ASRock Industrial 4X4 BOX-7735U UCFF PC Review: Zen 3+, RDNA2, and USB4 in a Potent Platform
by Ganesh T S on April 6, 2023 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- AMD
- UCFF
- USB4
- ASRock Industrial
- Rembrandt
- Ryzen 7000 Mobile
Setup Notes and Platform Analysis
The video below presents the entire gamut of available options in the BIOS of the 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5. Of particular interest is the 'CPU Operating Mode' under 'Advanced > CPU Configuration'. It is set to 'Normal' by default, corresponding to a TDP of 28W. Altering it to 'Performance' sets the fan speed to maximum irrespective of the actual load, but ekes out extra performance by pushing up the TDP to 42W.
The system is equipped with dual LAN ports backed up by Realtek controllers. Similar to previous 4X4 BOX systems, the 1GbE link comes with DASH support to make it easy for IT departments to deploy and manage the system with an out-of-band management interface. This support is disabled by default.
The block diagram below presents the overall high-speed I/O distribution.
The HDMI 2.1 port is actually driven from one of the DisplayPort outputs of the SoC with a Realtek RTD2175 protocol convertor on the board. The two Type-C ports in the front panel are both USB4 driven from the SoC in the same manner - a Realtek RTS5452E power delivery controller and a Kandou Technologies KB8002 retimer. One of the unfortunate aspects here is that this retimer doesn't support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) operation, but all other interesting modes including full PCIe tunneling are supported. The rest of the platform components (including the network controllers, audio codec, etc.) are similar to the one in the previous 4X4 BOX series.
In today's review, we compare the 4X4 BOX-7735U/D5 and a host of other UCFF systems based on processors with TDPs ranging from 15W to 40W.
| Comparative PC Configurations | ||
| Aspect | ASRock 4X4 BOX-7735U (Performance) | |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 7735U Zen 3+ (Rembrandt R) 8C/16T, 2.7 - 4.75 GHz TSMC 6nm, 16MB L3, 28W Max / Target TDP : 50W / 42W |
AMD Ryzen 7 7735U Zen 3+ (Rembrandt R) 8C/16T, 2.7 - 4.75 GHz TSMC 6nm, 16MB L3, 28W Max / Target TDP : 50W / 42W |
| GPU | AMD Radeon 680M (Rembrandt) - Integrated (12 CUs @ 2.2 GHz) |
AMD Radeon 680M (Rembrandt) - Integrated (12 CUs @ 2.2 GHz) |
| RAM | Kingston Fury KF548S38-8 DDR5-4800 SODIMM 38-38-38-70 @ 4800 MHz 2x8 GB |
Kingston Fury KF548S38-8 DDR5-4800 SODIMM 38-38-38-70 @ 4800 MHz 2x8 GB |
| Storage | Samsung PM9A1 MZVL2512HCJQ (512 GB; M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe;) (Samsung 6th Gen. V-NAND 128L (136T) 3D TLC; Samsung Elpis S4LV003 Controller; OEM version of 980 PRO) |
Samsung PM9A1 MZVL2512HCJQ (512 GB; M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe;) (Samsung 6th Gen. V-NAND 128L (136T) 3D TLC; Samsung Elpis S4LV003 Controller; OEM version of 980 PRO) |
| Wi-Fi | 1x 2.5 GbE RJ-45 (Realtek RTL8125) 1x GbE RJ-45 (Realtek RTL8111EPV) Mediatek MT7922 (RZ616) Wi-Fi 6E (2x2 802.11ax - 1.9 Gbps) |
1x 2.5 GbE RJ-45 (Realtek RTL8125) 1x GbE RJ-45 (Realtek RTL8111EPV) Mediatek MT7922 (RZ616) Wi-Fi 6E (2x2 802.11ax - 1.9 Gbps) |
| Price (in USD, when built) | (Street Pricing on April 17th, 2023) US $630 (barebones) USD 781 (as configured, no OS) |
(Street Pricing on April 17th, 2023) US $630 (barebones) USD 781 (as configured, no OS) |
The next few sections will deal with comparative benchmarks for the above systems.
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sjkpublic@gmail.com - Thursday, April 20, 2023 - link
Interesting. The 5800U GPU is almost twice as slow as this model.sjkpublic@gmail.com - Wednesday, April 12, 2023 - link
Audio. This uses the ALC233 audio chip. Other companies use something else. How does the ALC233 compare to the ALC269?ottonis - Friday, April 21, 2023 - link
"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."While this is certainly true (in theory), it might have been difficult for ASRock to properly implement such a feature because the SoC has may have been designed to operate at 28W/35W and not twice as much. In order to allow fan speeds to run lower than 100% would probably have demanded a much beefier cooling solution to begin with, which was probably not possible considering the constraints of the form factor and the price bracket.
sjkpublic@gmail.com - Saturday, April 22, 2023 - link
Agree. Or provide better cooling. Still, I would buy this but it came out too late for me. And yes, 7735HS boxes run at 15W idle and when they spin up the fan noise is less. Still I would go with ASROCK for a 7735 series if I was looking now.sjkpublic@gmail.com - Saturday, May 20, 2023 - link
The 7735 SOC on a mini PC is a great place to be. Only issue I have is memory limitation of 64GB. But that has to do with the SODIMM specs...