ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Power Consumption and Noise
The included power adapter is huge. It is a 120W Ac Bel unit, which is relatively nice, but it is longer than the NUC-size chassis. A fair criticism is that the system may be small, but the power adapter is large. With the Apple Mac Mini M4 integrating the power supply, it feels a bit strange to have such a large PSU.
At idle, the package power consumption was 6W and the system power consumption is closer to 8W with around 35-36dba in our 34dba noise floor studio. It was very quiet.
Putting the system under stress-ng load we see the package power consumption jump to just over 52W and the system will run at just under 70W. The noise of the system will hit 38-40dba in the same environment.
This is massively different behavior between the NUC BOX-155H and the NUC-BOX-255H. The 155H was tuned to allow a burst to closer to 80W at the wall, but then throttle down. In contrast, the 255H has a lower maximum power consumption, but out of the box it will just sit at that level and not drop down to lower clock speeds. CPU core temps will hit 90C, but the system runs. Also very notable was that the E-core clock speeds (aside from the 1.3GHz low power island e-cores) are well over 3GHz. As we mentioned in our performance section, we get solid architectural gains that show even on short benchmarks. On longer benchmarks, the difference in power level set by ASRock Industrial out of the box gives us a nice performance boost over time. The fact that this was done while maintaining a solid noise profile is exciting.
Key Lessons Learned
This might be a minority opinion, but I think Arrow Lake for mini PCs is great. ASRock Industrial has more consistent performance, a lower top-end peak power consumption and noise than in the previous generation. I am not sure what more one could ask for from the CPU, other than of course always wanting a bigger iGPU.
In the previous review we covered just how many big acceleration blocks are now in these systems. There are P cores, E-cores (both standard and low power island), a NPU for AI, an iGPU, offloads for video codecs, vPro, and more. The integration really helps with this platform. Arrow Lake is the next generation in that advancement.
Final Words
It was very strange testing the NUC BOX-255H next to the older NUC BOX-155H. In many ways, they are so similar so our gripes about wanting tool-less service and the too generalized labeling on the external ports are the same. Other than the CSODIMMs, the three SSD internal expansion remains, and even the WiFi is still using the AX211. That Arrow Lake CPU, however, changes the nature of the system by adding more performance, and we got better acoustics on this generation.
Combine this with Thunderbolt 4/ USB4 connectivity and there is even more room to expand despite this being such a small system. We just looked at a Sonnet Solo 10G Thunderbolt 3 10GbE Adapter and an Anker 778 Thunderbolt 4 Dock as examples. Still, the dual 2.5GbE with SMB Multichannel means that we get around 5Gbps of bandwidth for transfers without having to use a managed switch and deal with link aggregation. That is going to be plenty for many folks.
Overall, the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H started in our lab as feeling like a tiny upgrade since it looked so much like the previous generation. By then end, we greatly prefer the NUC BOX-255H because of what Arrow Lake brings to the table.
