ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7840U Power Consumption
The system came with an AcBel 19V 120W adapter. In many ways, this power adapter is so large that it adds a lot to the total system volume.
At idle we saw from about 5-6W to around 12W depending on how many power saving features we had enabled. Under load, we saw a brief touch in the 75-80W range before that fell into the 60-65W range in terms of power consumption. These numbers can change a bit based on the configuration, but that is generally the range we would expect.
On the noise side, we will let folks hear the new units in the power and noise section of the video above.
Key Lessons Learned
There are a few standout bits to this system that we would love to see changed on the next version. One is the port configuration. It would have been nice to have two 2.5GbE NICs instead of one 1GbE and one 2.5GbE. That may seem small, and we have seen it on ASRock Industrial AMD units before, but it feels strange two have two NICs side-by-side that are different speeds and not marked as such.
Another great one is the cooling. Having a small system is great, but if the unit could be made nearly silent at twice the size, it would probably feel like a big win. Even things like getting better cooling for the bottom SSD and memory area would be nice. The Samsung 990 Pro is too much SSD for this system long-term, although it served its purpose during testing.
Still, the system was easy to work on. Many of our readers comment when we review mini PCs from smaller vendors that they have not heard of a vendor before. ASRock is a big company that sells consumer products, industrial products, and even servers like the ASRock Rack AM5D4ID-2T BCM we reviewed. While it might cost a bit more, to many of our readers it will be worth it if they can buy from a better-known vendor.
Final Words
There are many of our readers that will gravitate to the AMD Ryzen 7040 series because of the AMD Radeon 780M graphics that we have seen a number of times. Also, AMD has only P-cores in this 8-core/16-thread platform. So ASRock Industrial has a platform that offers a really nice mix of CPU, integrated GPU, and codec performance. This is a system my parents or wife could use every day if they were Windows or Linux and not Apple folks.
Overall, the ASRock Industrial 4×4 BOX-7840U platform is a nice one for those who want that small NUC-like form factor but want to take advantage of the AMD Ryzen APUs from a larger vendor.
Where to Buy
One can purchase this system at many retailers. We got the barebones from ASRock Industrial, but we had to augment the system with additional RAM and a SSD. Since we had issues with the DDR4-5200 memory, we are going to link some kits that we had working after we took photos.
- ASRock Industrial 4×4 BOX-7840U via Newegg Affiliate
- Crucial 32GB (2x 16GB) DDR5-5600 kit via Amazon Affiliate
- Crucial 64GB (2x 32GB) DDR5-4800 kit via Amazon Affiliate
- Samsung 990 Pro 2TB via Amazon Affiliate
Hmm… The case and the NICs are very industrial…
No comment.
Does “industrial” here also mean that ASRock guarantees longer-term (five years or more) availability of spare parts? If that was mentioned in the article, apologies if I missed it.