Power Consumption and Thermal Characteristics
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 4K display being driven through the HDMI port of the system. In the graph below, we compare the idle and load power of the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-N97 and the GMKtec NucBox G2 with other systems evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, as well as our custom stress test with Prime95 / Furmark, and noted the peak as well as idling power consumption at the wall.
The numbers are consistent with the TDP and suggested PL1 / PL2 values for the processors in the systems, and do not come as any surprise. The idling numbers are reasonable, but for some reason, they are not as good as what Intel was able to achieve in their Wall Street Canyon and Arena Canyon NUCs (around 5W).
Stress Testing
Our thermal stress routine is a combination of Prime95, Furmark, and Finalwire's AIDA64 System Stability Test. The following 9-step sequence is followed, starting with the system at idle:
- Start with the Prime95 stress test configured for maximum power consumption
- After 30 minutes, add Furmark GPU stress workload
- After 30 minutes, terminate the Prime95 workload
- After 30 minutes, terminate the Furmark workload and let the system idle
- After 30 minutes of idling, start the AIDA64 System Stress Test (SST) with CPU, caches, and RAM activated
- After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the GPU, CPU, caches, and RAM activated
- After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with only the GPU activated
- After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the CPU, GPU, caches, RAM, and SSD activated
- After 30 minutes, terminate the AIDA64 SST and let the system idle for 30 minutes
Traditionally, this test used to record the clock frequencies - however, with the increasing number of cores in modern processors and fine-grained clock control, frequency information makes the graphs cluttered and doesn't contribute much to understanding the thermal performance of the system. The focus is now on the power consumption and temperature profiles to determine if throttling is in play.
We can see spikes to PL2 values for a very brief period in both systems before the package power stabilizes at the configured PL1 values - 12W for the ASRock NUC BOX-N97 and 10W for the GMKtec NucBox G2. Of additional interest is the maximum allowed iGPU power consumption. The N97 budgets 6W, while the N100 budgets 5W in the two evaluated systems.
The thermal solution of both systems is excellent. The package temperature stabilizes around 80C at the configured PL1 numbers. The GMKtec NucBox G2 is more compact, but the package temperature ends up being almost the same as the NUC BOX-N97's under long-term stress. This is due to the lower PL1 value in the system with a smaller physical footprint.
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