Logic Supply ML100G-50 Fanless Skylake vPro Industrial NUC Review
by Ganesh T S on February 27, 2017 8:00 AM ESTHTPC Credentials
The fanless nature of the ML100G-50. coupled with its compact form factor, ensures that it is a good HTPC candidate. However, Skylake doesn't support 4K Netflix, and the Intel HD Graphics 520 doesn't have full hardware decode acceleration for HEVC Main10. All of these are addressed in Kaby Lake. Given that industrial PCs are usually a generation behind the fanless consumer PCs, we would not recommend the ML100G-50 solely for HTPC duties. That said, it is interesting to look at certain aspects that are specific to the system - namely, the refresh rate accuracy and OTT streaming efficiency.
Refresh Rate Accuracy
Starting with Haswell, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have been on par with respect to display refresh rate accuracy. The most important refresh rate for videophiles is obviously 23.976 Hz (the 23 Hz setting). As expected, the Logic Supply ML100G-50 has no trouble with refreshing the display appropriately in this setting.
The gallery below presents some of the other refresh rates that we tested out. The first statistic in madVR's OSD indicates the display refresh rate.
Network Streaming Efficiency
Evaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back our standard YouTube test stream and five minutes from our standard Netflix test title. Using HTML5, the YouTube stream plays back a 1080p H.264 video. Since YouTube now defaults to HTML5 for video playback, we have stopped evaluating Adobe Flash acceleration. Note that only NVIDIA exposes GPU and VPU loads separately. Both Intel and AMD bundle the decoder load along with the GPU load. The following two graphs show the power consumption at the wall for playback of the HTML5 stream in Mozilla Firefox (v 51.0.1).
GPU load was around 16.58% for the YouTube HTML5 stream and 0.0205% for the steady state 6 Mbps Netflix streaming case.
Netflix streaming evaluation was done using the Windows 10 Netflix app. Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D). Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here.
The ML100G-50 is not particularly power efficient for OTT streaming workloads. Video decoding is now hardware accelerated on almost all systems (including Atom-based PCs), and systems such as the ECS LIVA Core (Core M with a 7W TDP CPU) and the ZBOX CI320 nano (Bay Trail-M 4.5W SDP CPU) are more power efficient compared to the ML100G-50 (which is equipped with a 15W TDP CPU).
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DarekLogic - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
Here's that ML100G-10 link without the errant parenthesis: https://www.logicsupply.com/ml100g-10BrokenCrayons - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Logic Supply sells the DA-1000 which has two Intel ethernet adapters and is passively cooled. Though it's CPU is based on the Bay Trail Atom, for a pfSense router project, it's probably sufficiently powerful AND would likely be a bit more efficient than a Skylake-based system.Shadowmaster625 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
That huge white block is a thermal pad?DarekLogic - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Darek here from Logic Supply. That's correct, that's a thermal pad for the SSD. As silly as it may look, in our testing it resulted in a roughly 6-12°C drop in SSD temperature depending on what the system is doing.Thanks for the question.
BrokenCrayons - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
I haven't ordered anything from Logic Supply in a few years, but I have done business with the company a few times for small orders. They were easy to deal with and I'd happily vouch for them putting together good fanless systems.Ranger1065 - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
Yawn.Valantar - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
As usual for these UCFF reviews, I (sorely!) miss pictures of the actual cooling solution. I get that you don't want to disassemble it before testing (having to replace thermal paste and so on), but can't you at least do it afterwards? Does it take more than removing the four screws in the motherboard? I'm very interested in seeing the actual implementation of the passive cooling solution here.Valantar - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
As usual for these UCFF reviews, I (sorely!) miss pictures of the actual cooling solution. I get that you don't want to disassemble it before testing (having to replace thermal paste and so on), but can't you at least do it afterwards? Does it take more than removing the four screws in the motherboard? I'm very interested in seeing the actual implementation of the passive cooling solution here.Spartacus00 - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
Would love to see comparisons to additional manufacturers. We have used Tangent for their Rugged Mini PC's and had great success. They were able to send us a demo unit, which Logic Supply was not; and were very flexible with the types of configurations we wanted in the machines. Worth looking into for anyone who is shopping for industrial fanless.fanofanand - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link
I still can't wrap my head around a $450 PC selling for $1150 because it's small. I get it, I understand all the reasons why, it still just doesn't make sense to me for 99.9999999% of consumers. Nobody has an extra 5 liters of space ANYWHERE around their desk?