ASRock Beebox-S 6200U Review - An Alternative to the Skylake NUC
by Ganesh T S on August 10, 2016 8:00 AM ESTPerformance Metrics - I
The ASRock Beebox-S 6200U was evaluated using our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs. Not all benchmarks were processed on all the machines due to updates in our testing procedures. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph might not be the same. In the first section, we will be looking at SYSmark 2014, as well as some of the Futuremark benchmarks.
BAPCo SYSmark 2014
BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 is an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation and data/financial analysis. Scores are meant to be compared against a reference desktop (HP ProDesk 600 G1 with a Core i3-4130, 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive) that scores 1000 in each of the scenarios. A score of, say, 2000, would imply that the system under test is twice as fast as the reference system.
Since SYSmark 2014 is one of the newer benchmarks in our suite, we only have the Intel NUC6i5SYK to compare against. In all of the components, the Intel NUC comes out ahead, thanks to its higher turbo frequency as well as bigger cache (4MB in the Core i5-6260U vs. 3MB in the Core i5-6200U).
Futuremark PCMark 8
PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU in the system.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
The Beebox-S 6200U comes in the middle of the pack when it comes to CPU-limited benchmarks. However, the GPU benchmarks show some serious shortcomings, as the Intel HD Graphics 520 is quite weak compared to the integrated GPUs in the other PCs that we are comparing against.
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
CINEBENCH R15 provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of select PCs in all three modes provided us the following results. The trends we observed in the Futuremark benchmarks are evident here also.
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dsraa - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
You're right, the link for newegg is a barebones unit for $319. Doesnt include anything.Ro_Ja - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Heh...We're talking about the NUC with the Skylake :)Ro_Ja - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
The NUC's also good enough for gaming if you're not the type of maxing everything out at 1080P.vailr - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
I think they stole the name from Jean-Louis Gassée:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox
hojnikb - Thursday, August 11, 2016 - link
> you would also be getting Intel QC.You means that "famous" intel QC, where they had to release numerous bios updates before the thing became useful ?
Samus - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
My only complaint is they cut costs using the Intel 3160 instead of the Intel 8260 (or even the older Intel 7260) which is ridiculous when you consider the 3160 and last-gen 7260 are virtually the same price.But at least they didn't use a 802.11n card. I can't believe how many of those I still see even in $1000 Thinkpad's and Elitebook's. Literally talking a few dollars in difference for improved range, performance and battery life going from 1x1 to 2x2.
u.of.ipod - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
I would love to see a review of the newest generation (and revision) of the Gigabyte Brix. The newest revisions have USB 3.1 (type c) ports and DDR4 RAM in addition to the Skylake CPUsganeshts - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
I have it in the queue, but I am waiting for a BIOS update : http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx... : Intel has made a bunch of fixes in the Skylake-U platform that are BIOS-related, and I want to evaluate with the most stable / recent platform Until GIGABYTE updates their BIOS with the fixes from Intel, I am not going to recommend the Skylake BRIX units.tipoo - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Still fixing it this long after Skylakes launch eh. What a mess. Kind of puts into perspective why there's no Macbook Pros with Skylake yet.u.of.ipod - Saturday, August 13, 2016 - link
Oh I didn't know there were problems with the Skylake BRIX units, I'll have to go re-read the Anandtech review.I just put together a simple Skylake BRIX i3 (the DDR3L version) for a friend using all open box parts from amazon. Seems to be humming right along for HTPC and emulator duties. I was considering upgrading my existing HTPC with one of the DDR4/USB C versions.