ASRock Beebox-S 6200U Review - An Alternative to the Skylake NUC

Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the ASRock Beebox-S 6200U with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, and noted the maximum sustained power consumption at the wall.

ASRock's configuration of the Beebox-S platform for better performance has the unfortunate side-effect of driving up the idle power consumption. The load power consumption is higher than the NUC6i5SYK despite operating at default TDPs likely because the Beebox-S has configured the OPI for higher performance, while the NUC65SYK numbers presented in this review are all with the original power-saving configuration.

Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by four stages of different system loading profiles using the AIDA64 System Stability Test (each of 30 minutes duration). In the first stage, we stress the CPU, caches and RAM. In the second stage, we add the GPU to the above list. In the third stage, we stress the GPU standalone. In the final stage, we stress all the system components (including the disks). Beyond this, we leave the unit idle in order to determine how quickly the various temperatures in the system can come back to normal idling range. The various clocks, temperatures and power consumption numbers for the system during the above routine are presented in the graphs below.

According to the official specifications, the junction temperature of the Core i5-6200U is 100C. The thermal solution employed in the Beebox-S 6200U is quite effective in keeping the CPU core / package temperature well below that even under maximum stress. The only disappointing aspect is the SSD temperature which goes close to 70C under stress. Due to the absence of any sort of thermal solution for the M.2 SSD, the drive also takes a very long time to get back to idling temperature In fact, even after 7 hours of removing the stress routine on the disk, the SSD temperature was more than 60C.

The power consumption characteristics provide more information about the TDP configuration. We see that the maximum CPU package power consumption is around 20W. This should be compared against the 23W and 28W numbers for the NUC6i5SYK and similar Haswell-based GIGABYTE BRIX units respectively.

The Beebox-S 6200U is actively cooled, and the chassis is not made of metal. Subjecting it to stress doesn't lead to unsafe internal temperatures. Therefore, the external chassis temperatures / hot spots are not much of a concern.