ASRock DeskMeet B660 Review: An Affordable NUC Extreme?

Power Consumption and Thermal Characteristics

The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 4K display being driven through the HDMI port of the system. In the graph below, we compare the idle and load power of the ASRock DeskMeet B660 with other systems evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, as well as our custom stress test with Prime95 / Furmark, and noted the peak as well as idling power consumption at the wall.

The numbers are consistent with the TDP and suggested PL1 / PL2 values for the processors in the systems, and do not come as any surprise. The Core i7-12700F is configured with a PL1 of 65W and PL2 of 126W, with PL1 duration locked to 28s, and PL2 to 2.44ms. Compared to the other processors, this is quite conservative. The discrete GPU is also rated for a 54W TDP, and these aspects contribute to the low load and idling power consumption numbers seen above.

Stress Testing

Our thermal stress routine is a combination of Prime95, Furmark, and Finalwire's AIDA64 System Stability Test. The following 9-step sequence is followed, starting with the system at idle:

• Start with the Prime95 stress test configured for maximum power consumption
• After 30 minutes, add Furmark GPU stress workload
• After 30 minutes, terminate the Prime95 workload
• After 30 minutes, terminate the Furmark workload and let the system idle
• After 30 minutes of idling, start the AIDA64 System Stress Test (SST) with CPU, caches, and RAM activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the GPU, CPU, caches, and RAM activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with only the GPU activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the CPU, GPU, caches, RAM, and SSD activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the AIDA64 SST and let the system idle for 30 minutes

Traditionally, this test used to record the clock frequencies - however, with the increasing number of cores in modern processors and fine-grained clock control, frequency information makes the graphs cluttered and doesn't contribute much to understanding the thermal performance of the system. The focus is now on the power consumption and temperature profiles to determine if throttling is in play.

The power consumption numbers for the CPU package and GPU hardly waver under sustained load, and stay close to expectations (65W for the CPU package, and around 45W for the GPU - the ASIC power is a bit lower than the TDP). On the temperature front, the GPU does get a bit toasty, but probably stays well within rated numbers as the power consumption doesn't change and the temperature ends up plateauing. The CPU package itself doesn't go beyond 80C - a testament to the effectiveness of the Silverstone Hydrogon H90 ARGB cooler.

The worrisome part is actually the temperature of the SSD. It rarely drops below 60C even when subjected to no load. After finishing up our evaluation routine, we realized that the absence of a proper thermal solution coupled with the complete absence of airflow for the underside of the motherboard resulted in sub-optimal storage performance.