Best mini pc for htpc 2016 1080p#
Best mini pc for htpc 2016 manual#
Best mini pc for htpc 2016 windows 10#

Since the Intel Skylake GPU load reported by third-party tools is only the EU load, it doesn't particularly reflect the actual load. The characteristics of each stream are annotated at the bottom of the graph. Nine different test streams of 90 seconds each were played back with a gap of 30 seconds between each of them.

Starting with the Broadwell NUC review, we decided to represent the GPU load and power consumption in a graph with dual Y-axes. In our earlier reviews, we focused on presenting the GPU loading and power consumption at the wall in a table (with problematic streams in bold). In this review, we dropped the testing with Kodi and Quick Sync. We considered four different cases while evaluating the ECS LIVA One. Under madVR, we used the DXVA2 scaling logic (as it is well known that the stressful configurations don't work even on the Iris Pro-equipped processors). We already know that EVR works quite well even with the Intel IGP for our test streams. In order to evaluate local file playback, we concentrate on EVR-CP and madVR. Statistics collected for the YouTube streaming experiment were also collected here.

Best mini pc for htpc 2016 manual#

Manual stream selection is available (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S) and debug information / statistics can also be viewed (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D).

Best mini pc for htpc 2016 windows 10#

Netflix streaming evaluation was done using the Windows 10 Netflix app. Being a full-blown desktop platform means that the Cubi 2 Plus, like the LIVA One, is not particularly power-efficient when it comes to these HTPC workloads. The following two graphs show the power consumption at the wall for playback of the HTML5 stream in Mozilla Firefox (v 45.0.3). Both Intel and AMD bundle the decoder load along with the GPU load. Note that only NVIDIA exposes GPU and VPU loads separately.

Since YouTube now defaults to HTML5 for video playback, we have stopped evaluating Adobe Flash acceleration.

Best mini pc for htpc 2016 1080p#

Using HTML5, the YouTube stream plays back a 1080p encoding. The first statistic in madVR's OSD indicates the display refresh rate.Įvaluation of OTT playback efficiency was done by playing back our standard YouTube test stream and five minutes from our standard Netflix test title. The gallery below presents some of the other refresh rates that we tested out. As expected, the MSI Cubi 2 Plus has no trouble with refreshing the display appropriately in this setting. The most important refresh rate for videophiles is obviously 23.976 Hz (the 23 Hz setting). Starting with Haswell, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have been on par with respect to display refresh rate accuracy. The treatment in this section will, therefore, be cursory in nature. In addition, we have already seen the HTPC capabilities of the Core i3-6100T in the ECS LIVA One review. So, this section deals only with the Core i3-6100T model. The vPro model is meant for business use and it doesn't make sense to evaluate it for HTPC duties. However, the Cubi 2 Plus is more than capable enough when it comes to basic HTPC duties - OTT streaming and playback of various media codecs flawlessly in an efficient manner. Consumers looking for high-end / fanless HTPCs need to look elsewhere. The MSI Cubi 2 Plus is relatively quiet considering the fact that it has an actively cooled 35W CPU inside.