Jasper Lake Fanless Showdown: ECS LIVA Z3 and ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano UCFF PCs Review
by Ganesh T S on July 8, 2022 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- ZOTAC
- Fanless
- ECS
- Passive Cooling
- UCFF
- Mini-PC
- Jasper Lake
HTPC Credentials
The HTPC-related sections in previous SFF PC reviews covered a range of aspects. Display refresh rate stability (particularly, the ability to drive 23.976 Hz for stutter-free playback of cinema content), OTT streaming efficiency (YouTube and Netflix), and local media playback performance and efficiency evaluation were some of them. While such a detailed study may still make sense for dedicated HTPC reviews, we have decided to pare down the evaluated aspects for system reviews. Workloads were processed on the ECS JSLM-MINI and the ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano for the results in this section.
YouTube Streaming Efficiency
4K video streaming has become ubiquitous enough for its support to be a necessity even for secondary HTPCs. HDR has also become affordable. Keeping these aspects in mind, we have chosen Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video as our test sample moving forward. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.
YouTube Streaming - ECS JSLM-MINI
YouTube Streaming - ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano
Intel's UHD Graphics for Gen 11 supports hardware decoding for VP9 Profile 2. Taking advantage of this feature, MS Edge automatically fetches the 4Kp60 VP9 Profile 2 encode from the YouTube servers. However, the playback was punctuated by frequent dropped frames on both systems as shown in the statistics segment of the above screenshots.
Various metrics of interest such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption were recorded for the first four minutes of the playback of the above video. The numbers are graphed below.
The reason for the dropped frames is evident by the spikes in D3D Usage. However, as we shall see further down in this section, this problem doesn't manifest itself in local playback. The culprit here seems to be the MS Edge browser itself, rather than the hardware platform.
Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding
The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the QuickSync encoder within Handbrake's framework. The iGPU in the systems support hardware encode for AVC, JPEG, HEVC (8b and 10b, 4:2:0 and 4:4:4), and VP9 (8b and 10b, 4:2:0 and 4:4:4). The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker. They were the same for both the ECS JSLM-MINI and the ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano.
The decoder engine in Jasper Lake is not the latest and greatest that Intel has to offer. For example, HEVC and VP9 12b support, as well as AV1 support are absent. AV1 is quite new, and the others are required only for professional applications - market segments that are not targeted by Jasper Lake systems.
Local Media Playback
Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Considering the target market for Jasper Lake systems, we played back the test streams using the following install-and-forget combinations:
- VLC 3.17.4
- Kodi 19.4
The fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage and at-wall power consumption were recorded during the course of this playback. Based on the DXVAChecker report presented previously, the GPU should be able to play back all codecs with hardware acceleration (except for AV1).
All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.
VLC and Kodi
VLC is the playback software of choice for the average PC user who doesn't need a ten-foot UI. Its install-and-play simplicity has made it extremely popular. Over the years, the software has gained the ability to take advantage of various hardware acceleration options. Kodi, on the other hand, has a ten-foot UI making it the perfect open-source software for dedicated HTPCs. Support for add-ons make it very extensible and capable of customization. We played back our test files using the default VLC and Kodi configurations, and recorded the following metrics.
| ECS JSLM-MINI Video Playback Efficiency - VLC and Kodi | |||
| ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano Video Playback Efficiency - VLC and Kodi | |||
Both players in both systems had great trouble handling the 8Kp60 AV1 clip, due to the absence of hardware acceleration. In addition to consuming lots of power, the playback was just a sequence of frames updated every few seconds. Other than that, all other codecs played without missing a frame, with hardware acceleration activated for low-power playback.
Overall, both systems can be recommended for media playback from the local disk or over the local network. Using web browsers is a hit or miss depending on the codec, resolution, and browser. The presence of hardware acceleration also ensures that the systems are unlikely to get thermally limited during playback.
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xol - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Correction (?)Neither of these reviewed products has a Intel UHD Graphics 605 .. (that's a 14nm Gemini part with 18 EU eg here https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
.. Intel seems to have not publisher a 'number' for this iGPU and seems to distinguish them by number of EU eg Jasper Lake 24EU eg https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/products...
xol - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Somehow messed up the link :UHD 605 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
mode_13h - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Thanks for your coverage of fanless mini-PCs. However, I really wish you'd include something with "big cores", so we can get a sense of the scale of performance difference between them and Tremont.Another nice-to-have would be at least a few benchmarks including a Raspberry Pi 4. However, it has serious thermal throttling issues, unless it's actively cooled or you use a substantial passive cooling solution.
mode_13h - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
I guess the ideal comparison would be a Tiger Lake-based system, since that's the same vintage and similar manufacturing tech as Tremont. Probably much harder to find in a fanless mini-PC, unless we're talking about an industrial PC, but I'd love even to see a comparison between two NUCs: Tiger Lake vs. Tremont.mode_13h - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Or maybe Ice Lake would be even better, but did they make Ice Lake-based NUCs?abufrejoval - Thursday, July 14, 2022 - link
Yes, Tiger Lake NUCs were made, but also very hard to come by: I have both.In a way they are perfect to showcase the benefit of E/P cores …in the case of Intel: AMD is really another story.
The two NUCs look nearly identical on the outside, but inside they are very different beasts.
For starters: The Tiger Lake NUC11 (i7-1165G7 with 96EU Xe iGPU) is configured with a 64 Watt PL2, a rather long TAU and even the PL2 is 30 Watts by default, I believe. There is a reason it comes with a 90 Watts power brick! I changed PL2 to 50, TAU to 10 seconds and PL1 to 15 Watts to ensure the fan would never howl they way it does with the defaults.
I’ve seen HWinfo report a 5GHz maximum clock, but 4.7GHz is the official top speed. It’s at 64 Watts and near 5GHz clocks that I have measured 1707/5808 Geekbench 4 results on Linux (always a bit faster than on Windows). Jasper Lake doesn’t quite play in the same league at 781/2540 using 3.3 GHz and 10 Watts. In Watts/compute power Tiger Lake looks rather worse than Jasper Lake, but when it comes to rendering a complex web page or recalculating a giant Excel sheet, its sprinting power certainly has it appear much faster.
At 64 Watts the Tiger Lake is a desktop CPU, shoehorned into mobile power envelopes. And when it’s constrained to the levels that passive cooling can manage (see the Supermicro SYS-E100-12T-H review here), it really struggles to deliver that performance. The great thing about the Tiger Lake NUC is that you can change PL1, PL2 and TAU to pretty much anything you want and when you set it to the 10 Watts the Jasper Lake gets to use as an absolute maximum, it starts to do rather badly.
Some of that is because the iGPU always gets preference, leaving close to nothing to the CPU. But some of that is that the remaining power budget forces very low frequencies, where the big Core CPU loses against the Atom cores running at a full speed with these Watts.
Jasper Lake, like all the other Atoms since the J1900, never slows down. I’ve never seen it drop below its “Turbo” clock unless idle, even on a mix of Prime95 and Furmark, and I’ve never seen it exceed 10 Watts of combined CPU+GPU power consumption either.
I also have two Ryzen 5800U based notebooks (1443/7855 on Geekbench4), one of which can be switched between 15 and 28 Watts of TDP. When Tiger Lake and Zen 3 are strictly set to the same power levels, Tiger Lake has to run much slower even with half the cores: Ryzen beats it with a much smaller energy footprint per core. But with Tiger Lake left at the default NUC settings (which a battery powered notebook could not support), its four cores will beat an eight core Zen 3 at 15 Watts in Geekbench, which luckily never seems to exceed TAU.
Intel needs E/P because P cores need too much power at the clock rates they require to beat a Ryzen core, and only with E cores they can hit the efficiency of Zen cores in fully multi-threaded loads.
mode_13h - Thursday, July 14, 2022 - link
Wow, another awesome post! Thanks for taking the time to relate your findings. Very interesting!> the iGPU always gets preference, leaving close to nothing to the CPU.
Very key point, but also one that Intel could conceivably address, to some extent, in future BIOS updates. Not that they're likely to, if it had been on the market for a while when you tested, but it's conceivable.
> in Geekbench, which luckily never seems to exceed TAU.
Another great point! I have never run Geekbench myself, and I haven't noticed reviewers mention this key detail.
Foeketijn - Saturday, September 3, 2022 - link
Don't you want to write for Anand?stanleyipkiss - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Zotac makes a fanless zbox with a 1165G7xol - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Benches I've seen suggest both are very similar in multi to a i3 low power Skylake eg a ie-6100T (2core 4 thread very common thin client chip) - the gfx capability also seems also a close match for the 24EU part [probably a very similar part with improved HEVC support] (the 32EU N6000 should be better)For single threaded the old Skylake is ~+50% faster., and from Skylake to Alder Lake it's nearly 2x , so nearly 3x from N5100 to i5-12500 for single thread
I have an old fanless Atom Z3735F (22nm) and these new SoCs are a impressive step up (~7x both cpu and gpu) -- I think the Pi Model B latest is very roughly 2x better than that nut no where near the 5100T in any metric.
tldr both benches would have been a wash one way of the other.