Intel NUC5i5RYK Broadwell-U Mini-PC Review

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, February 25, 2015, 12:00 PM EDT

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Test Setup, SANDRA and Cinebench

We decided to compare the Intel NUC5i5RYK to the Gigabyte BRIX Pro system and to the closest set of desktop reference numbers we had on hand from our recent AMD Kaveri performance review. In certain scenarios, we will also compare the NUC's HD 6000 series graphics to Intel's integrated Iris Pro Graphics engine and AMD's latest integrated APU offering with Radeon graphics. Though the desktop systems are configured differently here, with 16GB of RAM (versus 8GB in the small form factor rugs), these are similar setups with only small variations in available resources. It's not exactly apples-to-apples, these are all different platforms after all, but it's close.

HotHardware's Test Systems

System 1:
AMD A10-6800K
(4.1GHz - Quad-Core)
AMD A8-6500T
(3.5GHz - Quad-Core)
AMD A8-7600
(3.8GHz/3.3GHz Quad-Core)

Asus A88X-Pro
(AMD A88 Chipset)

2x8GB AMD DDR3-2133
(@1866 with 6700)

On-Processor Graphics
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

Samsung SSD 840 Pro

Windows 8.1 x64

System 2:
Intel Core i5-4670K
(3.8GHz - Quad-Core)
Intel Core i3-4330
(3.5GHz - Dual-Core + HT)

Gigabyte Z87X-UD7 TH
(Z87 Express Chipset)

2x8GB AMD DDR3-2133
(@1600 with Haswell)

Intel HD 4600
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

Samsung SSD 840 Pro

Windows 8.1 x64

System 2:
Intel Core i7-4770R
(3.9GHz Quad-Core)

Gigabyte M4HM87P Motherboard

2X4GB DDR3-1600

Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200

On-Board Ethernet
On-Board Audio

Intel SSDMCEAC240B3 240GB mSATA SSD

indows 8.1 X64

SiSoftware SANDRA 2014

Synthetic Benchmarks

We started our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, Cache).

CPU and Multimedia Tests

Memory Bandwidth and Cache

The Intel Core i5-5250U at the heart of the NUC5i5RYK is a dual-core machine, with a base clock of 1.6GHz. As such, it doesn't blow the doors off anything in SANDRA's database in the CPU or multi-media tests, but performance is good. Memory bandwidth falls in the 17GB/s range, which is in-line with expectation with a dual-channel setup.

Cinebench R15

3D Rendering Content Creation Performance

Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.

The NUC5i5RYK puts up middling numbers in the Cinebench CPU and OpenGL tests. Keep in mind, this little machine is packing a 2C / 4T CPU and the on-processor graphics is not in the same class as Iris Pro...

Tags: Intel, SFF, Barebone, system, DIY, NUC, Broadwell

Intel NUC5i5RYK Broadwell-U Mini-PC Review

Test Setup, SANDRA and Cinebench

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