Benchmarking the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H

This is a series of articles looking at the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H running Linux. In this series I examine every aspect of this Mini PC in detail from a Linux perspective. I’ll compare the machine with desktop PC counterparts along the way.

The barebone machine was supplied by ASRock Industrial, a respected Taiwanese manufacturer of computer hardware including AI Box computers and embedded motherboards.

The NUC BOX-255H has the mobile/embedded class Intel Core 7 255H processor with 16 cores (16 threads). That’s 6 performance-cores, 8 efficient-cores, and 2 low power efficient-cores.

In this article I’ll benchmark the machine. The tests are run using the Phoronix Test Suite, unless otherwise stated. Together with the ASRock NUC BOX-255H, I’ve run benchmarks on two other mini PCs (Intel NUC 13 Pro and Intel N100), as well as two desktop machines hosting 10th generation and 12th generation Intel processors. I include the N100 machine as it’s often found in bottom-end mini PCs. I want to see the scale of the difference between the ASRock NUC and an N100 Mini PC.

Each machine is tested with the same software and configured to ensure consistency between results. All power management functionality is disabled when running the benchmarks.

Processor Benchmarks

There are lots of processor benchmarks available in the Phoronix Test Suite, so I’ve selected some of the more interesting ones. I begin with Smallpt.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt

Smallpt is a C++ global illumination renderer written in less than 100 lines of code. Global illumination is done via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing and there is multi-threading support via the OpenMP library. As this benchmark uses all cores, a CPU with many cores complete the test considerably quicker.

The ASRock NUC is the clear winner, but the Intel NUC (i7-1360P) puts in a sterling performance too. Look at the Intel N100 lagging along. The N100’s 4 E-cores are clearly suffering.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark compress-pbzip2

pbzip2 is a parallel implementation of the bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses pthreads and achieves near-linear speedup on SMP machines.

This test measures the time needed to compress a file (a .tar package of the Linux kernel source code) using BZIP2 compression. Another good result for the NUC BOX-255H. It’s nearly twice as fast as the desktop i5-12400 machine.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark openssl

OpenSSL is an open-source toolkit that implements SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols. This test profile makes use of the built-in “openssl speed” benchmarking capabilities.

There are many different algorithms available for this benchmark. I’ve tested with the RSA4096 algorithm, as it’s representative for the others. There are two charts for this benchmark, one for the sign/s and one for the verify/s. The NUC BOX-255H is about 9 times faster than the N100.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark x265

This is a simple test of the x265 encoder run on the CPU with a sample 1080p video file. This test only uses the CPU not the GPU.

The ASRock NUC edges into first place in this benchmark although the margin over the i5-12400 and the i7-130P is quite slender.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark x265

Again the ASRock NUC is more than 4 times faster compared to the Intel N100 machine.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark

Coremark is a benchmark that measures the performance of central processing units (CPU) used in embedded systems.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark crafty

Crafty is a chess program directly derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championships.

This is a benchmark looking at the CPU’s performance through a chess benchmark. This benchmark only uses a single core.

This is one benchmark where the N100 punches above its weight.

Next page: Page 2 – Graphics

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Processor
Page 2 – Graphics
Page 3 – Memory

Complete list of articles in this series: