I've been drinking, it's 1900 and I've only eaten breakfast today so bear with me.
I'm just astonished that we're now using 64GB DDR4 to eliminate any chance bottlenecking. My last system had 24GB DDR3 and I'm now on 16GB DDR4 with no memory concerns.
As for *hic* SFF HTPC use, AMD has driver issues. I once said to a guy who deals in GPGPU stuff that "I don't have enough experience in drivers or coding to be able to say whether AMD's drivers are good or bad" and his response was "that's the same problem AMD have". If I'm using a PC for relaxing, having to debug or troubleshoot is not ideal. It's a shame, as noted in the conclusion here, that QA is often done on Intel systems and AMD don't get a look-in. Hopefully, as AMD become profitable and more performant they'll be able to convince people to QA on their hardware as well.
They definitely need to sort out their drivers and assess the OEM support for other hardware. It's a sad fact that, since I dropped Intel for AMD (both CPU and GPU), I've had more crashes in a month than in years of Intel/Nvidia systems. I've lost more time to lost work than when I was using Windows 98 and CTRL+S after every change is back to being automatic.
A few months ago I was trying to get 4K working on Netflix and their website specified only Nvidia card support or Intel iGPU decode support. Their support staff had never heard of the issue and so I went through the codecs supported by AMD and pointed out at least their hardware spec page should mention AMD once??? The guy couldn't help so he took it as a comment to escalate higher.
Got a secondary AMD rig that is 10+ years old and stays online for weeks at a time without a crash.
Still runs games just fine, the more modern titles that are heavier threaded tend to run much better on the old Phenom 2 x6 and paired up with the Radeon RX 580 is a pretty capable 1080P rig. Will upgrade it when it's useless.
No explanation as to the delay (originally it was related to the fires in California, but it sounded like they were past that), but Ryan said a couple days ago that they are still getting caught up: https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/13317467171...
Took Intel an age (over a year) to fix the BIOS updater on systems with Bitlocker - would fail to suspend the encryption so you'd be left with a machine that wouldn't boot, with a locked drive. Hope you kept the recovery key somewhere accessible.
OMG I remember that bug, the worst part was there was no way to clone a drive to upgrade the SSD because you couldn't suspend bitlocker so you had to decrypt the drive which takes hours in some cases. 3-4 hour project just to upgrade an SSD...
I remember when Atoms first came and the NM10 chipset. It had crap support on Linux (didn't support resolutions beyond 800x600 for a while). Then there's Asus Transformer Book that has Intel hardware that's only supported under 32 bit Windows, so no upgrading to 64 bit (even if it would've been a bit silly in that particular case as it only had 2GB RAM). Linux is right out.
Macy’s cardholders need to activate their Macy’s card. Macy’s Card Activation allow their customer to activate Macy’s Card if users want to activate their Macy’s Card then with this post customers didn’t have to do more hard things. http://philagribiz.com/macys-card-activation/
About ram it depends on how you work, I have 32GB and it daily goes above 24GB used, while browser/slack/spotify/30tabs on ff and few other things that I just never close take ~6GB. (I am on linux, it does use ram way more conservative that windows) When I last time used windows for work it did abuse all 32GB and started to slow down. its up to what you do and on 16GB it mostly work, but at least in my case 2-3 times a day I need a bit more, and like once a week 16GB is just not enough. as It costs just like 70$ once, and it saves me few minutes daily, I think it paid for itself in my health at least.
"...I've had more crashes in a month than in years of Intel/Nvidia systems. I've lost more time to lost work than when I was using Windows 98..."
I'm calling bullshit on that. My understanding is that the APU driver situation isn't as good as discrete components (which I'm currently running without issue), but I can't believe that it's *worse than Windows 98*.
I guess they were saying it's PEBKAC. Which it is. Having even 2 or 3 crashes in a month is already too much to be caused by AMD, their hardware, or their drivers, or else tens or hundreds of thousands of people would be affected and you'd hear about it. Not saying their drivers are perfect but if your PC is constantly crashing *you* have a problem. You probably don;t really know what's happening in there but you heard a rumor...
I lost count of how many acquaintances had rootkit encrusted PCs, full of every garbage known to man after clicking on everything that fell under their mouse, everything running with hacks, cracks, and other torrented junk, from the OS image to the "security" software. They had no idea what's going on but all had some form of (ridiculous) theory based of stuff they heard from someone, or read on the internet but probably neither them nor their source understood it.
Fix your stuff, stop blaming the tools. Also having at least a decent meal before drinking helps.
Interesting experience. I've been using an ASUS PN50 R5 4500 system for 2 months as my entertainment computer without a single crash, and typically keep 25+ web pages open in Chrome. It is configured with 32 GB 3200 MHz Crucial memory and an 500 GB EV0 970 Plus SSD running Windows 10 Pro 20H2. (Initially installed V 2004) In addition to Chrome, I'm a heavy user of the following Apps; Netflix, Amazon, & Hulu.
I'm not sure where the source of your problems, but I've been also running a PN50 R3 system as a workstation without any issues.
No problem with AMD drivers for my X370 based motherboard, Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, or Vega64 reference model video card(yes, I need a 6800X or 6900X, just waiting on the 6900X to be released at this point). People who claim to have this or that problem may be encountering problems between components that in turn cause their issues with Radeon cards. Looking for what is in common between people who have a problem and then looking at those without problems to see what the differences are is something that most people don't seem to understand.
QA process: Reproduce problem, identify source of problem, figure out workaround or fix for the problem.
Your set up is very close to mine. 3900x, vega64, but I'm on the x570 mobo.
What is very strange is these crashes are happening at low load (as is when working). No crashes during games or when I'm hammering it. It is unlikely to be a dodgy background application as it's a fairly new install and I routinely avoid installing bloat, etc. Only stuff required to make it go is enabled on start up to this end.
I'm on the verge of shifting to Linux but for one major issue - I have a decent sound card which is not supported in Linux. I'm unwilling to unplug and ditch a few hundred quid worth of kit. Hopeful Linux drivers will emerge but creative aren't exactly helpful.
Ganesh why would you use a Bapco Benchmark - Mobilemark. Its results are complete crap. You must not know the history of Bapco and how its basically an arm of Intel, made for Intel chips.
Notice how the AMD 4800U loses in every benchmark with Mobilemark and consumes more power doing it but when you look at the other results, synthetic or otherwise its mostly in AMDs favour... Intel benchmarking tools at work. This is a known thing among everyone who follows this stuff. If you want to maintain your credibility stick to independent benchmarks not ones made by the vendor for the vendors own chips.
I feel like the 35W 4800HS, with a bit more cooling, would be a better sweet spot for this form factor.
Speaking of which, my 4900HS doesn't idle that hot. But I did notice that it behaves quite differently when running on battery (where it drops down to 400Mhz) and on AC (where it wont go below 1GHz, even though the cores are largely asleep). Its possible that this 4800U is stuck in the Windows "plugged in" profile.
I'm thinking the biggest boost would come from combining DDR5 with a larger local cache a-la "Infinity cache" - 5nm should give them enough spare die area to achieve that, and it'll presumably help keep the power draw lower than stuffing the entire area with logic would.
I just want to point out that on the spec chart, you only list "USB 3.2 Type-C", but there is clearly more to it than that, as that spec can be 10GB, 20GB, alt-mode DP, alt-mode HDMI. I know it's clearly marked as 10GB alt-DP in the pictures.
aside from that When are manufacturers going to switch over to USB-C PD for these smaller devices? I know that USB-C PD can do 100W and this thing only eats 70W at full load from the wall.
... Thunderbolt please. Can then power with it and have multiple 4K screens and peripherals hanging off 1 cable. Can then just swap the cable between this and my work PC when I work at home.
Alt mode HDMI is dead, there are literally zero devices which support or implement it. It only exists as a specification. There's very little point anyway because dp alt mode is superior in every way, such as being able to reduce lane count to share usb3hs. But with hdmi alt mode, you are using all 4 lanes just to transmit 1080p.
Thanks Ganesh! The overall performance is decent, the problems with HTPC use unfortunate. One other piece of information I might have missed: just how noisy does this unit get, and how annoying is the fan noise? I am asking as especially smaller fans can be a lot more annoying than the simple dB(A) numbers suggest. Having had a laptop with this "feature", I now always ask about that before even thinking of buying.
Nice, been waiting for a decent NUC like product with an AMD CPU. This looks quite competitive, but seems like waiting until CES in January will be worth it. The Zen3 is a killer upgrade and might well mean it's worth keeping for another year or two.
Most hardware refreshes are annual, and you're willing to wait 2 years? With that mindset you'll never, ever buy anything because you know a better version will eventually arrive in that timeframe. Maybe 2 better versions.
I don't think spikebike was saying that they would wait 2 years to buy I think they were saying it would be interesting to wait until CES in a couple of months to see whether there could be Zen 3 based NUC coming out in the next few months which in their opinion would be a big enough upgrade over a Ryzen 4000 based NUC to last them a full year or two longer.
You are very right, Zen3 in a small form factor would be a formidable plattform for many use cases. I'd happily swap my old box for such a device.
Unfortunately I wouldn't expect this to happen anytime soon. Currently there is no such thing as a Zen3 based APU. The Zen2 based Renoir has just been released and still seems to have limited availability. It is more than a year behind the desktop and server Zen2 chips. Even if a Zen3 mobile chip was anounced in January, we would probably still be at least a year away from any SFF using it.
Looks like the devices from Asus and ASRock are your best bet, or you need a lot of patience.
Pretty damn impressive seeing this hit above 1300 in Time Spy and nearly 14000 in night raid. My ITX 4650G with the iGPU@2100, RAM @3800c16 and IF@1900 hits >1600 TS and >17000 NR, but that also consumes ~100W from the wall. With this sitting in the 50s of watts except for initial spikes, that's very good performance for the tiny power draw.
Really looking forward to how boxes like this evolve with DDR5.
Oh, and the dual NICs are brilliant. The 4350G version of this would make for a great PFSense box.
Yes, the 1G port has Realtek DASH enabled. I am actually investigating that feature right now (couldn't complete it in time for publishing the review), but information / guides are hard to come by. Realtek's own software that talks to DASH clients is a mess / very user unfriendly.
I had ordered the PN50 in summer with the Ryzen 4800U when a major EU retailer promised only 2-3 days deliver delays. Alas, the only thing that moved was the delivery delay, which increased and wound up as unknown. The Ryzen 4800U SoCs requires perfectly binned Renoir chips and those are likely to remain rare even while they are being replaced by 5800U chips (eve more attractive and harder to get?).
I had to resort to team blue, which has some advantages in my KVM live-migration scenarios and could become especially interesting: if I can get Thunderbolt 40Gbit networking to work, I’d use that for the cluster/gluster interconnect and switch the USB 2.5Gbit NICs to the front-end. ASRock is doing the right thing here, I wish 2.5Gbit had long since become default everywhere, especially since I can’t believe Realtek charges more than a few cents extra for the speed uplift.
In the mean-time I’d just like to report that the NUC8i7BEH has had its price reduced to around €300 including EU VAT, while the BXNUC10I7FNH currently goes for €450. That comes down to €75/core and pretty much to core/€ parity with the 4800H at €600, which is why I got one of each in the end. Their combined idle power may actually not be higher than the AMD unit, while peak heat and noise are very well managed via OS independent BIOS settings on Intel NUCs these days.
The Bean Canyon’s Iris 655 iGPU main advantage is that it doesn’t cost one cent extra vs the ordinary i7-10700U UHD630, just as the 128MB eDRAM are given away for free and that L4 cache does at least deliver measurable performance advantages to the CPU, even if they aren’t noticeable. Both give an i7-7700K a run for its money on bursty desktop/server workloads, but less so as members of a render or compile farm.
While I’ll use both pretty much only for CentOS/oVirt, I did test them intensively on Windows with all sorts of graphics loads. AT basically infected me with curiosity about these larger Iris iGPUs years ago. 3DMark Night Raid at 1920x1080 IMHO shows their basic potential and why Apple used them as their main staple for a while, but the most impressive demo remains Google Maps with their AI created 3D view in Chrome (much slower in Firefox, unfortunately), which not only runs smoother on my 4k display, than Microsoft’s 2020 FlightSim on my RTX 2080ti/Ryzen 7 5800X game rig, but actually reflects what’s on the ground. FlightSim resorts to pure parametric random algorithms, which create ground structures and traffic patterns that not only carry no resemblance with ground truth, but don’t make sense, even at propeller speeds.
While I would probably still rationally prefer NUC innards as Mini-ITX boards for better options on cooling and general modularity, I’ve come to appreciate those NUCs mostly because the chassis and power supply come basically for free and at excellent build quality, while expansion on mobile SoCs is mostly external anyway.
Thank you, very informative. It would have been nice to have the Ethernet Speed&Behavious test included in the Network Capabilities Analysis. Looking forward to see some interesting devices yet to come.
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philehidiot - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
I've been drinking, it's 1900 and I've only eaten breakfast today so bear with me.I'm just astonished that we're now using 64GB DDR4 to eliminate any chance bottlenecking. My last system had 24GB DDR3 and I'm now on 16GB DDR4 with no memory concerns.
As for *hic* SFF HTPC use, AMD has driver issues. I once said to a guy who deals in GPGPU stuff that "I don't have enough experience in drivers or coding to be able to say whether AMD's drivers are good or bad" and his response was "that's the same problem AMD have". If I'm using a PC for relaxing, having to debug or troubleshoot is not ideal. It's a shame, as noted in the conclusion here, that QA is often done on Intel systems and AMD don't get a look-in. Hopefully, as AMD become profitable and more performant they'll be able to convince people to QA on their hardware as well.
They definitely need to sort out their drivers and assess the OEM support for other hardware. It's a sad fact that, since I dropped Intel for AMD (both CPU and GPU), I've had more crashes in a month than in years of Intel/Nvidia systems. I've lost more time to lost work than when I was using Windows 98 and CTRL+S after every change is back to being automatic.
A few months ago I was trying to get 4K working on Netflix and their website specified only Nvidia card support or Intel iGPU decode support. Their support staff had never heard of the issue and so I went through the codecs supported by AMD and pointed out at least their hardware spec page should mention AMD once??? The guy couldn't help so he took it as a comment to escalate higher.
/ramble. I need crisps.
StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Got a secondary AMD rig that is 10+ years old and stays online for weeks at a time without a crash.Still runs games just fine, the more modern titles that are heavier threaded tend to run much better on the old Phenom 2 x6 and paired up with the Radeon RX 580 is a pretty capable 1080P rig.
Will upgrade it when it's useless.
YB1064 - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
$900 is a bit too rich for my blood.BTW, what happened to the latest RTX 3xxx review? Did you guys give up on it?
Makaveli - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Apparently you didn't get the memo.fcth - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
No explanation as to the delay (originally it was related to the fires in California, but it sounded like they were past that), but Ryan said a couple days ago that they are still getting caught up: https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/13317467171...damianrobertjones - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
...and Intel's driver support for Intel Nucs is hardly anything to scream about.dontlistentome - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Took Intel an age (over a year) to fix the BIOS updater on systems with Bitlocker - would fail to suspend the encryption so you'd be left with a machine that wouldn't boot, with a locked drive. Hope you kept the recovery key somewhere accessible.Samus - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
OMG I remember that bug, the worst part was there was no way to clone a drive to upgrade the SSD because you couldn't suspend bitlocker so you had to decrypt the drive which takes hours in some cases. 3-4 hour project just to upgrade an SSD...Yorgos - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
It took intel 3 or 4 years to fix the N2230 driver on linux.bananaforscale - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
I remember when Atoms first came and the NM10 chipset. It had crap support on Linux (didn't support resolutions beyond 800x600 for a while). Then there's Asus Transformer Book that has Intel hardware that's only supported under 32 bit Windows, so no upgrading to 64 bit (even if it would've been a bit silly in that particular case as it only had 2GB RAM). Linux is right out.Stoinis MO - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link
Macy’s cardholders need to activate their Macy’s card. Macy’s Card Activation allow their customer to activate Macy’s Card if users want to activate their Macy’s Card then with this post customers didn’t have to do more hard things.http://philagribiz.com/macys-card-activation/
deil - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
About ram it depends on how you work, I have 32GB and it daily goes above 24GB used, while browser/slack/spotify/30tabs on ff and few other things that I just never close take ~6GB. (I am on linux, it does use ram way more conservative that windows) When I last time used windows for work it did abuse all 32GB and started to slow down.its up to what you do and on 16GB it mostly work, but at least in my case 2-3 times a day I need a bit more, and like once a week 16GB is just not enough.
as It costs just like 70$ once, and it saves me few minutes daily, I think it paid for itself in my health at least.
damianrobertjones - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Plus there's also SUperfectch that caches various duties. A lot of people forget that.Spunjji - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
"...I've had more crashes in a month than in years of Intel/Nvidia systems. I've lost more time to lost work than when I was using Windows 98..."I'm calling bullshit on that. My understanding is that the APU driver situation isn't as good as discrete components (which I'm currently running without issue), but I can't believe that it's *worse than Windows 98*.
philehidiot - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
Bullshit? Perhaps because you've just made assumptions about the set up? Read properly before accusing people of lying.Thanks.
at_clucks - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link
I guess they were saying it's PEBKAC. Which it is. Having even 2 or 3 crashes in a month is already too much to be caused by AMD, their hardware, or their drivers, or else tens or hundreds of thousands of people would be affected and you'd hear about it. Not saying their drivers are perfect but if your PC is constantly crashing *you* have a problem. You probably don;t really know what's happening in there but you heard a rumor...I lost count of how many acquaintances had rootkit encrusted PCs, full of every garbage known to man after clicking on everything that fell under their mouse, everything running with hacks, cracks, and other torrented junk, from the OS image to the "security" software. They had no idea what's going on but all had some form of (ridiculous) theory based of stuff they heard from someone, or read on the internet but probably neither them nor their source understood it.
Fix your stuff, stop blaming the tools. Also having at least a decent meal before drinking helps.
Radhouse - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
Interesting experience. I've been using an ASUS PN50 R5 4500 system for 2 months as my entertainment computer without a single crash, and typically keep 25+ web pages open in Chrome. It is configured with 32 GB 3200 MHz Crucial memory and an 500 GB EV0 970 Plus SSD running Windows 10 Pro 20H2. (Initially installed V 2004) In addition to Chrome, I'm a heavy user of the following Apps; Netflix, Amazon, & Hulu.I'm not sure where the source of your problems, but I've been also running a PN50 R3 system as a workstation without any issues.
Targon - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
No problem with AMD drivers for my X370 based motherboard, Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, or Vega64 reference model video card(yes, I need a 6800X or 6900X, just waiting on the 6900X to be released at this point). People who claim to have this or that problem may be encountering problems between components that in turn cause their issues with Radeon cards. Looking for what is in common between people who have a problem and then looking at those without problems to see what the differences are is something that most people don't seem to understand.QA process: Reproduce problem, identify source of problem, figure out workaround or fix for the problem.
philehidiot - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
Your set up is very close to mine. 3900x, vega64, but I'm on the x570 mobo.What is very strange is these crashes are happening at low load (as is when working). No crashes during games or when I'm hammering it. It is unlikely to be a dodgy background application as it's a fairly new install and I routinely avoid installing bloat, etc. Only stuff required to make it go is enabled on start up to this end.
I'm on the verge of shifting to Linux but for one major issue - I have a decent sound card which is not supported in Linux. I'm unwilling to unplug and ditch a few hundred quid worth of kit. Hopeful Linux drivers will emerge but creative aren't exactly helpful.
damianrobertjones - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
Shift. Do it. Go to linux. You might then appreciate Windows a little more. Maybe. Both platforms have issues.hlovatt - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
It would be great to see a comparison with new Mac Mini M1jgraham11 - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Ganesh why would you use a Bapco Benchmark - Mobilemark. Its results are complete crap. You must not know the history of Bapco and how its basically an arm of Intel, made for Intel chips.Notice how the AMD 4800U loses in every benchmark with Mobilemark and consumes more power doing it but when you look at the other results, synthetic or otherwise its mostly in AMDs favour... Intel benchmarking tools at work. This is a known thing among everyone who follows this stuff. If you want to maintain your credibility stick to independent benchmarks not ones made by the vendor for the vendors own chips.
brucethemoose - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
I feel like the 35W 4800HS, with a bit more cooling, would be a better sweet spot for this form factor.Speaking of which, my 4900HS doesn't idle that hot. But I did notice that it behaves quite differently when running on battery (where it drops down to 400Mhz) and on AC (where it wont go below 1GHz, even though the cores are largely asleep). Its possible that this 4800U is stuck in the Windows "plugged in" profile.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, December 1, 2020 - link
Given the box pulls 65 watt, there is no way it’s sticking to its TDP. A 4800hs would likely perform the same to slightly worse, given its smaller GPUsix_tymes - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
I hope to see these with DDR5. anyone knows when DDR5 platforms are suppose to roll out?James5mith - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
2021-2022 timeframe.5080 - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
IMO the real breakthrough in this formfactor will come for AMD once they move to ZEN4/Navi based APU's on 5nm with DDR5 and USB4.0 in 2022.PixyMisa - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Yes. They could add more graphics cores, but without also adding memory bandwidth that won't achieve much. DDR5 will break that bottleneck.Spunjji - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
I'm thinking the biggest boost would come from combining DDR5 with a larger local cache a-la "Infinity cache" - 5nm should give them enough spare die area to achieve that, and it'll presumably help keep the power draw lower than stuffing the entire area with logic would.meacupla - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
I just want to point out that on the spec chart, you only list "USB 3.2 Type-C", but there is clearly more to it than that, as that spec can be 10GB, 20GB, alt-mode DP, alt-mode HDMI.I know it's clearly marked as 10GB alt-DP in the pictures.
aside from that
When are manufacturers going to switch over to USB-C PD for these smaller devices? I know that USB-C PD can do 100W and this thing only eats 70W at full load from the wall.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Dangerous. People are not often the brightest and help lines would probably be called when owners try to plug in a crappy usb c charger.1_rick - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
If your GPU can detect you didn't plug in the PCIe power plugs and refuse to let the computer boot there's no reason they can't do the same here.damianrobertjones - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
People buy cheap chargers for phones. Nothing will change in this case.dontlistentome - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
... Thunderbolt please. Can then power with it and have multiple 4K screens and peripherals hanging off 1 cable. Can then just swap the cable between this and my work PC when I work at home.timecop1818 - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Alt mode HDMI is dead, there are literally zero devices which support or implement it. It only exists as a specification. There's very little point anyway because dp alt mode is superior in every way, such as being able to reduce lane count to share usb3hs. But with hdmi alt mode, you are using all 4 lanes just to transmit 1080p.SeanFL - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Price is comparable to the Asus PN50 with the 4800U. Anyone have thoughts on which would be the one to buy?I've not been successful at finding the PN50 locally, Microcenter had a couple in stock then was sold out.
eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Thanks Ganesh! The overall performance is decent, the problems with HTPC use unfortunate. One other piece of information I might have missed: just how noisy does this unit get, and how annoying is the fan noise? I am asking as especially smaller fans can be a lot more annoying than the simple dB(A) numbers suggest. Having had a laptop with this "feature", I now always ask about that before even thinking of buying.smilingcrow - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
It seems a major omission for a system that was reviewed for HTPC features and might end up in the lounge.spikebike - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Nice, been waiting for a decent NUC like product with an AMD CPU. This looks quite competitive, but seems like waiting until CES in January will be worth it. The Zen3 is a killer upgrade and might well mean it's worth keeping for another year or two.grant3 - Wednesday, November 25, 2020 - link
Most hardware refreshes are annual, and you're willing to wait 2 years? With that mindset you'll never, ever buy anything because you know a better version will eventually arrive in that timeframe. Maybe 2 better versions.redwingsbb - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link
I don't think spikebike was saying that they would wait 2 years to buy I think they were saying it would be interesting to wait until CES in a couple of months to see whether there could be Zen 3 based NUC coming out in the next few months which in their opinion would be a big enough upgrade over a Ryzen 4000 based NUC to last them a full year or two longer.ifThenError - Monday, November 30, 2020 - link
You are very right, Zen3 in a small form factor would be a formidable plattform for many use cases. I'd happily swap my old box for such a device.Unfortunately I wouldn't expect this to happen anytime soon. Currently there is no such thing as a Zen3 based APU. The Zen2 based Renoir has just been released and still seems to have limited availability. It is more than a year behind the desktop and server Zen2 chips. Even if a Zen3 mobile chip was anounced in January, we would probably still be at least a year away from any SFF using it.
Looks like the devices from Asus and ASRock are your best bet, or you need a lot of patience.
Valantar - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Pretty damn impressive seeing this hit above 1300 in Time Spy and nearly 14000 in night raid. My ITX 4650G with the iGPU@2100, RAM @3800c16 and IF@1900 hits >1600 TS and >17000 NR, but that also consumes ~100W from the wall. With this sitting in the 50s of watts except for initial spikes, that's very good performance for the tiny power draw.Really looking forward to how boxes like this evolve with DDR5.
Oh, and the dual NICs are brilliant. The 4350G version of this would make for a great PFSense box.
DanaGoyette - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Realtek Virtual IPMI, on the Platform Analysis page....huh, does this have out-of-band management capabilities? If so, it could be useful as a server.
ganeshts - Thursday, November 26, 2020 - link
Yes, the 1G port has Realtek DASH enabled. I am actually investigating that feature right now (couldn't complete it in time for publishing the review), but information / guides are hard to come by. Realtek's own software that talks to DASH clients is a mess / very user unfriendly.watersb - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
And here (for reference) is the DASH overview article. Excellent!https://www.anandtech.com/show/16319/asrock-4x4-bo...
zakelwe - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
Who cares about this? Where are the graphics card reviews from Amd and nVidia ?abufrejoval - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
I had ordered the PN50 in summer with the Ryzen 4800U when a major EU retailer promised only 2-3 days deliver delays. Alas, the only thing that moved was the delivery delay, which increased and wound up as unknown. The Ryzen 4800U SoCs requires perfectly binned Renoir chips and those are likely to remain rare even while they are being replaced by 5800U chips (eve more attractive and harder to get?).I had to resort to team blue, which has some advantages in my KVM live-migration scenarios and could become especially interesting: if I can get Thunderbolt 40Gbit networking to work, I’d use that for the cluster/gluster interconnect and switch the USB 2.5Gbit NICs to the front-end. ASRock is doing the right thing here, I wish 2.5Gbit had long since become default everywhere, especially since I can’t believe Realtek charges more than a few cents extra for the speed uplift.
In the mean-time I’d just like to report that the NUC8i7BEH has had its price reduced to around €300 including EU VAT, while the BXNUC10I7FNH currently goes for €450. That comes down to €75/core and pretty much to core/€ parity with the 4800H at €600, which is why I got one of each in the end. Their combined idle power may actually not be higher than the AMD unit, while peak heat and noise are very well managed via OS independent BIOS settings on Intel NUCs these days.
The Bean Canyon’s Iris 655 iGPU main advantage is that it doesn’t cost one cent extra vs the ordinary i7-10700U UHD630, just as the 128MB eDRAM are given away for free and that L4 cache does at least deliver measurable performance advantages to the CPU, even if they aren’t noticeable. Both give an i7-7700K a run for its money on bursty desktop/server workloads, but less so as members of a render or compile farm.
While I’ll use both pretty much only for CentOS/oVirt, I did test them intensively on Windows with all sorts of graphics loads. AT basically infected me with curiosity about these larger Iris iGPUs years ago. 3DMark Night Raid at 1920x1080 IMHO shows their basic potential and why Apple used them as their main staple for a while, but the most impressive demo remains Google Maps with their AI created 3D view in Chrome (much slower in Firefox, unfortunately), which not only runs smoother on my 4k display, than Microsoft’s 2020 FlightSim on my RTX 2080ti/Ryzen 7 5800X game rig, but actually reflects what’s on the ground. FlightSim resorts to pure parametric random algorithms, which create ground structures and traffic patterns that not only carry no resemblance with ground truth, but don’t make sense, even at propeller speeds.
While I would probably still rationally prefer NUC innards as Mini-ITX boards for better options on cooling and general modularity, I’ve come to appreciate those NUCs mostly because the chassis and power supply come basically for free and at excellent build quality, while expansion on mobile SoCs is mostly external anyway.
Gadgety - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link
Nothing on physical size or noise?Gadgety - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link
110.0 x 117.5 x 47.85mmwatersb - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
Thanks.The motherboard looks like PC-104, without the funky stack connector.
mars2k - Tuesday, December 1, 2020 - link
Why no Blu-Ray playback? What do they think we're supposed to do?kapqa - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
Thank you, very informative.It would have been nice to have the Ethernet Speed&Behavious test included in the Network Capabilities Analysis.
Looking forward to see some interesting devices yet to come.