ASRock Beebox-S 6200U Review - An Alternative to the Skylake NUC
by Ganesh T S on August 10, 2016 8:00 AM ESTPerformance Metrics - I
The ASRock Beebox-S 6200U was evaluated using our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs. Not all benchmarks were processed on all the machines due to updates in our testing procedures. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph might not be the same. In the first section, we will be looking at SYSmark 2014, as well as some of the Futuremark benchmarks.
BAPCo SYSmark 2014
BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 is an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation and data/financial analysis. Scores are meant to be compared against a reference desktop (HP ProDesk 600 G1 with a Core i3-4130, 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive) that scores 1000 in each of the scenarios. A score of, say, 2000, would imply that the system under test is twice as fast as the reference system.
Since SYSmark 2014 is one of the newer benchmarks in our suite, we only have the Intel NUC6i5SYK to compare against. In all of the components, the Intel NUC comes out ahead, thanks to its higher turbo frequency as well as bigger cache (4MB in the Core i5-6260U vs. 3MB in the Core i5-6200U).
Futuremark PCMark 8
PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU in the system.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
The Beebox-S 6200U comes in the middle of the pack when it comes to CPU-limited benchmarks. However, the GPU benchmarks show some serious shortcomings, as the Intel HD Graphics 520 is quite weak compared to the integrated GPUs in the other PCs that we are comparing against.
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
CINEBENCH R15 provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of select PCs in all three modes provided us the following results. The trends we observed in the Futuremark benchmarks are evident here also.
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tipoo - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
I like how they'll keep including CDs after they removed DVD slots, lolBrokenCrayons - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Yeah, that is sort of silly. It probably boils down to cost. Cheap little USB drives are several dollars whereas a disc is a few pennies and can't be accidentally erased by the end user...though you could write protect any other storage medium too.Chaitanya - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
There are couple of NAND based products that follow: write once read many scheme. I wouldnt mind having a read only USB flashdrive containing drivers and bios for safe fall back option.ganeshts - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Yes, Zotac and GIGABYTE do that. ASRock is following the feedback from this article, so they will be getting the message :)thegreenhundred - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Or we can save the OEM a few bucks and lots of supply chain/production work by downloading & backing up any drivers we want for the infamous "what if" scenereos........ that and getting said drivers from component vendors is likely to give much newer/better versions of said drivers than what the OEM could assemble at time of production.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, August 11, 2016 - link
It's good to know ASRock is taking feedback into account. Even if the company elects to continue shipping products with drivers on discs, the fact that they're at least considering feedback at all says a lot of nice things about them.Shiitaki - Sunday, August 14, 2016 - link
What Asrock and the rest of the PC industry should be looking at is a proper drive curation system. Microsoft COULD be better here. Any modern UEFI motherboard should be able to phone home for firmware updates and even download a driver package. If Apple can pull this off, then the board manufactures certainly could as well. After all you would only need to write the UEFI app once and then include it in every firmware upgrade. Even older boards could be upgraded retroactively. The option to dump them on to a flash drive should be a standard method. That way real drivers and firmware updates are both easy and available. Though Microsoft should be releasing updated images every month instead of every OS release.Ro_Ja - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
I'd still pick the Intel NUC6i5SYK over this. Is the Samsung 950 Pro more expensive than Samsung SM951? Sorry guys I'm really new to these things.fanofanand - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
I was thinking the same thing, the 5SYK has much better Wi-Fi, a faster processor, and though it would be about $90 more if the SSD capacity were identical, you would also be getting Intel QC. Slightly better timings on the RAM used on the 5SYK as well. I am still holding out hope that I can get one of these for my son instead of building out a rig. I don't think we are quite there yet. Great for office and light browsing, facebook etc., but still not ready for primetime.jaydee - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way. The i5-6200 CPU should be faster than the i5-5250U. The RAM typically doesn't come supplied with either unit, you buy/install whichever you want. The Wifi card is an easy replacement for either, I wouldn't let that be a determining factor either.