Intel’s Meteor Lake sequence of processors has had a drawn-out launch since its particulars had been formally revealed in September 2023. The sequence marks Intel’s foray into the buyer market with a tile-based chiplet configuration held along with Foveros packaging. Similar to Tiger Lake, the main focus of Meteor Lake has primarily been on the cellular market – ultraportables and notebooks. However, this has not prevented Intel and its companions from introducing it as a follow-up to Raptor Lake-P and Raptor Lake-H within the SFF / UCFF desktop market.
ASRock Industrial has constantly been the primary to market with ultra-compact form-factor motherboards and mini-PCs, with product bulletins typically coinciding with Intel’s launch of its newest and biggest cellular processors. Meteor Lake has not been any totally different, with the NUC(S) Ultra 100 BOX sequence launching in the direction of the tip of This autumn 2023. In the in the meantime, Intel’s NUC enterprise was taken over by ASUS. ASUS’s first main product announcement after the acquisition got here within the type of the Meteor Lake-based Revel Canyon NUCs on the 2024 CES.
The flagship NUC Ultra 100 BOX system is the NUC BOX-155H primarily based on the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. The Revel Canyon NUC lineup features a mannequin primarily based on the Core Ultra 7 165H with vPro capabilities, with its declare to fame being the power to hit 5 GHz on the efficiency cores. This assessment takes an in depth have a look at the options and efficiency profile of the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-155H and the ASUS NUC14RVHv7. The evaluation additionally helps in establishing the potential and advantages of Meteor Lake for the UCFF desktop market over its predecessors and the competitors.
Introduction and Product Impressions
The final decade has seen important strides in processor efficiency in addition to energy effectivity. Coupled with developments in thermal options, we have now seen compact methods with low-power SoCs changing into able to changing cumbersome desktops for a lot of use-cases. This development gained mainstream consideration with Intel’s introduction of the ultra-compact form-factor (4in. x 4in.) NUC within the early 2010s.
The 4×4 form-factor continues to carry sway even at present, as evidenced by the number of UCFF methods launched by a number of distributors yearly. Both the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-155H and the ASUS NUC14RVHv7 we’re on this assessment make the most of the tried and examined 4×4 form-factor.
ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-155H
ASRock Industrial has been serving the commercial methods market with compact boards and mini-PCs for the reason that days of Intel Skylake (sixth Gen) / Braswell. Having taken over ASRock’s Beebox design, the corporate’s product releases on this class have had a daily cadence.
The firm has been usually iterating on the unique design and making enhancements over time. The shiny fingerprint-magnet of a chassis was lastly changed with a matte high within the Raptor Lake era. This yr, we’re seeing a revamp of the internals to accommodate a thermal answer able to dealing with the warmth generated by Genfour SSDs working at full speeds. The NUC BOX-155H being checked out at present is the tall model with help for a 2.5″ SATA drive.
In addition to the primary unit, the NUC BOX-155H package deal comes with a VESA mount and corresponding screws, M.2 mounts and screws, a mixed SATA knowledge and energy cable suitable with the SATA port on the inner board, an consumer guide, and a 120W AC adapter (19V @ 6.32A) coupled with a geo-specific energy wire. The gallery under gives a complete have a look at the chassis design and I/O ports placement, in addition to the format of the inner board.
Our assessment pattern from ASRock Industrial was a barebones system. We opted to put in 2x 16GB Crucial DDR5-5600 SODIMMs and a 2TB Samsung SSD 990 PRO SSD.
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