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

Digital Signage and HTPC Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated HTPC evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the ASRock 4X4 BOX-7840U (in both modes) as part of the HTPC suite.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our HTPC test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. 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 Statistics - Normal Mode

YouTube Streaming Statistics - Performance Mode

The iGPU in ASRock 4X4 BOX-7840U supports hardware decoding of VP9 Profile 2, and we see the stream encoded with that codec being played back. The streaming is perfect, thanks to the powerful GPU and hardware decoding support - the few dropped frames observed in the statistics below are due to mouse clicks involved in bringing up the overlay.

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

The 4X4 BOX-7840U in the Normal Mode (28W) ties with the NUC BOX-1360P/D5 for the best energy efficiency in network streaming.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the VCE encoder within Handbrake's framework. The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker.

Video Decoding Hardware Acceleration in ASRock 4X4 BOX-7840U

On paper, this codec list is quite comprehensive and should cover most home consumer and digital signage requirements.

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. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.20
• Kodi 20.2
• mpv 0.37 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.37 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

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, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

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.

The 8Kp60 AV1 playback is at half-rate even when hardware acceleration is in the picture, and this could point to driver issues or even software compatibility. This is a retrogression from the progress we saw when evaluating the Beelink GTR7 where the playback was perfect without any dropped frames for this case. In terms of energy efficiency, the Phoenix systems are at the top, except when mpv is used.