Alder Lake-P and Cezanne UCFF Faceoff

Over the past few years, Intel and AMD have staggered their new processor offerings. In the sub-45W category, Intel’s incumbent has been able to offer both notebook and ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) offerings within a few months. AMD’s focus, on the other hand, is on the high-margin notebook market, with chips he’s slumped into the desktop market in a year or so. In this regard, AMD’s Cezanne (most SKUs based on Zen 3 microarchitecture) and Intel’s Tiger Lake went head to head in the notebook market last year, while Rembrandt (based on Zen3+) and Alder Lake -P fights for this. Year. In the desktop space, Cezanne-based mini PCs started appearing a few months ago. This coincides with the first wave of Alder Lake-P systems.

ASRock Industrial has the reputation of being one of the first vendors to launch UCFF systems based on the latest processors available from both Intel and AMD. As the first Tiger Lake-U mini-PC he reviewed the NUC BOX-1165G7, the 4X4 BOX-4800U was one of the earliest Renoir-based desktops. The company has his NUC BOX-1200 series for Alder Lake-P and NUC 4X4 BOX-5000 series For Cézanne, product launches occur within a month of each other.

The company sent the flagship models of both lineups for review, giving us the opportunity to evaluate the performance and value proposition of the NUC BOX-1260P and 4X4 BOX-5800U. The review below provides a hands-on detailed comparison of the two models. It also brings a variety of configurable aspects that can be fine-tuned by vendors and end users to maximize performance within form factor constraints. Along the way, you’ll also get insight into what helps ASRock Industrial introduce mini PCs based on the latest processors much faster than the competition.

Introduction and product impressions

Last year, Intel introduced heterogeneous computing to its product line with performance (P) cores combined with efficiency (E) cores with Alder Lake. The desktop product line launched first, but Intel followed up with his sub-35W processors in February 2022. Built with Intel 7, Alder Lake brings a multitasking focus to computing, giving hints to the OS about where different tasks are needed. It will be executed. All in all this is believed to result in a better user experience and the Alder Lake-P series is set to offer everything within his 28W power envelope while AMD’s Cezanne is due early 2021 announced, bringing the Zen 3 microarchitecture to the notebook space. His 8C/16T configuration of homogenous high-performance cores gives it an edge over Intel’s solutions in multi-threaded workloads.

Ultra-compact form factor and small form factor desktop systems using these processors started hitting the market at about the same time, even though the solutions were introduced over a year apart. Both Cezanne and Alder Lake-P utilize updated microarchitectures and promise healthy performance gains over their predecessors. Integrated GPU clocks are also higher. On the system front, high-speed I/O options carry over from Renoir and Tiger Lake – Cezanne still retains PCIe 3.0 lanes for storage and USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps ) ports. In contrast, the Alder Lake-P offers four dedicated CPU-connected PCIe 4.0 lanes for storage drives, and two Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports for external peripherals. Aspects that require further investigation include system performance for different types of workloads and power/energy consumption profiles.

ASRock is a well-known vendor in the consumer PC market. In 2011, the company established his ASRock industrial business unit to focus on industrial motherboards. This division he branched out in 2018 as an independent vendor specializing in B2B products. The company has products for deployment in small business (office), automation, robotics, security, and other industrial/IoT applications. Primarily, the company develops motherboards and sells them to various system integrators who can offer their own added value. Additionally, the company sells mini PCs based on the motherboards it developed to retail channels.

ASRock Industrial has sampled their flagship models in the Alder Lake-P (NUC BOX-1260P) and Cezanne (4X4 BOX-5800U) lineups. Since two flagship products rarely receive reviews at the same time, we took this opportunity to evaluate them side by side.

Both the NUC BOX and 4X4 BOX series use chassis that date back to ASRock’s now-discontinued Beebox product line. The cooling solution has been time tested within its case design and all ASRock Industrial has done is slightly altering the I/O cutouts to suit different motherboards.Pictured above. As shown, it’s hard to tell the two systems apart at first glance because the cutouts are exactly the same (in fact, so are the previous generation NUC BOX-1165G7 and 4X4 BOX-4800U). Looking closer, the presence of two black USB 2.0 ports on the rear I/O of the 4X4 BOX-5800U (compared to the blue USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports on the NUC BOX-1260P) acts as a differentiating factor.

The main focus of ASRock Industrial is our B2B customers. It’s no surprise that their system is packaged in a nondescript way. However, inside the package is everything an end user might need, including VESA mounts and related screws, 2.5″ drive and M.2 SSD mounting aids, region-specific power cords, and a 90W power adapter. is included.

ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1260P Package Contents

ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-5800U Package Contents

The NUC BOX-1260P sample was an early engineering sample, so it didn’t have model number markings on the underside (unlike the 4X4 BOX-5800U). Both examples are bare bones, RAM and disk drives are at the discretion of the end user. For a complete comparison, we decided to utilize the same set of components used in our review of the company’s systems based on Tiger Lake-U and Renoir. The NUC BOX-1260P was equipped with 2x 32GB of ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite and Kingston FURY Impact DDR4-3200 SODIMM. A Patriot Memory P300 SSD and 2x 32GB Patriot Memory DDR4-3200 SODIMMs were installed in his 4X4 BOX-5800U for evaluation.

A closer look at the NUC BOX-1260P and 4X4 BOX-5800U reveals many differentiating aspects, both internally and externally, beyond their similar construction and industrial design. They are summarized in the table below. The rationale behind the (BIOS 1.2E) and (Performance) suffixes is explained in the next section.

The 110 mm x 117.5 mm x 47.85 mm chassis that ASRock Industrial uses for both systems is made of polycarbonate, but has a metal frame inside. The bottom panel is secured by four screws that must be removed to access the M.2 and SODIMM slots. The top of the chassis is glossy and prone to smudges and fingerprints, but it has a plastic film to hold it in place without compromising cooling efficiency. Both sides have perforated windows for air intake. The top of the back panel has an opening to allow the internal blower fan to expel the hot air after it passes through the heat spreader.

Details of the two cases and photos of the inside can be seen in the gallery above. We can see that ASRock Industrial supports mounting his 2.5″ drive inside. This makes it difficult to accommodate thermal gap fillers for M.2 SSDs. In fact, the components are densely packed on the board, and the M.2 2280 SSD needs a special plastic tab to hang over one of his USB-C ports on the board.

In the next section, we’ll look at the BIOS options along with an analysis of the motherboard platform. Following that are several sections focusing on various performance aspects before concluding with an analysis of the system’s value proposition.