Cincoze DS-1300 Industrial PC Review: Xeon-Powered Do-it-All

System Performance : Miscellaneous Workloads

Standardized benchmarks such as UL's PCMark 10 and BAPCo's SYSmark take a holistic view of the system and process a wide range of workloads to arrive at a single score. Some systems are required to excel at specific tasks - so it is often helpful to see how a computer performs in specific scenarios such as rendering, transcoding, JavaScript execution (web browsing), etc. This section presents focused benchmark numbers for specific application scenarios.

Rendering: Cinebench R23

The Cinebench rendering benchmark can operate in two modes - single-threaded and multi-threaded.

Both Comet Lake systems have the same number of cores. However, the DS-1302's higher TDP allows for faster sustained clocks, delivering a hefty performance boost for workloads involving algorithms used in 3D rendering.

Transcoding: Handbrake 1.5.1

Handbrake is one of the most user-friendly open source transcoding front-ends in the market. It allows users to opt for either software-based higher quality processing or hardware-based fast processing in their transcoding jobs. Our new test suite uses the 'Tears of Steel' 4K AVC video as input and transcodes it with a quality setting of 19 to create a 720p AVC stream and a 1080p HEVC stream.

Hardware transcoding for HEVC is a lot faster than software (when compared to AVC in the same modes). Comparison between the hardware encoders is not ideal here because of the usage of QuickSync in the OnLogic HX500 and NVENC in the Cincoze DS-1302. While QSV provides 10b encode support for HEVC, that capability is not exposed in the GeForce GTX 1650 / Handbrake 1.5.1 combination.

Archiving: 7-Zip 21.7

The 7-Zip benchmark is carried over from our previous test suite with an update to the latest version of the open source compression / decompression software.

The higher sustained clock rates in the Cincoze DS-1302 enable it to easily best the fanless HX500 despite the same number of cores in both systems.

Web Browsing: JetStream, Speedometer, and Principled Technologies WebXPRT4

Web browser-based workloads have emerged as a major component of the typical home and business PC usage scenarios. We are carrying over the browser-focused benchmarks from the WebKit developers used in our notebook reviews. Hosted at BrowserBench, JetStream 2.0 benchmarks JavaScript and WebAssembly performance, while Speedometer measures web application responsiveness. From a real-life workload perspective, we also process WebXPRT4 from Principled Technologies. WebXPRT4 benchmarks the performance of some popular JavaScript libraries that are widely used in websites.

The higher TDP CPU in the Cincoze DS-1302 helps it in the JavaScript benchmarks. However, for real-world workloads in Principled Technologies WebXPRT4, the performance of the fanless OnLogic HX500 is very similar to the Cincoze unit across all three browsers.

Application Startup: GIMP 2.10.30

A new addition to our systems test suite is AppTimer - a benchmark that loads up a program and determines how long it takes for it to accept user inputs. We use GIMP 2.10.30 with a 50MB multi-layered xcf file as input. What we test here is the first run as well as the cached run - normally on the first time a user loads the GIMP package from a fresh install, the system has to configure a few dozen files that remain optimized on subsequent opening. For our test we delete those configured optimized files in order to force a ‘fresh load’ every second time the software is run. As it turns out, GIMP does optimizations for every CPU thread in the system, which requires that higher thread-count processors take a lot longer to run. So the test runs quick on systems with fewer threads, however fast cores are also needed.

Both systems have the same number of cores, and the loading time is small enough that clock rates for both systems are bound to be approximately the same throughout the testing. However, the SATA SSD in the HX500 (compared to the NVMe drive in the DS-1302) might be a contributing factor to the latter's slight advantage.