ASRock Beebox-S 6200U Review - An Alternative to the Skylake NUC
by Ganesh T S on August 10, 2016 8:00 AM ESTPower 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.
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Arnulf - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Where is Apollo Lake?I want one of those on a desktop-sized motherboard (uATX?).
Ro_Ja - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
The Celerons and the Pentiums? They'll be better off with Compute Sticks.maglito - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Someone needs to make something like this with passive 24v 4wire Power over Ethernet or one of the active PoE standards that supports voltage in the 48v range. I have a NUC rigged up to run off of one of these switches: https://www.netonix.com/wisp-switch.html with this PoE extractor: http://tyconsystems.com/index.php/passive-gigabit/... (using 24VH mode on the switch) but it required a bit of cutting. There isn't really any good SFF PC with PoE input anywhere on the market I've found.BedfordTim - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
On the plus side at least there are still NUCs that support 24V input.MrCommunistGen - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Wouldn't some of the Skylake NUC's performance advantage be related to the fact that the i5-6260U has 64MB of eDRAM?ganeshts - Thursday, August 11, 2016 - link
Very true. I had mentioned Iris graphics in the comparison table for the NUC6i5SYK, but didnt mention the eDRAM aspect in the text.Wineohe - Thursday, August 11, 2016 - link
I can appreciate the desire to test the unit in it's best light with a 950 Pro and the 16GB of RAM, but it seems like overkill and jacks up the price way up. You fail to even mention the base price, although I can go shopping. A more likely configuration for me is a mainstream 250gb SSD and 8GB. It would be perfect in my sailboat.Jookie - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
I would love to see a NUC/UCFF that doesn't sandwich a hot WiFi adapter between the SSD and the MoBo. I usually don't install the WiFi if I care about the data on the drive.Mathewlin - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
Cool be good for my mom! :)Detosx - Saturday, August 27, 2016 - link
Another over-priced mini PC based around a low powered ultrabook-series CPU. Wouldn't it make more sense to buy an ultrabook laptop where a screen, keyboard, trackpad... memory and storage are included in the price?! I know it's a smaller footprint an ultrabook but I feel like potential customers are getting hammered on price, or certainly here in the UK. The NUC, with the much better Iris HD 540 graphics component, seems much more appealing, to me, but again the price is the big off putter and lack of things like a Thunderbolt 3 port limit the appeal of mini PCs, at the moment. If the price were much lower, I think the things it lacks would be less conspicuous by their absence. Thanks for the review. It would be nice to think it might spark some competition but here in price fixing UK, competition seems to be a dirty word. Hopefully the next generation will make for viably priced and appealing little gaming console alternatives.