Pint-sized PCIe powerhouse: Intel NUC5i5RYK

Component level

Fitting the memory and hard drive in the NUC5i5RYK was a doddle. Undoing the four captive screws in the centre of the four feet enables the bottom of the unit to lift out and then you are confronted by the two SODIMM slots stacked on top of each other and the M.2 socket. Just chuck in drive and memory and off you go.

Intel inside – click for a larger image

Not only is the unit tiny, so is the 65W power adaptor and it makes a nice change not to have some huge power brick. Also in the box is a VESA mounting plate, so you can fit the NUC to the back of a monitor and hide it out of the way.

Duly armed with the NUC fully loaded, and with a fresh install of Windows 8.1, it’s time to see what the wee one can actually do. First off, what it can’t do: any serious gaming, which should come as no real surprise, given the integrated HD6000 graphics.

1080p playback barely taxes the system – click for a larger image

Regardless, I put it through the torture of the complete 3DMark testing suite, even the ones it had no hope of producing a meaningful fps score from. To its credit it ran all the tests without falling over, although the most extreme ones were painfully slow to watch.

To test the NUC’s overall performance, I used Futuremark’s PCM8 benchmark suites; Home, Creative and Work in both conventional and accelerated modes (the accelerated mode allows the workloads to use OpenGL acceleration). Once again, the NUC5i5RYK ran these tests without any problems or hiccups.

Benchmark Results

ATTO results: Intel 530 (left), Samsung XP941 (middle) and Samsung SM951 (right) – click for a larger image

AS SSD results: Intel 530 (left), Samsung XP941 (middle) and Samsung SM951 (right) – click for a larger image

CrystalDiskMark results: Intel 530 (left), Samsung XP941 (middle) and Samsung SM951 (right) – click for a larger image

Needless to say, the performance of the PCI-E Samsung XP941 eclipsed the SATA-based Intel 530 drive in the storage tests. In ATTO, the Intel 530 produced read/write scores of 542MB/s and 511MB/s respectively, not too shabby for a SATA SSD of the 530’s generation. However, these scores were completely blitzed by the XP941 producing a read score of 1060MB/s with 772MB/s for the writes.