ASRock Beebox Review: A Fanless Braswell UCFF PC

Networking and Storage Performance

We have recently started devoting a separate section to analyze the storage and networking credentials of the units under review. On the storage side, one option would be repetition of our strenuous SSD review tests on the drive(s) in the PC. Fortunately, to avoid that overkill, PCMark 8 has a storage bench where certain common workloads such as loading games and document processing are replayed on the target drive. Results are presented in two forms, one being a benchmark number and the other, a bandwidth figure. We ran the PCMark 8 storage bench on selected PCs and the results are presented below.

It must be noted that the SSD in our review sample was industrial-grade. The claimed speeds of 510 MBps reads and 300 MBps writes indicate that the controller in the mSATA SSD is likely the Silicon Motion SM2246EN. The PCMark 8 storage bench numbers keep the Beebox in the top half of the graph.

On the networking side, we restricted ourselves to the evaluation of the WLAN component. Our standard test router is the Netgear R7000 Nighthawk configured with both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks. The router is placed approximately 20 ft. away, separated by a drywall (as in a typical US building). A wired client (Zotac ID89-Plus) is connected to the R7000 and serves as one endpoint for iPerf evaluation. The PC under test is made to connect to either the 5 GHz (preferred) or 2.4 GHz SSID and iPerf tests are conducted for both TCP and UDP transfers. It is ensured that the PC under test is the only wireless client for the Netgear R7000. We evaluate total throughput for up to 32 simultaneous TCP connections using iPerf and present the highest number in the graph below.

In the UDP case, we try to transfer data at the highest rate possible for which we get less than 1% packet loss.

The Realtek 8821AE 1x1 802.11ac / BT 4.0 combo is no stranger to our testbed. We have seen it before in our GIGABYTE BRIX Pro as well as BRIX Gaming reviews. Unfortunately, the performance of the mPCIe card in the Beebox is not that great - this could be due to a number of factors such as host CPU limitations (Cherry Trail vs. Core-series) and/or antenna placement.