ACEMAGIC F2A 125H SFF PC Review: Mid-Range Meteor Lake at 65W

HTPC Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated HTPC evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the ACEMAGIC F2A 125H as part of the HTPC suite. Prior to that, a discussion of the changes in MTL-H relevant to multimedia processing is in order.

Meteor Lake moves the media engine (decoder / encoder) as well as the display engine away from the GPU tile to the SoC tile. The media engine supports a variety of codecs and also supports limited video post-processing.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our HTPC test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.

YouTube Streaming Statistics

The GPU in ACEMAGIC F2A 125H supports hardware decoding of AV1, and we see the stream encoded with that codec being played back. The streaming is perfect, thanks to the powerful GPU and hardware decoding support - the number of dropped frames observed in the statistics above are due to mouse clicks involved in bringing up the overlay.

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

Since almost all of the processing for streaming occurs in the SoC tile, the MTL-H systems are quite frugal in the energy consumption aspect for the job. That said, we do see that the F2A is not as efficient as the NUC14RVHv7 despite similar PL1 numbers.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the QuickSync encoder within Handbrake's framework. We usually check the capabilities of the decoder engine using DXVAChecker, but the software (4.6.0) unfortunately crashes while attempting to execute processes in some DLLs in the Arc GPU drivers. Fortunately, Intel has a comprehensive table of supported codecs and pixel formats in the media engine.

Video Decoding Hardware Acceleration in the ACEMAGIC F2A 125H

The supported codecs list is good enough even for professional applications.

Local Media Playback

Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.20
• Kodi 21.0
• mpv 0.38.2 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.38.2 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

Fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.

Restricting the decoding and rendering activity to the SoC tile helps in keeping the energy consumption numbers low, but the F2A is not as efficient as the other MTL-H configurations.

The energy efficiency trend seen in the VLC case is repeated here also.

The F2A is not particularly energy efficient for the mpv playback case, making its entry in the bottom half.

The additional iGPU activity with the GPU-HQ setting (along with the associated GPU - SoC tiles communication) tends to increase the energy consumption numbers over the vanilla mpv default playback case, as shown in the above graph.