ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7735U UCFF PC Review: Zen 3+, RDNA2, and USB4 in a Potent Platform
by Ganesh T S on April 6, 2023 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- AMD
- UCFF
- USB4
- ASRock Industrial
- Rembrandt
- Ryzen 7000 Mobile
System Performance: UL and BAPCo Benchmarks
Our 2022 Q4 update to the test suite for Windows 11-based systems carries over some of the standard benchmarks we have been using over the last several years, including UL's PCMark and BAPCo's SYSmark. New additions include BAPCo's CrossMark multi-platform benchmarking tool, as well as UL's Procyon benchmark suite.
UL PCMark 10
UL's PCMark 10 evaluates computing systems for various usage scenarios (generic / essential tasks such as web browsing and starting up applications, productivity tasks such as editing spreadsheets and documents, gaming, and digital content creation). We benchmarked select PCs with the PCMark 10 Extended profile and recorded the scores for various scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU and GPU in the system, though the RAM and storage device also play a part. The power plan was set to Balanced for all the PCs while processing the PCMark 10 benchmark. The scores for each contributing component / use-case environment are also graphed below.
| UL PCMark 10 - Performance Scores | |||
The overall scores tend to favor the 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5 configurations because of their significant edge in the gaming component. In the Essentials category, the RPL-P units have a good lead, while the other two categories show the order changing based on the available power budget for the processors.
UL Procyon v2.1.544
PCMark 10 utilizes open-source software such as Libre Office and GIMP to evaluate system performance. However, many of their professional benchmark customers have been requesting evaluation with commonly-used commercial software such as Microsoft Office and Adobe applications. In order to serve their needs, UL introduced the Procyon benchmark in late 2020. There are five benchmark categories currently - Office Productivity, AI Inference, Battery Life, Photo Editing, and Video Editing. AI Inference benchmarks are available only for Android devices, while the battery life benchmark is applicable to Windows devices such as notebooks and tablets. We presents results from our processing of the other three benchmarks.
| UL Procyon - Office Productivity Scores | |||
The Office workloads tend to favor the systems with the heterogeneous processors. Both ADL-P and RPL-P have the edge over the Rembrandt-R configurations across all components. It is likely that raw core count helps more than just multiple threads.
Energy numbers for Rembrandt-R are better than ADL-P, but RPL-P manages to eke out a slender lead.
Moving on to the evaluation of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, we find that the heterogeneous processors with larger raw core counts have the edge. However, the 28W Rembrandt-R configuration delivers the best energy efficiency.
UL Procyon evaluates performance for video editing using Adobe Premier Pro. This is most a measure of the iGPU prowess, and the 42W Rembrandt-R almost matches the performance delivered by the 40W Raptor Lake-P system.
On the energy front, the 28W Rembrandt-R configuration is again the most effective - consuming the least amount over the entire duration needed to complete the tasks.
BAPCo CrossMark 1.0.1.86
BAPCo's CrossMark aims to simplify benchmark processing while still delivering scores that roughly tally with SYSmark. The main advantage is the cross-platform nature of the tool - allowing it to be run on smartphones and tablets as well.
| BAPCo CrossMark 1.0.1.86 - Sub-Category Scores | |||
The relative performance seen in UL Procyon translate to CrossMark also, as expected. Without gaming workloads in the mix, the Rembrandt-R configurations fall behind the heterogeneous processor-based systems. However, there is a good jump in performance over the Cezanne system.
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5080 - Thursday, April 6, 2023 - link
Wondering if the 4X4 Box will be updated to the Ryzen 7 7840U or any of the other Phoenix based APU's in the near future.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, April 6, 2023 - link
Yawn. Another ryzen 6000 rebrandeon product. Nobody cares about that, we want the zen 4+rDNA3 chips.And why oh why do these companies always put the thunderbolt on the front? Most thunderbolt devices are left plugged in, why would I want to dirty my desk with cables wrapped around the front of the PC?
lmcd - Thursday, April 6, 2023 - link
It has all of the IO improvements relevant to this form factor. Zen 4 barely moved the needle compared to Zen 3, and RDNA3's biggest gains were in high-CU yields via chiplets. This form factor doesn't even benefit notably from the expected mild Ryzen 7x4x efficiency improvements.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, April 10, 2023 - link
20%+ increase in perf/watt, only ~5% loss going from 125 to 45 watts, and better clock scaling are "minor". Sure. Dont forget rDNA3, which is supposed to be a 40%+ improvement despite the same CU count.How is that rock you are living under?
lmcd - Wednesday, April 12, 2023 - link
Zen 3 also scales down well, the difference is AMD wasn't advertising it.All of the improvements you listed are desktop 7000 platform vs desktop 5000 platform, and top SKU GPU vs top SKU GPU. Perf/watt improvements mostly came from the die shrink and improved bandwidth -- this platform has a die shrink and improved bandwidth, just the refined 6nm instead of newer 5nm. Clock scaling does not matter at these TDPs. RDNA3 performance literally cannot reach a 40% improvement over iso bandwidth (and there's no way the memory controller got completely reworked in a year's time).
It feels like you eat up hype. Ryzen 7x4x will be nice, but its goal is to be the successor to Ryzen 5000, not Ryzen 6000. Ryzen 6000 is an up-to-date platform that has barely even stretched its legs.
evolucion8 - Tuesday, April 25, 2023 - link
Intel in the other hand cant compete with AMD in the Sub 55W market with Zen 3+, let alone with Zen 4 ROFL.meacupla - Friday, April 7, 2023 - link
No, it's you who doesn't care.As it happens, this is a very fast APU, considering it is a rebranded 6000U series.
Asrock somehow managed to tune the settings so that it is achieving extremely good results in gaming.
As for front or rear ports, does it really matter? NUCs are best mounted on the backs of monitors anyways.
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, April 10, 2023 - link
It achieves the same as any ryzen 6000 chip with DDR5. There's no magic tuning, asrock just stopped gimping.And yes, port placement does matter.
StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, April 12, 2023 - link
No. Port placement doesn't matter on these devices. They are mounted behind monitors.abufrejoval - Sunday, April 16, 2023 - link
I own 5 NUCs, none was ever mounted to a monitor: they connect via a cascade of KVMs to a set of screens that have nothing mounted behind.I bought them for their low idle power and the small space they occupy under my desk. And they share that space with 6 Mini-ITX systems, four workstations and a set of semi-resident notebooks.
While I value that at least their RAM and storage can be explanded, I'd still prefer Mini-ITX mainboards in 5L boxes, because generally they allow me to have or put anything inside (e.g. 10Gbit NICs) that I have to hang e.g. via Thunderbolt to the outside of a NUC.
Unfortunately, getting "NUC power" in a Mini-ITX form factor has become nearly impossible, a very recent Erying G660 (https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-h-laptop-cpu... which I've just added to my collection being one of the very few exceptions.
BTW that board works rather well, at least after upgrading the Pico-PSU to 120 Watts, even if it only consumes 45 Watts on sustained peak loads.
And thanks to a Noctua NH-L9i-17xx cooler it remains unnoticeable even under top load, something which the NUCs only ever achieve when you restrict their PL1/PL2/TAU settings to match their tiny fans.
Just remember that personal computers have been loved for decades, exactly because people could use them in ways that their vendors never imagined.