ASUS NUC14RVHv7 and ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-155H Review: Meteor Lake Brings Accelerated AI to UCFF PCs

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

Networking and storage are aspects that may be of vital importance in specific PC use-cases. The ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-155H comes with dual LAN ports backed by Intel NBASE-T controllers (up to 2.5 GbE). On the other hand, the ASUS NUC14RVHv7 has only one 2.5GbE LAN port. This is a definite plus point for the NUC BOX-155H when it comes to specific networking use-cases. However, it must be noted that the ASUS NUC 14 Pro has many variants / options. For example, a dual LAN configuration can be obtained by using third-party expansion card / lid that adds another 2.5GbE RJ-45 port via the internal M.2 2242 slot. In addition, ASUS also has other product families such as the PN ExpertCenter mini-PCs that offer the dual LAN feature natively (configurable port option set on a particular SKU). The Wi-Fi support in both systems is similar - 2T2R 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6E) with 160 MHz channels using the Intel AX211 WLAN module.

On the storage side, different versions of the Samsung SSD 990 PRO were used in the two systems. While our own 2TB sample of the 990 PRO was placed in the NUC BOX-155H, ASUS supplied the 512GB OEM version of the SSD (PM9A1a) for the NUC14RVHv7. In both systems, the SSDs connect via a PCIe 4.0 x4 link. From a benchmarking perspective, we provide results from the WPCstorage test of SPECworkstation 3.1. This benchmark replays access traces from various programs used in different verticals and compares the score against the one obtained with a 2017 SanDisk 512GB SATA SSD in the SPECworkstation 3.1 reference system.

The graphs above present results for different verticals, as grouped by SPECworkstation 3.1. The storage workload consists of 60 subtests. Access traces from CFD solvers and programs such as Catia, Creo, and Soidworks come under 'Product Development'. Storage access traces from the NAMD and LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulator are under the 'Life Sciences' category. 'General Operations' includes access traces from 7-Zip and Mozilla programs. The 'Energy' category replays traces from the energy-02 SPECviewperf workload. The 'Media and Entertainment' vertical includes Handbrake, Maya, and 3dsmax.

The NUC14RVHv7 is hampered in the above tests by its low capacity point. On the other hand, the SSD 990 PRO finds itself in the top half with similar scores in both operating modes of the NUC BOX-155H. Surprisingly, the same SSD in the Phoenix-based 4X4 BOX-7840U scores better overall. This points to the CPU being a bottleneck - likely due to the allocation of some benchmark segments to the efficiency cores.

Closing Thoughts

The ASUS NUC14RVHv7 (Revel Canyon vPro) and the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-155H provided us with the opportunity to evaluate the Meteor Lake-H platform in an ultra-compact desktop. This form-factor allows vendors much more leeway in terms of configuring the power limits. While Meteor Lake was introduced primarily for notebooks, ASUS and ASRock Industrial have shown that the capabilities can be marketed effectively even in the desktop space.

On the technical front, Meteor Lake is undoubtedly an impressive product family with its chiplet / tile-based architecture allowing for a mixture of dies fabricated in different processes. The disaggregation of different functions brings about energy and power savings for specific tasks such as media playback. The integration of an NPU (the Movidius VPU3720) enables acceleration of different neural networks and AI applications. Intel and its partners have realized that these continue to remain in the domain of developers and advanced users for now. In a bid to open them up to the mass market, sample applications are being developed using Intel's customized models for different computer vision tasks. ASRock Industrial is offering the AI Guru software pack as a free download as part of this endeavor.

While this type of AI push is welcome, mass market adoption is going to be completely reliant on real-world use-cases such as querying of private photo albums, or automatic indexing and querying of videos from network cameras, and other such applications. It will take a few more years for these types of applications to become pervasive, and at that time, a performant NPU would become a must-have. As it stands currently, the NPU is good to have, but there aren't too many real-world use-cases to take advantage of it.

Between the NUC14RVHv7 and the NUC BOX-155H, the 64W dynamic PL1 setting of the former gives it the edge in many of the CPU-centric workloads. On the other hand, the NUC BOX-155H, particularly in its 40W version, consistently outperforms the NUC14RVHv7 in GPU-heavy workloads. The former has an extra Thunderbolt port, while the latter has an extra 2.5 GbE port. The NUC14RVHv7 has some nifty features such as display emulation that do not have a corresponding equivalent in the NUC BOX-155H. Based on the specific requirements and use-cases, either Meteor Lake-H system is a good choice. At $700, the NUC BOX-155H maintains the launch pricing of previous flagship NUC BOX products from ASRock Industrial.

[ Top-Left: ASUS NUC14RVHv7 (Revel Canyon vPro), Top-Right: ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-155H, Center: Intel NUC13ANKi7 (Arena Canyon) ]

Positives aside, readers might have noticed that SPECworkstation 3.1 results were not presented for any of the MTL-H systems. Unfortunately, the Arc GPU drives have a hard freeze / hang issue with the Folding @ Home component of the benchmark. Intel is currently looking into the problem and hopes to have a fix out soon. We also faced problems with applications such as DXVAChecker.

The other disappointing aspect is the regression in performance for many real-world workloads compared to UCFF systems based on Raptor Lake-P. The reasons for that are not immediately obvious - whether it is due to the 'Thread Director' implementation in Windows 11 23H2, or it is due to the distribution of some of the CPU cores across different tiles, or due to comparatively low CPU clock speeds. The surprising aspect is that the NUC14RVHv7, despite its sustained 64W power budget, comes up short against the Arena Canyon NUC13ANKi7 with a 40W power budget in benchmarks such as the UL Procyon Office Workload.

Raptor Lake-P-based systems might not boast of a dedicated NPU or a fancy chiplet architecture with power and energy savings for specific tasks. However, they deliver more consistent performance and have much more stable iGPU drivers compared to Meteor Lake. As it stands currently, a Meteor Lake-based UCFF desktop is recommended only for power users who can put up with performance quirks and possible driver issues. Raptor Lake and Phoenix-based systems are currently better choices for the average consumer.