ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-V1000M Ryzen Mini-PC Review: Finding Zen In The Small Things

Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 4K display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graph below, we compare the idle and load power of the ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-V1000M with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, and noted the maximum sustained power consumption at the wall.

The load power consumption of the 4X4 BOX-V1000M is reasonable given that no external peripherals were connected to the system,  However, the idling power is a big cause for concern. In fact, it falls in the same league as the idling power for systems equipped with 65W TDP CPUs.

Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by four stages of different system loading profiles using the AIDA64 System Stability Test (each of 30 minutes duration). In the first stage, we stress the CPU, caches and RAM. In the second stage, we add the GPU to the above list. In the third stage, we stress the GPU standalone. In the final stage, we stress all the system components (including the disks). Beyond this, we leave the unit idle in order to determine how quickly the various temperatures in the system can come back to normal idling range. The various clocks, temperatures and power consumption numbers for the system during the above routine are presented in the graphs below.

There are no surprises in store - the cores stayed above the rated 2 GHz whenever the CPU was supposed to be actively working.The temperatures didn't go beyond 70C - the noisy fan curves (which has since been fixed by ASRock Industrial in the move from BIOS 1.1 to 1.40) definitely help in this aspect. The power numbers are a bit interesting - While the SoC starts off with a 25W spike, it settles down to around 22W quite quickly for the duration of the stress test. The at-wall consumption is steady around 50W during the process.

Our custom stress test using Prime95 and FurMark also shows similar behavior profiles for the frequencies, temperatures and power consumption numbers.

According to the official specifications, the junction temperature of the V1605B is 105C. The thermal solution is very conservative and doesn't allow the SoC to reach anywhere near that number. Based on the frequencies of various SoC blocks, there was no thermal throttling at play either. Overall, ASRock Industrial has managed to create an effective, albeit noisy, thermal solution for the 4X4 BOX-V1000M.