This is a new series looking at the BOSGAME M4 Plus Mini PC 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.
For this article in the series, I’ve run a series of benchmarks on the machine. Most of the tests use the Phoronix Test Suite. Together with the BOSGAME M4 Plus, I’ve run the same benchmarks on 4 other mini PCs (the Minisforum AI X1 Pro (with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370), ASRock NUC Box-255H (with Intel Core Ultra 7 255H), Intel NUC 13 Pro (with Intel i7-1360P), and an Intel N100), together with two desktop machines with 10th and 12th generation Intel processors.
Both the BOSGAME and Minisforum machines have an AMD processor, the rest are Intel based. I want to see how the BOSGAME machine compares against the Intel machines, as well as see how it performs against more expensive mini PCs. Does the BOSGAME mini PC (currently selling for £479) represent good value for money?
The N100 machine is much cheaper than all the machines. It’s included simply to put in perspective the performance improvement offered by the higher specification machines.
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. Where available, I enabled Performance Mode in the Power Limit mode section in the BIOS. Every performance enhancing technique is used e.g. the performance governor is used for all tests, each machine was running with as few processes running as possible (e.g. no X11/Wayland is running except for the graphic benchmarks).
Let’s kick off with a variety of processor benchmarks.
$ 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.
What a great start for the BOSGAME machine. While it completes the benchmark slower than the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and the Core Ultra 7 255H machines, the BOSGAME is a much cheaper mini PC. It’s definitely the winner in terms of performance / price.
$ 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. Again this test uses all a machine’s cores.
I’m again very impressed with the BOSGAME machine given its price. It’s less than 10% slower than the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H machine yet it costs hundreds of pounds less (with the same RAM and disk).
$ 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.
Another impressive result for the BOSGAME when you take into account its low cost. Its sign/s benchmark is remarkable!
$ 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 beating the Intel Arc 140T iGPU (Core Ultra 7 255H) by a good margin.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark
Coremark is a benchmark that measures the performance of central processing units (CPU) used in embedded systems.
2nd place for the BOSGAME is hugely impressive, beating the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H machine by nearly 20%.
$ 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.
We often see sites that claim the Inte Core Ultra 7 255H has far superior single core performance compared to similar priced AMD processors. That’s not the case with this benchmark. The BOSGAME runs that Intel CPU extremely close.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Processor
Page 2 – Graphics
Page 3 – Memory
Page 4 – Disk
Complete list of articles in this series:
| BOSGAME M4 Plus Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the machine |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the BOSGAME M4 Plus |