Intel NUC NUC6i5SYK Skylake Mini PC Review

NUC6i5SYK General Performance Testing

The Intel NUC Kit NUC6i5SYK with the Intel Core i5-6260U processor scored 63.90 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 296 points on the multi-core CPU test and 122 points on the single-core CPU test.

• Gigabyte BRIX S BSi7H-6500 with the Intel Core i7-6500U processor scored 44.30 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 328 points on the multi-core CPU test and 130 points on the single CPU test.
• Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK with the Intel Core i5-5350U processor scored 31.80 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 259 points on the multi-core CPU test and 107 points on the single CPU test.
• Intel NUC NUC5PGYH with the Intel Pentium N3700 processor scored 14.18 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 134 points on the multi-core CPU test and 38 points on the single CPU test.
• ECS LIVA X2 with the Intel Celeron N3050 processor scored 12.69 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark, 64 points on the multi-core CPU test and 34 points on the single CPU test.
• ECS LIVA X with the Intel Celeron 2808 processor it scored 6.21 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark and then 66 points on the multi-core CPU test and 37 points on the single CPU test.

In 3DMark we scored 5,615 points in Sky Diver, the benchmark for mid-range PCs, specifically 25.88 FPS in Graphics Test 1 and 26.45 FPS in Graphics Test 2.

On the x265 HD Benchmark 64-bit video encoding benchmark we found the Gigabyte Brix S was capable of 6.57 FPS with regards to the average frame rate for encoding HD (1080p) video in the new H.265 / HEVC format.

We ran Handbrake 0.10.5 and used the Big Buck Bunny 1080P 60 FPS movie as our test file. We were able to complete the transcode with an average speed of 20.51 FPS in 31 minutes and 25 seconds.

AIDA64 v5.70 beta showed that the dual channel 2133MHz DDR4 memory had 13-13-13 1T timings and was capable of 30,524 MB/s read and 45,534 MB/s write speeds with a latency of 63.7 ns.

The benchmark included in CPU-Z showed we had a single thread performance score of 1420 and a multi-thread performance score of 3051.

CipherShed v0.7.4.0 shows that the Intel NUC6i5SYK had a mean score of 1.7 GB/s on the AES Encryption test.

We ran the JetStream v1.1 JavaSctipt on Google Chrome 50 and found an overall score of 161.99.

The 7-Zip 15.14 benchmark test showed that the Intel Core i5-6260U Processor in this system had a total rating of 8817 MIPS and handled compression tasks well.

A quick run of CrystalDiskMark v5.1.2 showed the performance of the Samsung SSD 950 Pro 512GB storage drive was pretty solidc. Sequential read speed to be 1390 MB/s and the sequential write speed was 1532 MB/s. The Random 4K read speed was 56 MB/s and the 4K random write speed was 189 MB/s.

The last performance test that we wanted to run was Bootracer 5.0 to see how fast the system is able to boot Windows 1o Pro 64-bit. We found that the Intel NUC Kit NUC6i5SYK takes 6 seconds to get to the logon screen and it takes about 20-21 seconds on average to get up and running on the desktop when using the Samsung SSD 950 Pro 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD. This is a pretty quick boot time, but not the fastest that we have ever seen in a Skylake powered mini PC.

Video Playback

Since many Intel NUC Kits will be used in the living room we thought we’d take a second and look at a number of video types on the device to see how it would perform as a HTPC as many people might be looking into buying this and running Kodi. We took a quick look at DXVA checker and found that the Skylake processor with Intel Iris 540 Graphics offers hardware acceleration for MPEG-2, VC1, H.264, HEVC, VP9 (8-bit only) and WMV9. When it comes to audio bitstreaming the device supports DTS, Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus.

Let’s take a look at power consumption and CPU temperatures on the Intel NUC NUC6i5SYK.