ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1165G7 Mini-PC Review: An Ultra-Compact Tiger Lake Desktop

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

Networking and storage are two major aspects which influence our experience with any computing system. This section presents results from our evaluation of these aspects in the ASRock NUC BOX-1165G7. On the storage side, one option would be repetition of our strenuous SSD review tests on the drive(s) in the PC. Fortunately, to avoid that overkill, UL PCMark 10 has a Full System Drive Benchmark storage test certain common workloads such as booting, loading games, and document processing are replayed on the target drive. The average access times and bandwidth numbers are recorded for each trace and the overall numbers contribute to a benchmark score.

In case of single drive systems, we attempt to allocate 180GB to the primary partition, and leave the remaining space on the drive as a secondary partition. For dual-drive systems, the OS drive is the primary drive, while the other is categorized as the secondary one. Since PCMark 10 requires 80GB of free space at the minimum for processing the Full System Drive Benchmark, we are able to process the benchmark on both the primary and secondary drive in only some of the evaluated systems. We present results of the secondary drive testing below, as it has more number of comparison points. In the case of the NUC BOX-1165G7 configuration, the primary and secondary drive results are within the margin of error.

The PCIe 4.0 SSD - the ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite manages a better score compared to the SSDs in the Frost Canyon NUC (the Crucial P5 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD) and the 4X4 BOX-4800U (the Patriot P300 DRAM-less PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD). In terms of average latency, the lead for the S50 Lite over the Crucial P5 is narrow (82us vs. 84us). The average bandwidth (342 MBps vs. 327 MBps) contributes more to the score difference graphed above.

On the networking front, the system ticks multiple boxes - dual LAN ports with one of them supporting NBASE-T (2.5Gbps), along with 160 MHz Wi-Fi 6. These features are a nice upgrade over previous UCFF PCs that had no NBASE-T support and/or came with only one wired LAN port. The rich networking I/O also expands the application scenarios for the system.

Closing Thoughts

At the end of our review process for the ASRock Industrial NUC-1165G7, we have insights into three complementary components - Intel's Tiger Lake-U platform for UCFF PCs, the NUC-1165G7 motherboard, and the NUC BOX chassis.

Intel's Tiger Lake brought the Willow Cove micro-architecture to processors with a wide range of TDPs. In our review of the Beast Canyon NUC, the 65W chip with its 8C/16T configuration simply blew the competition out of the water. This was partly due to the fact that AMD's Ryzen lineup did not have any suitable chips to go directly against the non-socketed Core i9-11900KB. In lower core/lower TDP configurations, however, Tiger Lake has the distinct disadvantage of not having enough cores to go against the top-end Zen 2-based UCFF PCs. In fact, across multiple workloads, the NUC BOX-1165G7 even comes up second best to the Frost Canyon NUC with its hexa-core processor.

Intel does manage to save face with impressive single-threaded performance, but a large number of consumer workloads are shifting to take advantage of multi-core processors. AMD's Zen 3-based Cezanne APUs will be coming to the mini-PC market soon, and that will pose more challenges to Intel's market share in this segment. If AMD's OEMs manage to create a mini-PC with, say, the Ryzen 7 5800U in a 25W cTDP-up configuration, Tiger Lake-U's appeal could be dented further.

But when that time comes, there will be more than just CPU performance to consider. In terms of connectivity and I/O, Tiger Lake-U leaves Cezanne / Renoir far behind. PCIe 4.0 support, along with integrated Thunderbolt 4 ports means that TGL-U-based mini-PCs are much more extensible compared to AMD-based offerings.

ASRock Industrial's NUC-1165G7 motherboard was one of the first UCFF boxes based on TGL-U to hit the market. In order to bring the product to market faster, USB4 certification was delayed and the company opted not to pursue Thunderbolt 4 certification. Thankfully, the board design with the retimer integration ensures full Thunderbolt 4 support on one of the Type-C ports. Suitable networking controllers have been integrated on the board to make it a premium product in terms of I/O. And the BIOS on the board is functional enough for business deployments.

On the NUC BOX chassis itself, we appreciate that ASRock Industrial managed to include support for a 2.5-inch SATA drive. Despite being made of plastic, the case is well-ventilated, as evidenced by the thermal performance of the system. The distribution of I/O ports between the front and rear is well-balanced, unlike some of the other PCs where most ports are relegated to the rear panel. Ease of disassembly and ability to VESA mount the system mean that there is little to complain about the case design itself.

On the pricing front, the NUC BOX-1165G7 is available for $583. There are a few Tiger Canyon NUCs available from different e-tailers for $620+, but most of those NUCs are currently in the hands of system integrators who only want to supply pre-built configurations at huge premiums. Given the current state of the electronics industry supply chain, that is not a surprise. The ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1165G7 happens to be one of the very few barebones Tiger Lake-based UCFF mini-PCs that can actually be ordered today. The 4X4 BOX-4800U is also available for a very similar price. Depending on the exact user requirements, either can be chosen. For example, the 4X4-4800U's Realtek DASH implementation for remote management has no corresponding feature in the NUC BOX-1165G7, since the board uses a non-vPro processor.

Overall, despite the lack of additional cores, the single-threaded performance of Tiger Lake, higher boost clocks, and Thunderbolt support gives the NUC BOX-1165G7 a slight edge over currently available Renoir mini-PCs. However, that could vary depending on end-user requirements. The competition in the UCFF PC market is heating up, and that is only good news for consumers once the semiconductor shortage clears up and the supply chain becomes healthy again.