ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Internal Hardware Overview
Opening the bottom cover, it is immediately obvious that ASRock Industrial is using this as more than a simple cover.
Instead we get thermal pads and heatsinks for memory and SSDs. There is also a 2.5″ space for another SATA SSD.
The motherboard has a very standard layout for a NUC or mini PC. Here we can see the NUC-255H motherboard with two memory slots, WiFi built-in, and then two additional M.2 slots for storage.
The included WiFi is an Intel AX211 unit so this is WiFi 6E. It would have been nice to see a BE200 or at least a WiFi 7 card here as part of the refresh.
Looking at this top portion, we can see a “SATA3″ header. The system comes with a SATA data and power cable that allows one to mount a 2.5” SATA SSD to the bottom lid.
The SSD options are a M.2 2280 that slots above the WiFi card and then a middle M.2 2242 card slot.
Here is the installation with a single M.2 2280 (80mm) PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD. One can add two M.2 SSDs since there is also a M.2 2242 slot in the middle. Using VMD, this allows for RAID 0 or RAID 1.
This supports up to DDR5-6400 CSODIMMs.
To get to that high speed, this is the CSODIMM kit that we used.
Here are the two CSODIMMs. That CSODIMM means that we have a clock driver onboard. These Crucial memory modules have a small Montage Technology clock driver chip in the center below the label. Having that clock driver means we can hit DDR5-6400 speeds.
All told, this is a nice little setup and ASRock Industrial is taking steps to mitigate cooling challenges in mini PCs with that bottom cover heatsink design.
Next, let us get to the performance.
