ASRock Brings Zen 2 NUC : 4X4 BOX-4800U Renoir Mini-PC Reviewed
by Ganesh T S on November 25, 2020 11:00 AM ESTHTPC Credentials - I
The ASRock 4X4 BOX-4800U comes with four display outputs. All of them support 4Kp60, with the HDMI port providing support for HDR as well as HDCP 2.2. Unfortunately, UHD Blu-rays can't be played back on the system, though HDCP 2.2 enables other protected content to be displayed at full resolution. The system also supports HD audio bitstreaming over the HDMI port.
Our evaluation of the 4X4 BOX-4800U as a HTPC was done using the native HDMI output connected to a TCL 55P607 4K HDR TV via a Denon AVR-X3400H AV receiver.
We tested out various display refresh rates ranging from 23.976 Hz to 59.94 Hz. Of particular interest is the 23.976 Hz (23p) setting, which Intel used to have trouble with in the pre-Broadwell days.
The gallery below presents screenshots from the other refresh rates that were tested. The system has no trouble maintaining a fairly accurate refresh rate throughout the duration of the video playback.
Our HTPC testing with respect to YouTube had been restricted to playback of a 1080p music video using the native HTML5 player in Firefox. The move to 4K, and the need to evaluate HDR support have made us choose Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video as our test sample moving forward. 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.
The system is supposed to support 4Kp60 VP9 Profile 2 playback, and MS Edge automatically gets the correct encode from the YouTube servers. However, the playback was punctuated by frequent dropped frames as shown in the statistics segment of the above screenshot.
Various metrics of interest such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption were recorded for the first four minutes of the playback of the above video. The numbers are graphed below.
The GPU and decoder utilization numbers spiking close to 100% in the above graph explains the dropped frames. Interestingly, as we shall see in the next section, local playback fo VP9 Profile 2 videos didn't result in any issues.
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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.