ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7735U UCFF PC Review: Zen 3+, RDNA2, and USB4 in a Potent Platform

Digital Signage and HTPC Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated HTPC evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the ASRock 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5 as part of the HTPC suite.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our HTPC test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.

YouTube Streaming Statistics - Normal Mode


YouTube Streaming Statistics - Performance Mode

The GPU in the 4X4 BOX-7735U supports hardware decoding of VP9 Profile 2, and we see the stream encoded with that codec being played back. The streaming is largely perfect, but does suffer from dropped frames whenever any overlay is active. In that respect, the playback experience on Intel-based systems is much better. However, that looks likely to be driver-related - hopefully, future driver versions can provide a better experience.

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

The 28W Rembrandt-R configuration is the most energy efficient of the lot when it comes to YouTube playback.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the VCE encoder within Handbrake's framework. The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker.

Video Decoding Hardware Acceleration in ASRock 4X4 BOX-7735U

On paper, this codec list is quite comprehensive and should cover most home consumer and digital signage requirements.

Local Media Playback

Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.18
• Kodi 20.1
• mpv 0.35.1 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.35.1 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

Fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.

The combination of a smaller power budget and availability of hardware acceleration ensure that the 28W Rembrandt-R configuration is one of the most energy efficient systems in the mix. However, it is held back on the 'user experience' front by the lack of hardware acceleration for AV1, which results in slideshows for the 8Kp60 AV1 clip.

The user experience with Kodi is not much different, as AV1 hardware acceleration is again unused. Since Kodi doesn't close inbetween the different streams, the GPU remains active and continues to render the UI. This results in the energy numbers creeping up when the full playback period is considered.

We finally see AV1 decode acceleration. Unfortunately, despite the decoder engine running at full tilt, there is some problem with the video output path resulting in approximately half the frames getting dropped.

The case of the AV1 playback being spotty despite the hardware acceleration is seen here again. The energy numbers are also a bit higher, given that the GPU shaders are getting activated for the rendering.