ASRock Brings Zen 2 NUC : 4X4 BOX-4800U Renoir Mini-PC Reviewed

HTPC 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.