ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5

The ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5 provided us with the opportunity to evaluate a high-end AMD-based UCFF PC with premium features. The Rembrandt-R platform exceeded our expectations with top-notch iGPU performance and USB4 40 Gbps support. ASRock Industrial has managed to bring the 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5 to the market relatively quickly after AMD's introduction of the SoCs. While the BIOS toggle to set the CPU operation mode to either 'Normal' or 'Performance' is appreciated, we believe ASRock Industrial has taken a shortcut here. In the performance mode, the fan is set to run at 100% duty cycle - even when the system is at idle. The company could have delivered support for similar TDP values with a better noise profile by allowing for fine-grained fan speed control based on SoC temperature. ASRock's BIOS for their consumer motherboards (and even the DeskMini series) has such support - so it is not entirely unreasonable of us to expect ASRock Industrial to deliver a similar feature. On the hardware front, we would like to see support for a better thermal solution for the M.2 SSD. Replacement of the USB 2.0 ports in the rear panel with USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports would also be good to bring the I/O on par with Intel-based offerings. While we have seen significant improvement on the iGPU performance side, the drivers could probably behave a bit better for certain multimedia workloads. Still, it is a major improvement over the previous generations / driver versions when the application would end up crashing. All things considered, the new 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5's value proposition can only be discussed after we get clarity on the pricing. ASRock Industrial had indicated earlier that the system would be available for $650, but the product is yet to hit the e-tailer shelves. At $650, we will have no qualms in recommending the system as an alternative to the Arena Canyon NUC. Given the architectural differences (the heterogeneous nature of Raptor Lake-P), there will always be workloads that favor one over the other. Considering the user experience with the system as a whole, the Intel NUC's BIOS is quite sleek and has fine-grained control over TDP values, unlike the ASRock Industrial's NUC(S) BOX and 4X4 BOX systems. That said, the USB4 integration in Rembrandt-R has rendered Intel's Thunderbolt advantage moot for most practical purposes. The 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5 also comes with extra features (such as DASH management). Combined with the lower price point, ASRock Industrial's Rembrandt-R system has a slight edge over the Arena Canyon NUC in the market. In our evaluation, the Arena Canyon NUC comes out on top in a majority of the CPU-centric workloads (including the multi-threaded ones that used to be AMD's forte in the past few years). However, the GPU-centric workloads have ended up with a swing in the opposite direction and AMD has again regained the spot it once occupied in the pre-Zen days. The performance crown for different types of workloads has been passing back and forth between AMD and Intel over the last few processor generations. This is particularly evident in the UCFF market where it is not possible to drastically increase core counts and claim victory in multi-threaded benchmarks. At the same time, both vendors are working to make their platforms more power- and energy-efficient. It is great news for consumers to finally have such close competition between the two x86 vendors after a long time.