MSI Cubi 2 Plus vPro Skylake mini-STX PC Review
by Ganesh T S on April 27, 2016 8:05 AM ESTPerformance Metrics - II
In this section, we mainly look at benchmark modes in programs used on a day-to-day basis, i.e, application performance and not synthetic workloads.
x264 Benchmark
First off, we have some video encoding benchmarks courtesy of x264 HD Benchmark v5.0. This is simply a test of CPU performance - both clock speed and multi-threading capabilities. As expected, the Core i5-6500T emerges as the best of the lot by a huge margin.
7-Zip
7-Zip is a very effective and efficient compression program, often beating out OpenCL accelerated commercial programs in benchmarks even while using just the CPU power. 7-Zip has a benchmarking program that provides tons of details regarding the underlying CPU's efficiency. In this subsection, we are interested in the compression and decompression MIPS ratings when utilizing all the available threads. The Core i5-6500T again emerges as a comfortable winner.
TrueCrypt
As businesses (and even home consumers) become more security conscious, the importance of encryption can't be overstated. CPUs supporting the AES-NI instruction for accelerating the encryption and decryption processes used to be restricted to the higher end SKUs. However, starting with Bay Trail, even the lowly Atom series started gaining support for AES-NI. TrueCrypt, a popular open-source disk encryption program can take advantage of the AES-NI capabilities. The TrueCrypt internal benchmark provides some interesting cryptography-related numbers to ponder. In the graph below, we can get an idea of how fast a TrueCrypt volume would behave in the MSI Cubi 2 Plus vPro and how it would compare with other select PCs. This is a purely CPU feature / clock speed based test.
Agisoft Photoscan
Agisoft PhotoScan is a commercial program that converts 2D images into 3D point maps, meshes and textures. The program designers sent us a command line version in order to evaluate the efficiency of various systems that go under our review scanner. The command line version has two benchmark modes, one using the CPU and the other using both the CPU and GPU (via OpenCL). The benchmark takes around 50 photographs and does four stages of computation:
- Stage 1: Align Photographs
- Stage 2: Build Point Cloud (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 3: Build Mesh
- Stage 4: Build Textures
We record the time taken for each stage. Since various elements of the software are single threaded, others multithreaded, and some use GPUs, it is interesting to record the effects of CPU generations, speeds, number of cores, DRAM parameters and the GPU using this software.
Dolphin Emulator
Wrapping up our application benchmark numbers is the Dolphin Emulator benchmark mode results. This is again a test of the CPU capabilities, and it seems to fare well where single-threaded performance is good. That is probably the reason why the higher-clocked Core i3-6100T in the ECS LIVA One and the MSI Cubi 2 Plus fares better than the Core i5-6500T in the Cubi 2 Plus vPro. That said, the margin between the three is very small.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
24 Comments
View All Comments
ganeshts - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
Yes, but I have seen that type of behavior (load power higher than PSU rating) in some of the other mini-PCs that we have evaluated before.KateH - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
The 90W rating is on the DC side; the draw from the wall will always be higher than the system consumption due to heat losses in the power supply. The 102W reading on the AC side means the system is probably consuming around 80-85W DC.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Thanks both of you. I'd neglected to take into account inefficiencies in the PSU. Still, that is cutting things a bit close. An inexpensive PSU running at 80-90% of its max rated output might not last very long under adverse conditions like say, sitting under a desk in a hot room on top of a shaggy carpet.ganeshts - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Well, I suspect no one is going to run Prime 95 + Furmark 24x7 on their PC :) It is just a check for how much the max. power consumption of the unit is going to be.HomeworldFound - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
All of these devices are a let down to me, I want one yet it fails to meet my expectation every time. So many different Intel configurations exist that the market is flooded by products that barely differ outside of the case. Why do none of these manufacturers team up and offer a better alternative to the Intel GPU even in the larger more accommodating products?I guess what I have to ask is if I want something like this with the ability to game, is AMD really ahead of the competition or will they be with an improved CPU/GPU combo?
abufrejoval - Saturday, April 30, 2016 - link
I guess the biggest issue is about what you consider "game ready". To you it may mean the equivalent of a GTX 980 ti or even a dual AMD Fury or about 300 Watts of TDP.Others are happy enough with the on-board GPU or would love to see an AMD Nano (175 Watts) matched to this form factor.
This large range of TDP cannot be solved with a single physical design in this form factor and the result is loss of economy of scale, which is what these systems are mostly about: Selling large volumes.
And that unfortunately means that the TDP is pretty much set in stone and either excludes an external GPU or uses one so weak, it doesn't do any better than what an APU or Intel HD graphics can deliver by themselves.
AMD is ahead only in terms of the openness of their platform, of where they could go theoretically as proven out by the PS4 and Xbox 2 designs.
In that theory someone could go and have AMD design a custom SoC a couple of notches above the likes of a PS4, using either 16 GB GDDR5 for OS and graphics or even 16GB of HBM2, 8 juicy CPU cores (4GHz class) and Fury class graphics with a combined TDP of 200 Watts and cooled by something really massive and slow moving.
At the space and weight equivalent of a gallon of milk you could have a gaming PC, that's even portable (thanks to the handle on that milk bottle) from room to room or party to party.
Better yet, I'd like to be able to stack two, four (or eight?) of these together, to build an even larger NUMA/SLI rig.
PCs are still designed far too CPU centric, even if GPUs have long since taken over a much larger part of the silicon real-estate and the value creation.
Let's move what's left of the PC onto the GPU board (or SoC) and turn the motherboard into a passive backplane with slot form factor sockets for additional (2-4/8) APUs.
And make the memory system GPU centric with the CPU being allowed to use some of that to bootstrap the games (or even run Excel/SAP during business hours).
AMD could execute that vision, if somebody were to provide the required cash up front. The result would be an open PC, which unfortunately means that recovering the invest could be much more difficult than it already is on locked-in systems like the PS4 or the Xbox.
RayRoy - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Will there be a Skylake U model in the original Cubi size?ganeshts - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
I have pinged MSI, but they have neither confirmed nor denied plans for a Skylake Cubi-mini. We will probably know more at Computex. If it is not shown at Computex, I think it will not be coming.potf - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Sorry, only thing missing imho in the article photos is where is the hdd if you want to put one ?I would guess on the bottom as there seems to be room for it.
Asus competition the vc65 / VC65R has at least 2 2.5 hdd slots , 4 in some VC65R versions, and an optical drive (but have no M2)
MSI cubi broadwell small factors had the option to have msata plus 2.5 drive, and it seems to me that the bottom would be removable in the 2 plus version also, in order to choose between a smaller form factor and more ports, but now it only seems that is a differentator between normal and pro version.
Otherwise, still waiting to see how MSI will sell them in europe : for now only ref is MSI Cubi 2 Plus-B3610T4GXXDXX Intel Core i3-6100T 2x 3.20 GHz, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, no OS and I do not know whether the ssd is in M2 factor or 2.5. Street price is around 500 euros vat included (400 USD equivalent).
The nice thing with selling them barebones is the flexibility, the less nice one is that T processors are less easy to find than standard cpus (55-65W).
ganeshts - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
It is is one of the teardown gallery photos, where the removable bottom part is shown separately, and there is a rectangular 'hole' corresponding to where the 2.5" drive is mounted. The 'proprietary' cable to connect the drive to the main board on the bigger segment is supplied along with the unit (you can see it in the package photo on the right side)