ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7840U mini-PC Review: AMD Phoenix in an UCFF Avatar

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

Networking and storage are aspects that may be of vital importance in specific PC use-cases. The ASRock 4X4 BOX-7840U comes with dual LAN ports. From a management perspective, the system is DASH-enabled. This out-of-band management path for deployment and maintenance is a huge plus for IT departments. The WLAN component is with the AMD-branded Mediatek-based Wi-Fi 6E solution that was also used in the previous generation 4X4 BOX-7735U.

On the storage side, we configured the barebones system with a high-end Gen 4 NVMe SSD - the Samsung SSD 990 PRO. From a benchmarking perspective, we provide results from the WPCstorage test of SPECworkstation 3.1. This benchmark replays access traces from various programs used in different verticals and compares the score against the one obtained with a 2017 SanDisk 512GB SATA SSD in the SPECworkstation 3.1 reference system.

The graphs above present results for different verticals, as grouped by SPECworkstation 3.1. The storage workload consists of 60 subtests. Access traces from CFD solvers and programs such as Catia, Creo, and Soidworks come under 'Product Development'. Storage access traces from the NAMD and LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulator are under the 'Life Sciences' category. 'General Operations' includes access traces from 7-Zip and Mozilla programs. The 'Energy' category replays traces from the energy-02 SPECviewperf workload. The 'Media and Entertainment' vertical includes Handbrake, Maya, and 3dsmax. As expected, the Samsung 990 PRO comes out with a huge lead in most workloads. A couple of segments see the SSD slipping to the middle. It is not clear how much of this can be attributed to the SSD itself, as against throttling due to the lack of an effective thermal solution. In general, it is advisable to use low-power DRAM-less NVMe SSDs in such systems, as the performance benefits of high-end SSDs can't be realized in this form factor.

Closing Thoughts

The ASRock 4X4 BOX-7840U provided us with the opportunity to evaluate an AMD Phoenix-based UCFF PC with premium features. The Phoenix platform had already impressed us in its 65W avatar in the Beelink GTR7. That product had its share of early-adopter troubles, which we thankfully didn't encounter in the ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7840U. There are still a few worrisome iGPU driver issues related to media playback that keep reappearing in different releases. Hopefully that is something AMD can address, now that they are gaining significant market share in this segment.

In terms of I/O capabilities, the two USB4 40 Gbps ports bring these systems on par with the mainstream Intel NUCs. The iGPU performance is better for most workloads. Unless single-threaded performance is of vital importance, these Phoenix systems offer a much better value proposition compared to the Raptor Lake-P ones.

ASRock Industrial has delivered two different AMD-based UCFF system sets this year. The Rembrandt-R ones came to market only in Q1, and the Phoenix-based ones have come in early Q4. Due to the relatively short time between the introductions, many of the concerns we voiced in the 4X4 BOX-7735U review remain unaddressed. In the performance mode, the fan is set to run at 100% duty cycle - even when the system is at idle. The company could have delivered support for similar TDP values with a better noise profile by allowing for fine-grained fan speed control based on the SoC temperature. A thermal solution for the M.2 SSD is needed, and at least one of the two USB 2.0 ports in the rear panel needs to be replaced with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port.

At $570 for the barebones version, there is a big pricing advantage over the Arena Canyon NUC and even ASRock Industrial's own NUC BOX-1300 series. Unless the dual USB 3.2 Gen 2 rear ports and slight edge in ST performance are needed, it is difficult to recommend the Arena Canyon NUC or any other RPL-P platform. The Phoenix platform wins on the energy efficiency metric as well.

Looking forward to 2024, ASRock Industrial has already introduced the Phoenix-R-based 4X4 BOX-8040 series and Meteor Lake-based NUC 100 Ultra Box series of UCFF systems. With Intel going in for architectural changes in both the CPU and GPU (compared to the refresh approach from AMD), we might finally see Intel reclaim some of the lost ground. That said, newer generations always come at a price premium, and the software / BIOS also needs some time to mature. Given that context, the value proposition of AMD Phoenix-based systems like the ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7840U will continue to be very attractive for the next few months.