ASRock Beebox-S 7200U Kaby Lake UCFF PC Review

Networking and Storage Performance

Networking and storage are two major aspects which influence our experience with any computing system. This section presents results from our evaluation of these aspects in the ASRock Beebox-S 7200U. 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.

The Samsung SSD 950 PRO PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD is able to deliver on its full potential when used in the Beebox-S 7200U. The uplink to the SiP is true PCIe 3.0 x4, unlike some of the Skylake-U UCFF PCs.

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 with an Intel GbE LAN port 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.

Despite sporting the same WLAN adapter as the Beebox-S 6200U, we find that the Wi-Fi performance of the Kaby Lake unit is much worse compared to the Skylake version. Some customer reviews have indicated that swapping the pigtail connections in the WLAN card helps in improving the performance, though we found that out after our benchmarking was completed.