System Performance: Miscellaneous Workloads
Standardized benchmarks such as UL's PCMark 10 and BAPCo's SYSmark take a holistic view of the system and process a wide range of workloads to arrive at a single score. Some systems are required to excel at specific tasks - so it is often helpful to see how a computer performs in specific scenarios such as rendering, transcoding, JavaScript execution (web browsing), etc. This section presents focused benchmark numbers for specific application scenarios.
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R23
We use CINEBENCH R23 for 3D rendering evaluation. R23 provides two benchmark modes - single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of different PC configurations in both supported modes provided us the following results.
It appears that enabling ECC has negligible effect on rendering performance. In the single-threaded case, the 28W PL1 Core i7-1360P in the new system performs roughly on par with the 40W PL1 Core i7-1260P in the Wall Street Canyon NUC. However, the lagging PL1 is a liability in the multi-threaded case, allowing both the Wall Street Canyon NUC and the 4x4 BOX-5800U to take a huge lead.
Transcoding: Handbrake 1.5.1
Handbrake is one of the most user-friendly open source transcoding front-ends in the market. It allows users to opt for either software-based higher quality processing or hardware-based fast processing in their transcoding jobs. Our new test suite uses the 'Tears of Steel' 4K AVC video as input and transcodes it with a quality setting of 19 to create a 720p AVC stream and a 1080p HEVC stream.
The relative ordering seen in the Cinebench multi-threading case is also seen in the case of x264 and x265 encoding for the same reason. The 28W PL1 is a downer for long-running tasks in the NUCS BOX-1360P/D4.
In the QuickSync case, which is purely a reflection of the iGPU clock speeds, the Wall Street Canyon NUC with higher PL1 is able to maintain faster clocks compared to the NUCS BOX, despite the latter having higher iGPU speeds on paper. Enabling ECC causes the frame rate to slip, only to be expected based on previous results for GPU-heavy benchmarks.
Archiving: 7-Zip 21.7
The 7-Zip benchmark is carried over from our previous test suite with an update to the latest version of the open source compression / decompression software.
Higher power budgets and core counts matter in this test - so, the trend observed in the rendering and transcoding tests hold true here. ECC seems to negatively impact the compression rate, possibly due to the triggering of a large number of unaligned accesses to the external memory.
Web Browsing: JetStream, Speedometer, and Principled Technologies WebXPRT4
Web browser-based workloads have emerged as a major component of the typical home and business PC usage scenarios. For headless systems, many applications based on JavaScript are becoming relevant too. In order to evaluate systems for their JavaScript execution efficiency, we are carrying over the browser-focused benchmarks from the WebKit developers used in our notebook reviews. Hosted at BrowserBench, JetStream 2.0 benchmarks JavaScript and WebAssembly performance, while Speedometer measures web application responsiveness.
From a real-life workload perspective, we also process WebXPRT4 from Principled Technologies. WebXPRT4 benchmarks the performance of some popular JavaScript libraries that are widely used in websites.
Single-threaded performance matters heavily in browser benchmarks. Here, the improvements in Raptor Lake-P come to fore. Even with ECC enabled, the NUCS BOX system is able to surpass the performance of the Wall Street Canyon with a higher PL1.
Application Startup: GIMP 2.10.30
A new addition to our systems test suite is AppTimer - a benchmark that loads up a program and determines how long it takes for it to accept user inputs. We use GIMP 2.10.30 with a 50MB multi-layered xcf file as input. What we test here is the first run as well as the cached run - normally on the first time a user loads the GIMP package from a fresh install, the system has to configure a few dozen files that remain optimized on subsequent opening. For our test we delete those configured optimized files in order to force a fresh load every second time the software is run.
The 'cached start' situation is a win for the NUCS BOX, but the system suffers in the 'cold start' scenario. Based on the relative ordering of the system, the processor architecture generation and PL1 configuration appear to be the likely affecting factors.
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