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  • MrSpadge - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link

    First paragraph:
    "The Kaby Lake-U (KBL-U)series with 15W TDP CPUs was introduced along with the 4.5W Kaby Lake-Y ones in Q3 2014."
    You mean Broadwell here instead of Kaby Lake, don't you?
  • ganeshts - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link

    bad typo, with the link in it correctly linking to the Q3 2016 article. It has been fixed.
  • Voldenuit - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link

    No tear down? Cooling system? System layout? Noise measurements?
  • Great_Scott - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link

    It doesn't really matter anyways.

    This kind of system is a waste of time: laptops have greater functionality for less price, and the same components. The U-series doesn't distinguish between the i5 and i7 beyond clock speeds.

    You can go to any site online and get a U-series laptop for ~$400 US that also includes RAM and Storage.
  • barleyguy - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    For an HTPC, a NUC or UCFF is a lot more convenient than a laptop. They generally have less fan noise, fit in less space, and boot up with the TV (or projector) as the primary monitor.

    (I'm typing this on a Zotac Z-Box in my living room.)

    That said, I'm really skeptical of the U-series processors in general. My Z-Box has an i5-4200u, and I've had some issues with throttling under load. Hopefully they've improved from the 4200u to the 7500u.
  • kmmatney - Monday, January 2, 2017 - link

    and the laptop will have an OS as well...
  • milkod2001 - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    and it also has screen, keyboard and tracking device to start with and usually cost much less.

    I can only see good use of NUCs if the cheapest & crappiest NUCs are considered to buy to replace Intel P4 10 years old machines with existing monitors, keyboards and mice. For anything else: laptop is much better solution unless you need to Vesa mount your computer on telly.
  • niva - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    I don't know about all that, please show me the laptop with a Kaby Lake "i7" chip and comparable specs that really stacks up to this NUC and obsoletes it.

    I think these boxes are ideal for installing linux on it, paying for a windows license when buying a laptop really irks me anyways so that's money down the drain too. I just bought an Acer Aspire E 15 from Amazon for $350 but that thing had a terrible drive in it, an i3-7100U, and only a single stick of 4GB RAM. Of course I had an old SSD from my previously dead laptop I could put in and I dumped linux on it which is fine with 4GB of RAM at this point, but you guys are seriously ignoring some of the components thrown into this NUC.
  • BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    *shoulder taps* Psst, from one Linux user to another, Windows licenses are not a waste because close to or over 99% of laptops that ship with Windows end up as ....*drum roll*... Windows latops.

    As far as your Acer's sad configuration is concerned, welcome to the wonderful world of budget computers. You got what you paid for. If you want better new hardware, you'll have to dig a little deeper into the wallet.
  • ganeshts - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link

    You guys are hard to please. In any case, this is a bog standard NUC, nothing special about it.

    Cooling system - all that matters is effectiveness, and I hope readers agree when I say that we have the most comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the cooling solution of mini-PCs in the review circuit. Look at the graphs in the 'Power Consumption and Thermal Performance' section.

    Noise measurement - we only do subjective eval in these reviews. Providing noise numbers for these types of PCs (i.e, non gaming mini-PCs) is pretty much useless because the noise floor is too high and these types of PCs are too quiet in our evaluation setup. Creating a noise measurement lab is not worth the investment for the number of PC reviews that I do per year. You can find dedicated guys like SPCR ( Silent PC Review - http://www.silentpcreview.com/ ) who fill that market niche with excellent reviews and articles. (I would imagine even they would not find the Cubi 2 and other similar PCs interesting enough to do noise measurements)
  • voicequal - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    I just spent 20 mins looking at the power & thermal charts. It's fascinating to see how the CPU & GPU clock respond to the shared 15W power and thermal budget of the integrated package. Time 1800-3600 shows how the GPU steals performance from the CPU, resulting in the CPU clock dropping to 1.2 GHz, far below the Core i7-7500U spec of 2.7 GHz. I've always thought it misleading to claim this a 15W 2.7GHz CPU, when this is only the case if GPU utilization is negligible.
  • niva - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    That is indeed interesting, but the whole i7 label on these chips is misleading in my opinion.
  • BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    I know right. There've been i7 dual core processors since 2010 or so and despite all those years, it's still dreadfully complicated and confusing. Intel is so hush-hush about specifications too. They don't publish anything about the CPU specs. It's like they're all mysterious black boxes.
  • Robalov - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    If it's same as cubi 1, the heat sink fan mounts are soldered onto the pcb.

    They're weak and fall off. The system will barely last to warranty and is difficult to repair.
  • Kakti - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link

    "We didn't evaluate 4K Netflix streaming on this PC because there is no HDCP 2.2 support."

    Intel really dropped the ball in regards to their Y and U chips not being able to decode HDCP 2.2 streams. Do we know if the 200-series chipset for LGA 1151 Kaby Lake processors will include native HDCP 2.2 support, or will it be the same story there?
  • vlado08 - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    At the end of the review: "Over the next few months, we will be reviewing a few more Kaby Lake-U PCs that bring in features like HDMI 2.0b and full Netflix 4K support with HDCP 2.2"
  • Pazz - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    In respect of the HDCP 2.2, Ganesh is referring to the Beebox-S and BRIX Kaby Lake models which both feature a LSPCon.
  • fanofanand - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link

    I'd still rather have the skulltrail unit
  • 1_rick - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link

    You mean the skull canyon NUC? It's pretty awesome--I have one. With 16GB of RAM you can run two simultaneous VMs running small SQL Server database as well as light gaming in the host OS. You wouldn't want it for high-end gaming without an eGPU, but for everything else, it's pretty sweet.
  • fanofanand - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    That's the one! It is similarly priced but even a year later holds it's own with the iris GPU
  • NikosD - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    In the paragraph of x264's description says:

    "Actual x264 encoding performance with the Kaby Lake processors and using the latest x264 releases (with AVX512 support) is bound to be even better compared to the numbers below."

    I don't think x264 or any other non extremely customized app has AVX512 support, but you probably mean AVX2.

    But even AVX2 is used no more than 5% by x264 last time I checked.

    It is x265 that makes heavy use of AVX2 instructions.
  • ganeshts - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    Thanks for the note. Yes, it is indeed AVX2, and the relevant section has been updated. Btw, do you have any studies confirming the 5% number? I based my note on this investigation: https://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x264-devel/...
  • NikosD - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    Yes my source is an old comment for the mentioned subject by me here:
    http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1690751#po...

    The comment I referred to by the developer of x264 mentioning 5% gain of AVX2 only over Ivy bridge is here:
    http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1631325#po...
  • Icehawk - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    Are you ever going to switch to x265? Far superior encoding, I have been converting all of my video files over and saving 50-75% space with no visible quality change.
  • Pazz - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    I know of no x265 unifiable benchmark suite/program.
  • lagittaja - Monday, January 2, 2017 - link

    Anything wrong with the HWBot benchmark?
    http://hw-museum.cz/hwbot_x265_benchmark.php

    Or you could just download the latest x265 and run the cli with your own test clip and settings. And you could just as well write yourself a little script to log the results along with a dump of relevant info from CPU-Z etc.
  • vlado08 - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    May be it will be interesting to test the HW h.265 encoder
  • barleyguy - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    The advantage of H.264 is that my tablet will play it without killing the battery (because of onboard decoding), and my TV will play it off a USB stick. We might get there with x265 someday.
  • PyroHoltz - Saturday, December 31, 2016 - link

    The 1x1 NIC is a serious oversight IMHO
  • KingGheedora - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    Can anyone elaborate on this line: "It is a pity that the display engine still doesn't support HDMI 2.0 natively"?

    What is the "display engine" referring to? Is it the Intel HD 620 hardware, or is it something in the drivers that can be fixed? Or is it an OS issue?
  • Sene - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

    Any idea of the MPC-HC+MADVR capabilities ? how far this new gen of GPU can go ?
  • Ethos Evoss - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link

    Hahah I have MSi Cubi celeron .. all setup cost me £175 ..
    Now am selling it..

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