Intel NUC Kit D54250WYK Review – The NUC Gets Haswell Power!
General NUC Performance
The Intel NUC scored P995 on 3DMark 11 with the performance preset. The Intel HD 5000 graphics scored 898 on the GPU test and the Intel Core i5-4350U processor scored 3103 on the Physics test.
In the latest build of 3DMark we found solid performance with a score of 39,339 in Ice Storm, 4,409 in Cloud Gate and 679 in Fire Strike.
In PCMark 8 we found the Intel NUC had an overall score of 2700 with a casual gaming score of 20.6 FPS.
Moving along to Cinebench we found the Intel NUC with the Intel Core i5-4520U processor scored 15.72 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark and then 2.49 points on the multi-core CPU test and 1.13pts on the single CPU test.
The x264 HD 64-bit benchmark showed around 28 FPS on the first pass and then 5.2 FPS on the second pass. Not bad rendering performance from the Intel Core i5-4250U!
A quick look at the memory performance showed just shy of 18 GB/s of bandwidth. This sounds about right for a dual channel memory kit running at 1600MHz with 11-11-11-28 2T memory timings. It should be noted that we had some issues running a 2x8GB memory kit, but we expect the issue to be fixed before this model hits the market in October 2013.
In Sandra Processor Arithmetic the aggregate native performance score was 28 GOPS.
The Sandra Processor Multi-Media aggregate performance score was 120.62MPix/s.
The Sandra processor Cryptographic score was 2.15GB/s.
In the Encryption Algorithm Benchmark that comes inside TrueCrypt we found an AES mean score of 1.3GB/s.
A quick run of CrystalDiskMark v3.0.2f showed the sequential read speed at 399 MB/s and the write speed at 261 MB/s! The Random 4K read speed was 21MB/s and the 4K random write speed was 69MB/s. This is the brand new Intel SSD 530 Series 180GB mSATA drive that just was launched in August 2013.
Taking a look at another storage benchmark called ATTO, we find that the SSD reaching speeds of up to 548MB/s read and 520/s write!
Does the internal SATA III 6Gbps header work? We cracked open the case again and tried it out with a Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB SSD! We didn’t have the proper female to female SATA power cable, so we hooked up a secondary power supply to do this test.
As you can see with HWiNFO64, we now have two SATA 6 Gb/s devices hooked up to the Intel D54250WYB NUC Board and it was properly detected in Windows 8. A quick run of CrystalDiskMark showed that we were getting SATA III speeds and everything was working properly.
When it comes to wireless performance the we used LAN Speed Test to check the performance of the new Intel 7260HMW 802.11AC Wireless Card. We used a desktop with Gigabit Ethernet to run LAN Speed Server that was hard connected to the ASUS RT-AC66U 802.11AC wireless router on the 5GHz band and moved it 15-feet away from the NUC test machine to check out performance with both 1MB and 100MB packets. We ran LAN Speed Test on the NUC with the wireless card to test the throughput and found roughly 175Mbps (20MB/s) write speeds and 250-325Mbps (30-40MB/s) read speeds.
This is the first 802.11AC card from Intel, so we were curious how it would perform and these are solid for a 2×2 802.11AC wireless card.
The last performance test that we wanted to run was Bootracer 4.5 to see how fast the system is able to boot Windows 8 64-bit. We were happy it takes just 7 seconds to get to the logon screen and in just 22-23 seconds everything was up and running on the desktop!