![[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR](./core/images/default/default_avatar_medium.png "[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR"){kind=avatar}
Tweet
Fast, compact and loud
As both certified performance enthusiasts and smaller-PC fetishists, we wondered how long it would take to get Intel’s new eight-core hotness, the Haswell-E, in a tiny case. While Polywell’s MiniBox X9900x doesn’t exactly qualify as “tiny,” it’s probably as small as you’re going to see with Intel’s Core i7-5960X powering it. With the hefty size of the LGA2011-v3, it’ll probably never make its way into a mini-ITX mobo.
Full details of the parts used in this box are below, but the highlights include the eight-core Core i7-5960X chip. The chip normally runs a stock 3GHz with a boost of 3.5GHz on one core. The MiniBox Polywell does a decent overclock to 4.2GHz. This can’t be done with air cooling; it’s up to the Antec closed-loop cooler to keep it from melting the case to the ground. For a foundation, Polywell plugs the Hassy-E into an Asrock X99m-Extreme4 mobo and pairs it with 16GB of Crucial DDR4/2133 RAM. Graphics are handled by a single Gigabyte Windforce Radeon R9 290X. The PSU running all of this is a de-branded 750-watt 80+ bronze unit. Why Polywell decided to de-brand the PSU, we’re not sure.
Of course, you don’t care about any of this—all you want to know is how it performs. As this is the first formal sighting of a Haswell-E in a pre-built PC, we all want much smoking of all before it that we’re surprised the FDA didn’t slap a health warning on the MiniBox X9900x. And we don’t mean by 2 or 5 percent either. The MiniBox X9900x finishes our Premiere Pro benchmark 62 percent faster; in x264 HD 5.0 it moves up to 67 percent. The record holder had been a Digital Storm Ivy Bridge-E box OC’ed to 4.7GHz. Not anymore. The Polywell MiniBox X9900x sprints past the DStorm by up to 29 percent in Premiere. That same Aventum II also held the record in X264 HD 5.0, but the MiniBox X9900x encodes video roughly 31 percent faster than that big-ass tower.
Nobody's Perfect
The world is not all multi-threaded, though. In tasks that can’t use all those cores, high clock speed (and microarchitecture, of course) matters more than core count. Even there, the MiniBox doesn’t disappoint. It easily eats our zero-point by a hefty 21 percent in both Stitch.Efx 2.0 and ProShow Producer 5.0. Against the Haswell Core i7-4790K in Dream Machine 2014 running at 4.7GHz, the MiniBox is only 2 percent slower in Stitch.Efx 2.0 and 4 percent in ProShow Producer 5.0. Yes, all this from a small form factor box.
Where the MiniBox can’t hang is in gaming. With its single Radeon R9 290X, it’s not going to beat multi-card systems. But we’ll note that size isn’t everything. For kicks, we ran the numbers against the Falcon Northwest Tiki-Z we reviewed in September. With its single Titan Z card (essentially two down-clocked Titan Black cards) the Tiki-Z offers roughly twice the gaming performance of the MiniBox. To be fair, the MiniBox pays back in CPU benchmarks, too.
If it sounds like the MiniBox is cruising for an easy victory, it is. Except for one problem: It’s loud. The Gigabyte Windforce cards are typically very quiet under load but when pushed here, all three fans spooled up and become quite noticeable. The Antec Kuhler H20 650 cooling the CPU also gets noticeable under CPU loads. It’s not as annoying as the GPU but you can tell this may be just a little too much hardware for this system. One solution would be to add more fans to move the heat out of the case, which might tone down the GPU. The Prodigy case’s internal layout makes this tough, but we think Polywell could have added more fans.
This does color our view of the Mini-Box, but how much should the noise dock the score? That one’s hard to say. While the noise is bad in gaming (although we’ve heard worse), CPU loads aren’t that bad. And then there’s the price. At $2,900, there’s a lot of performance per buck in the MiniBox. Plain? Yes. Loud at times? Affirmative. Stupidly fast in CPU chores? Hell, yes.
More...
As both certified performance enthusiasts and smaller-PC fetishists, we wondered how long it would take to get Intel’s new eight-core hotness, the Haswell-E, in a tiny case. While Polywell’s MiniBox X9900x doesn’t exactly qualify as “tiny,” it’s probably as small as you’re going to see with Intel’s Core i7-5960X powering it. With the hefty size of the LGA2011-v3, it’ll probably never make its way into a mini-ITX mobo.
Of course, you don’t care about any of this—all you want to know is how it performs. As this is the first formal sighting of a Haswell-E in a pre-built PC, we all want much smoking of all before it that we’re surprised the FDA didn’t slap a health warning on the MiniBox X9900x. And we don’t mean by 2 or 5 percent either. The MiniBox X9900x finishes our Premiere Pro benchmark 62 percent faster; in x264 HD 5.0 it moves up to 67 percent. The record holder had been a Digital Storm Ivy Bridge-E box OC’ed to 4.7GHz. Not anymore. The Polywell MiniBox X9900x sprints past the DStorm by up to 29 percent in Premiere. That same Aventum II also held the record in X264 HD 5.0, but the MiniBox X9900x encodes video roughly 31 percent faster than that big-ass tower.
Nobody's Perfect
The world is not all multi-threaded, though. In tasks that can’t use all those cores, high clock speed (and microarchitecture, of course) matters more than core count. Even there, the MiniBox doesn’t disappoint. It easily eats our zero-point by a hefty 21 percent in both Stitch.Efx 2.0 and ProShow Producer 5.0. Against the Haswell Core i7-4790K in Dream Machine 2014 running at 4.7GHz, the MiniBox is only 2 percent slower in Stitch.Efx 2.0 and 4 percent in ProShow Producer 5.0. Yes, all this from a small form factor box.
Where the MiniBox can’t hang is in gaming. With its single Radeon R9 290X, it’s not going to beat multi-card systems. But we’ll note that size isn’t everything. For kicks, we ran the numbers against the Falcon Northwest Tiki-Z we reviewed in September. With its single Titan Z card (essentially two down-clocked Titan Black cards) the Tiki-Z offers roughly twice the gaming performance of the MiniBox. To be fair, the MiniBox pays back in CPU benchmarks, too.
If it sounds like the MiniBox is cruising for an easy victory, it is. Except for one problem: It’s loud. The Gigabyte Windforce cards are typically very quiet under load but when pushed here, all three fans spooled up and become quite noticeable. The Antec Kuhler H20 650 cooling the CPU also gets noticeable under CPU loads. It’s not as annoying as the GPU but you can tell this may be just a little too much hardware for this system. One solution would be to add more fans to move the heat out of the case, which might tone down the GPU. The Prodigy case’s internal layout makes this tough, but we think Polywell could have added more fans.
This does color our view of the Mini-Box, but how much should the noise dock the score? That one’s hard to say. While the noise is bad in gaming (although we’ve heard worse), CPU loads aren’t that bad. And then there’s the price. At $2,900, there’s a lot of performance per buck in the MiniBox. Plain? Yes. Loud at times? Affirmative. Stupidly fast in CPU chores? Hell, yes.
More...