Jasper Lake Fanless Showdown: ECS LIVA Z3 and ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano UCFF PCs Review

System Performance: UL and BAPCo Benchmarks

Our 2022 test suite for Windows 11-based systems carries over some of the standard benchmarks we have been using over the last several years, including UL's PCMark and BAPCo's SYSmark. Starting this year, we are also including BAPCo's CrossMark multi-platform benchmarking tool.

PCMark 10

UL's PCMark 10 evaluates computing systems for various usage scenarios (generic / essential tasks such as web browsing and starting up applications, productivity tasks such as editing spreadsheets and documents, gaming, and digital content creation). We benchmarked select PCs with the PCMark 10 Extended profile and recorded the scores for various scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU and GPU in the system, though the RAM and storage device also play a part. The power plan was set to Balanced for all the PCs while processing the PCMark 10 benchmark.

The first couple of workloads see the JSLM-MINI come out on top. With higher clock speeds compared to the CI331 nano, this is expected. However, gaming and digital content creation see the CI331 nano emerge ahead. This is despite the comparatively weaker GPU. As we shall see in a later section, this has probably got to do with the PL1 and PL2 limits set by ZOTAC for the product.

BAPCo SYSmark 25

BAPCo's SYSmark 25 is an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users in the areas of productivity, creativity, and responsiveness. The 'Productivity Scenario' covers office-centric activities including word processing, spreadsheet usage, financial analysis, software development, application installation, file compression, and e-mail management. The 'Creativity Scenario' represents media-centric activities such as digital photo processing, AI and ML for face recognition in photos and videos for the purpose of content creation, etc. The 'Responsiveness Scenario' evaluates the ability of the system to react in a quick manner to user inputs in areas such as application and file launches, web browsing, and multi-tasking.

Scores are meant to be compared against a reference desktop (the SYSmark 25 calibration system, a Lenovo Thinkcenter M720q with a Core i5-8500T and 8GB of DDR4 memory to go with a 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD). The calibration system scores 1000 in each of the scenarios. A score of, say, 2000, would imply that the system under test is twice as fast as the reference system.

SYSmark 25 also adds energy measurement to the mix. A high score in the SYSmark benchmarks might be nice to have, but potential customers also need to determine the balance between power consumption and the performance of the system. For example, in the average office scenario, it might not be worth purchasing a noisy and power-hungry PC just because it ends up with a 2000 score in the SYSmark 25 benchmarks. In order to provide a balanced perspective, SYSmark 25 also allows vendors and decision makers to track the energy consumption during each workload. In the graphs below, we find the total energy consumed by the PC under test for a single iteration of each SYSmark 25 workload. For reference, the calibration system consumes 8.88 Wh for productivity, 10.81 Wh for creativity, and 19.69 Wh overall.

The observations made for the PCMark 10 workloads hold true here also. The JSLM-MINI's clock speeds help it come out on top for the productivity workloads. However, higher power limits help the CI331 nano wrest the lead overall. It is also not a surprise that the overall efficiency is the least for the CI331 nano - it consumes significantly more energy compared to the JSLM-MINI in order to get the honors in the performance score leaderboard.

BAPCo CrossMark 1.0.1.86

BAPCo's CrossMark aims to simplify benchmark processing while still delivering scores that roughly tally with SYSmark. The main advantage is the cross-platform nature of the tool - allowing it to be run on smartphones and tablets as well.

CrossMark is a relatively short-running benchmark (approx. 20 minutes) compared to SYSmark 25 (minimum of 4 hours). Here, the thermal throttling of the Z3 doesn't come into play, and the higher clock speeds in the JSLM-MINI can be sustained right through. The nett result is that this delivers results as one might expect based on the paper specifications - the JSLM-MINI on top with its high clock speeds and a thermal solution that works effectively. The Z3 is next, as long as it doesn't thermally throttle to such as extent that it falls behind the performance of the Celeron N5100 in the CI331 nano.