmark 30 once the open issues are resolved.

UL PCMark 10

UL's PCMark 10 evaluates computing systems for various usage scenarios (generic / essential tasks such as web browsing and starting up applications, productivity tasks such as editing spreadsheets and documents, gaming, and digital content creation). We benchmarked select PCs with the PCMark 10 Extended profile and recorded the scores for various scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU and GPU in the system, though the RAM and storage device also play a part. The power plan was set to Balanced for all the PCs while processing the PCMark 10 benchmark. The scores for each contributing component / use-case environment are also graphed below.

The Productivity workload benefits from the 8 high-performance Zen 3 cores in the 4X4 BOX-5800U, but the Intel systems wrest the lead in other components. Overall, the RPL-P system at default comes out on top. However, with in-band ECC enabled, the gaming workload suffers greatly. This sees the overall score for the ECC-enabled configuration to be in the middle of the pack.

UL Procyon v2.1.544

PCMark 10 utilizes open-source software such as Libre Office and GIMP to evaluate system performance. However, many of their professional benchmark customers have been requesting evaluation with commonly-used commercial software such as Microsoft Office and Adobe applications. In order to serve their needs, UL introduced the Procyon benchmark in late 2020. There are five benchmark categories currently - Office Productivity, AI Inference, Battery Life, Photo Editing, and Video Editing. AI Inference benchmarks are available only for Android devices, while the battery life benchmark is applicable to Windows devices such as notebooks and tablets. We presents results from our processing of the other three benchmarks.

Enabling in-band ECC results in some penalty, but the scores across all MS Office workloads for both NUCS BOX-1360P/D4 configurations handily surpass the other systems.

The NUC 12 Pro Wall Street Canyon and the 4x4 BOX-5800U come out as the best bet for energy efficiency with respect to the MS Office workloads. The NUCS BOX-1360P/D4 gets a much higher score, but is let down on the energy consumption side. While not an entirely scientific metric, the Wall Street Canyon configuration delivers 733 pts / Wh, while the NUCS BOX does only 699 pts / Wh in this workload. However, we have historically seen that ASRock Industrial's BIOS for the NUC BOX lineup is rarely optimized for power consumption.

Moving on to the evaluation of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, we find the same pattern. Despite the 40W PL1 of the NUC 12 Pro, the 28W PL1 Core i7-1360P in the NUCS BOX is able to match it and also consume lesser energy for the workload. Enabling ECC pushes down the system towards the middle of the pack in both metrics.

UL Procyon evaluates performance for video editing using Adobe Premier Pro.

The workload takes advantage of the iGPU, which is problematic for the ECC-enabled configuration. However, the default configuration is able to come out on top by a huge margin. Being able to complete the workload faster also keeps the energy consumption low.

BAPCo CrossMark 1.0.1.86

BAPCo's CrossMark aims to simplify benchmark processing while still delivering scores that roughly tally with SYSmark. The main advantage is the cross-platform nature of the tool - allowing it to be run on smartphones and tablets as well.

CrossMark shows the NUCS BOX-1360P/D4 emerging on top, with the ECC-enabled configuration performing roughly on par with the NUC BOX-1260P.