ASUS PN50 mini-PC Review: A Zen 2 Business NUC

BAPCo SYSmark 25

The Asus PN50 was evaluated using our Fall 2018 test suite for small-form factor PCs. The test suite includes BAPCo's SYSmark 25 - an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users in the areas of productivity, creativity, and responsiveness. The 'Productivity Scenario' covers office-centric activities including word processing, spreadsheet usage, financial analysis, software development, application installation, file compression, and e-mail management. The 'Creativity Scenario' represents media-centric activities such as digital photo processing, AI and ML for face recognition in photos and videos for the purpose of content creation, etc. The 'Responsiveness Scenario' evaluates the ability of the system to react in a quick manner to user inputs in areas such as application and file launches, web browsing, and multi-tasking.

Scores are meant to be compared against a reference desktop (the SYSmark 25 calibration system, a Lenovo Thinkcenter M720q with a Core i5-8500T and 8GB of DDR4 memory to go with a 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD). The calibration system scores approximately 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.

The mix of workloads in SYSmark 25 puts more emphasis on single-threaded performance, and it is no surprise that the Tiger Lake NUC BOX-1165G7 and the Frost Canyon NUC outscore the ASUS PN50. Between the PN50 and the 4X4 BOX-4800U, the ASUS system has the edge across all workloads. Across all cases, the system scores better than the Coffee Lake-based calibration system.

SYSmark 25 also adds energy measurement to the mix. A high score in the SYSmark benchmarks might be nice to have, but, potential customers also need to determine the balance between power consumption and the efficiency of the system. For example, in the average office scenario, it might not be worth purchasing a noisy and power-hungry PC just because it ends up with a 2000 score in the SYSmark 2014 SE benchmarks. In order to provide a balanced perspective, SYSmark 25 also allows vendors and decision makers to track the energy consumption during each workload. In the graphs below, we find the total energy consumed by the PC under test for a single iteration of each SYSmark 25 workload. For reference, the calibration system consumes 8.88 Wh for productivity, 10.81 Wh for creativity, and 19.69 Wh overall.

Thanks to the judicious choice of components (only 16GB of DRAM, and a QLC SSD), the energy consumption is the lowest of the lot for the ASUS PN50 across all workloads. Overall, the performance per watt metric presents an attractive picture of the system for the workloads in its target market.