Intel NUC11TNBi5 and Akasa Newton TN Fanless Case Review: Silencing the Tiger
by Ganesh T S on July 22, 2022 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Fanless
- HTPC
- NUC
- Passive Cooling
- UCFF
- Tiger Lake
- Akasa
GPU Performance
Tiger Lake's integrated GPU based on the reworked scalable Xe microarchitecture provides a significant increase in performance over the previous Intel iGPUs. In mini-PCs, the GPUs are generally used for casual gaming and multimedia workloads (including shader-enabled video postprocessing). GPU performance evaluation typically involves gaming workloads, and for select PCs, GPU compute.
The Intel Iris Xe Graphics in the NUC11TNBi5's Core i5-1135G7 has 80 EUs clocked between 0.4 GHz and 1.3 GHz (not 96, as shown in the screenshot above by GPU-Z). The performance of this iGPU is miles ahead of previous iGPUs from both Intel and AMD, as the benchmarks below show.
GFXBench
The DirectX 12-based GFXBench tests from Kishonti are cross-platform, and available all the way down to smartphones. As such, they are not very taxing for discrete GPUs and modern integrated GPUs. We processed the offscreen versions of the 'Aztec Ruins' benchmark.
The extra EUs in the Core i7-1165G7, coupled with the higher PL1 limits enable the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1165G7 to grab the top spot here. However, the NUC11TNBi5 configurations take up the next two spots. The high-end Renoir SKUs reach around 80% of the performance of the NUC11TNBi5's iGPU.
UL 3DMark
Four different workload sets were processed in 3DMark - Fire Strike, Time Spy, Night Raid, and Wild Life.
3DMark Fire Strike
The Fire Strike benchmark has three workloads. The base version is meant for high-performance gaming PCs. It uses DirectX 11 (feature level 11) to render frames at 1920 x 1080. The Extreme version targets 1440p gaming requirements, while the Ultra version targets 4K gaming system, and renders at 3840 x 2160. The graph below presents the overall score for the Fire Strike Extreme and Fire Strike Ultra benchmark across all the systems that are being compared.
| UL 3DMark - Fire Strike Workloads | |||
The relative difference observed in GFXBench translate to both Fire Strike workloads, with the NUC11 configurations taking up the second and third spots behind the NUC BOX-1165G7.
3DMark Time Spy
The Time Spy workload has two levels with different complexities. Both use DirectX 12 (feature level 11). However, the plain version targets high-performance gaming PCs with a 2560 x 1440 render resolution, while the Extreme version renders at 3840 x 2160 resolution. The graphs below present both numbers for all the systems that are being compared in this review.
| UL 3DMark - Time Spy Workloads | |||
The advantage for the TGL-U's iGPU runs thin in the Time Spy workloads, with the high-end Renoir systems catching up to the NUC11's Core i5-1135G7 at 4K resolution, and only slightly behind at 1080p.
3DMark Wild Life
The Wild Life workload was initially introduced as a cross-platform GPU benchmark in 2020. It renders at a 2560 x 1440 resolution using Vulkan 1.1 APIs on Windows. It is a relatively short-running test, reflective of mobile GPU usage. In mid-2021, UL released the Wild Life Extreme workload that was a more demanding version that renders at 3840 x 2160 and runs for a much longer duration reflective of typical desktop gaming usage.
| UL 3DMark - Wild Life Workloads | |||
The GFXBench story and analysis repeats for the Wild Life workload also.
3DMark Night Raid
The Night Raid workload is a DirectX 12 benchmark test. It is less demanding than Time Spy, and is optimized for integrated graphics. The graph below presents the overall score in this workload for different system configurations.
The 'Night Raid' workload sees the gap between the high-end Renoir and mid-range TGL-U iGPU narrow down, but the advantage still rests with TGL-U.
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18 Comments
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deporter - Friday, July 22, 2022 - link
Thanks for the review!Indeed, if you want to cool that kind of power without any throttling, you simply need a bigger mass of metal. Still, it's not so bad and probably good enough for most use cases.
deil - Monday, July 25, 2022 - link
A little sad its throttling, it's very close to sustaining it while new and clean, it might become choppy and slow soon, when tiny amount of dust will get in. especially in SFF, I prefer machines that don't go beyond 80'CyankeeDDL - Wednesday, July 27, 2022 - link
I use a laprop with Tiger Lake as my daily driver for work. Company policy is Intel-only.It is a hot mess, drains the battery and it is definitely not zippy. I have a 4800HS at home that runs circles around it.
74W at the wall. And it is half as fast as a 4800U in multithreaded apps. With TL Intel is not even in the same ballpark as AMD. Gen 12 seems a huge improvement. Perhaps Gen 13 will catch up.
ganeshts - Wednesday, July 27, 2022 - link
I am curious from a benchmarking suite perspective - what are the multi-threaded apps that you are using? CPU-based rendering like Cinebench etc., obviously benefits - but no one is seriously going to use a TGL-U system for that purpose. I do see MT performance benefiting compression and decompression using 7-Zip. Anything else?Calin - Thursday, July 28, 2022 - link
Corporate computers run a _lot_ of software that is not present on home computers. Also, their startup sequence is more complex due to the integration into Active Directory (adding extra startup steps).Not to mention that you might have a transparent VPN installed that send data through the company network, which slows down otherwise fast "internet" actions.
So, you're comparing apples and oranges.
TensorVortex - Friday, July 22, 2022 - link
Yah there are some router on aliexpress with i5 or i7 11th gen fanless that cost the same or cheaper than this. I bought one and was running it at 70C fanless, and a filter cap blown, and the high side mosfet also burnt through… bought new mosfet, contacted support to get the spec of the filter cap, apparently they are using L5V rating caps, no wonder it blowns in a fanless case…. I have replaced the cap with X5R cap, and running a fan to cool it down now…t.s - Friday, July 22, 2022 - link
For box that small, > 70 watt is insane.Ryan1981 - Saturday, July 23, 2022 - link
I have an Intel NUC 8 Rugged Kit NUC8CCHKR, I've tried the Zotac CI331 Nano, both fanless but not "noiseless"! I wanted these as a bedroom HTPC that I can leave on in the night for smart home purposes and the convenience of not having to wait till it's booted and ready to go but I ended up having to turn it off because while there is no fan noise, the electrical noise coming from these PC's is audible at night and disrupting my sleep. No major issue for me since it was a test but when I see this article claiming it is noiseless, I strongly suspect it is in fact not, and I'd feel it should be included in the testing. In fact I'd feel this is an underestimated topic to have bedroom appliances like clocks, phone chargers and nowadays smart lights etc. that do not make some form of electrical noise (speficially high pitched ones).ganeshts - Saturday, July 23, 2022 - link
I have observed the issue in a couple of fanless mini-PCs.. like the one reviewed here:https://www.anandtech.com/show/14157/zotac-zbox-ci...
I had observed this issue in some of the fanless Zotac PCs I had reviewed back in 2016 too. I think the problem actually may vary from sample to sample - I also reviewed the CI662 nano with pretty much the same board, but just a newer CPU - and that didn't have the problem.
It has probably got to do with some particular board component choice.
I am surprised about the Chaco Canyon, though. Usually, Intel's board components are top-notch.
abufrejoval - Saturday, July 23, 2022 - link
I got tons of equipment in the room where I also sleep.And I remember being bothered by a high pitched noise when things quietened down at night, that was hard to pinpoint. I tried using a spectroscope app on the smartphone to identify where the high pitch was coming from, too. I wound up really ripping out everything connected to the power lines, but no luck.
Eventually it dawned on me that I have tinnitus...