ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1260P and 4X4 BOX-5800U Review: Alder Lake-P and Cezanne UCFF Faceoff
by Ganesh T S on August 5, 2022 8:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- AMD
- Intel
- UCFF
- Mini-PC
- ASRock Industrial
- Cezanne
- Alder Lake-P
GPU Performance
Both Intel and AMD refrained from making significant changes to the integrated GPUs when moving from Tiger Lake to Alder Lake / Renoir to Cezanne. Process maturity allows both vendors to clock the GPUs slightly higher than the previous generation, but the number of EUs / shaders remain the same compared to the equivalent products in the previous generation. GPU performance evaluation typically involved gaming workloads, and for select PCs, GPU compute. Prior to that, a look at the capabilities of the GPU in the two systems is warranted.
The AMD Radeon Graphics in Cezanne (Ryzen 7 5800U) has 8 CUs, while the Intel Iris Xe Graphics in the Core i7-1260P has 96 EUs. The performance of the Iris Xe iGPU is miles ahead of previous iGPUs from both Intel and AMD, as the benchmarks below show, and is more than capable of surpassing the performance of the iGPU in Cezanne.
GFXBench
The DirectX 12-based GFXBench tests from Kishonti are cross-platform, and available all the way down to smartphones. As such, they are not very taxing for discrete GPUs and modern integrated GPUs. We processed the offscreen versions of the 'Aztec Ruins' benchmark.
As expected, the reworked architecture from Intel handily bests the AMD offering, delivering around 20% to 30% better numbers.
UL 3DMark
Four different workload sets were processed in 3DMark - Fire Strike, Time Spy, Night Raid, and Wild Life.
3DMark Fire Strike
The Fire Strike benchmark has three workloads. The base version is meant for high-performance gaming PCs. It uses DirectX 11 (feature level 11) to render frames at 1920 x 1080. The Extreme version targets 1440p gaming requirements, while the Ultra version targets 4K gaming system, and renders at 3840 x 2160. The graph below presents the overall score for the Fire Strike Extreme and Fire Strike Ultra benchmark across all the systems that are being compared.
| UL 3DMark - Fire Strike Workloads | |||
The NUC BOX-1165G7 has a higher power budget compared to the NUC BOX-1260P. Since the GPU configurations are the same, the former comes out ahead of the Alder Lake-P system.
3DMark Time Spy
The Time Spy workload has two levels with different complexities. Both use DirectX 12 (feature level 11). However, the plain version targets high-performance gaming PCs with a 2560 x 1440 render resolution, while the Extreme version renders at 3840 x 2160 resolution. The graphs below present both numbers for all the systems that are being compared in this review.
| UL 3DMark - Time Spy Workloads | |||
The Cezanne iGPU is able to put up a much better fight in Time Spy, and delivers performance that is almost equivalent to the Intel Iris Xe Graphics in this workload. The TGL-U system with the higher power budget continues to remain on top.
3DMark Wild Life
The Wild Life workload was initially introduced as a cross-platform GPU benchmark in 2020. It renders at a 2560 x 1440 resolution using Vulkan 1.1 APIs on Windows. It is a relatively short-running test, reflective of mobile GPU usage. In mid-2021, UL released the Wild Life Extreme workload that was a more demanding version that renders at 3840 x 2160 and runs for a much longer duration reflective of typical desktop gaming usage.
| UL 3DMark - Wild Life Workloads | |||
This workload sees the Ryzen iGPU slip down again, with the leaderboard seeing the TGL-U system followed by Alder Lake-P. This is primarily dictated by the power budget.
3DMark Night Raid
The Night Raid workload is a DirectX 12 benchmark test. It is less demanding than Time Spy, and is optimized for integrated graphics. The graph below presents the overall score in this workload for different system configurations.
The Ryzen iGPU fares much better in this workload, and comes out on top despite the NUC BOX-1165G7 and the NUC BOX-1260P having higher power budgets.
Overall, the iGPU in the Alder Lake-P system has a slight edge over the one in Cezanne, but there are certain specific workloads where the Cezanne configuration can flex its muscles to come out on top.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
34 Comments
View All Comments
yannigr2 - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
Nice review thanks.Considering Intel's optimizations for 3D benchmarks, 1-2 games are a necessity for closer to real life results.
Dante Verizon - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
Yes, some games and real world benchmarks...PeachNCream - Saturday, August 6, 2022 - link
Probably costs too much in terms of time and money to use real world applications. :(xol - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
the color legend on the web/javascript seems to be messed up/makes no sense..
also I think to call the Xe gpu in the intel box as "new" is not quite right - it's not the new architecture (ie Arc) or even close, just shares the branding - it's clearly from the same series that gave us tehe HD 400 way back, and the HD 770 (such as found in the i5-12500) - the difference is that this box has 3x the EU (@96) compared to the i5-12500 (32 EU)... hence the good performance.
xol - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
postscript I'm just gonna say that using the old HD graphics architecture is no bad thing .. at least the drivers will work ! (jokes on Arc for now_abufrejoval - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
Whatever the issues with ARC drivers might be, the iGPU drivers for Linux work quite well also with the newer Xe based variants. The worst I had to do was to force the i915 drivers to accept the unknown Xe PCI device ID via a boot parameter for the kernel.No issues on Windows 10/11 either, while there could be trouble with AMD GPUs on Windows server editions because AMD likes to save money on driver signatures there. I used to run Windows server on earlier APUs (Richmond/Kaveri) and had to fiddle hard to get them working anyway.
deil - Sunday, August 28, 2022 - link
+1 Xe seems to work nice, EXCEPT os 21.10->22.04 upgrade. I had only one of 11400h, and it failed hard on gpu driver to the point where after bios integrated screen was completely unresponsive. (external worked fine though) Purge -> reboot -> new installation, fixed it. I always run proposed, but still that was unusual. I never had screen just nope and completely middle finger me. Otherwise, it's fine, but I personally feel like it's never under 50'c and It's annoying to use for longer, if there is any load. Might be acer fault, but I feel like all of intels are toasters now.abufrejoval - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
I'm afraid there is no Thunderbolt in the Intel variant either..., I checked all references I could find.And that's really too bad, because for this to work as a µ-server I'd use the TB connector to attach 10GBase-T Ethernet based on AQC107 e.g. as sold by Sabrent. The main advantage is really solid Linux support since years, much better than for the various 2.5 variants from RealTek and Intel.
The AQC113 chip is out there (hopefully fully AQC107 driver compatible), please ASRock add it to the base board on both devices and I shall buy one of each at least!
2.5Gbit/s is a long overdue improvement over Gbit, but no longer adequate either. And while it will a few Watts when used at max speed (I think about 3 with Green Ethernet), these boxes aren't running on batteries.
abufrejoval - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
Ok, now finshed reading the review ;-)I guess the 2nd set of PCIe x4 would become allocated to Thunderbolt on the Intel variant, if that's really working. AFAIK at least some re-timer chips or similar are both required and in short supply, which is why I'd want working proof.
AFAIK the AQC113 can do 10GBase-T out of PCIe 4.0 x1 or PCIe 3.0 x2 (or even PCIe 2.0 x4, like the AQC107). So just by dropping the 2nd Gbit, they'd gain all the resources required on Cezanne.
Yes, a couple of millimeters in height and a Noctua cooler would make all the difference in conjunction with open power and fan settings in the BIOS.
Since these mainboard are so similar, perhaps somebody (even ASRock) could come up with an alternate chassis?
I have zero software issues with various kinds of Linux on my 5800U based notebook, while I'm pretty sure all that P/E drama isn't yet sorted out in enterprise Linux. I'm pretty sure that E/P won't reduce the energy footprint on such a NUC in my operations, nor provide better performance under load.
But with systems so closely matched, at least now I could find out.
ganeshts - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
Yes, the Type-C port close to the Type-A one is indeed Thunderbolt 4. I tested out by connecting the Plugable Thunderbolt 4 Hub to it, and then connecting a Thunderbolt 3-only SSD to one of the downstream ports. I made sure that the TB3 SSD delivered PCIe performance with a quick CrystalDiskMark workload.ASRock also mentions it in their block diagram..