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I bought a NUC!



Basically I've been meaning to build a new HTPC or do something about my old HTPC which has been running too loudly to watch much on recently. I already use a 4k Fire stick for any standard media streaming. However I occasionally need to watch movies as part of a virtual film fest or something that need to be watched via a browser. The old HTPC just wasn't cutting it.

Old HTPC Specs:
AMD A4-7300 Richmond Dual 32nm @ 3.8GHz
Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI Mini-ITX
4GB DDR3
AMD Radeon HD 8470D
Crucial C300 128GB SSD
Seagate ST3320620AS 300GB
Win10 Pro

When I built this system back in 2015 I threw some emulators and roms on there but never played all that much. I flirted with both Hyperspin and LaunchBox but for some reason I just never put the time in to get it all set up. But with the new NUC, I figured I'd finally really dive in and have one super emu box!

So I did.

It didn't take very long reading around to discover that Hyperspin is way too stupid and complex to bother with. But LaunchBox and it's cabinet/TV-centric pay big brother BigBox is awesome and the community is great. So I'm all in on LaunchBox and BigBox (LB/BB).


LaunchBox - click for full size

So far I've just got through all of my main consoles. But it has been super fun. LB/BB makes it very easy to scrape for images, music etc. It also integrates with nearly any emulator and importantly with RetroArch which I just learned about in this process and is a pretty amazing front/middle end for many many emulators. That means you just setup controls once and its consistent across all your emulators. Importantly retroarch also lets you setup advanced joystick mapping so you can map a hold-and-press hotkey. For instance, I mapped holding select and hitting start once to reset and twice to exit for every console. Likewise with select+shoulders for save slot switching and select+thumb stick presses for load and save state. Very cool. Retroarch actually runs the original emulators. So you're running Flycast but through retroarch. Retroarch has its own decent controller-controlled front end but nothing like LB/BB with all the media and bells and whistles.


LaunchBox - click for full size

As far as consoles go, I knew I didn't want to go too nuts. You can go nuts with that. So instead I decided to add the full libraries for a few systems that might be fun to browse and also wouldn't crush my 1TB of storage. I still plan to put a full MAME romset (minus CHDs) so needed to keep a good chunk of that free. And then I decided to put select sets of roms for either CD-based consoles or older consoles I just don't think I'll ever bother to browse. I even left a few systems totally off. I may come back and play with C64 and Amiga and some of those systems that some of you monkeys have more of a connection to than I do. But chances are if I only know it through emulation, I left it off. Anyway, here is what I landed on:

NES - Full set
SNES - Full set
Nintendo 64 - Full set
GameCube - Selects (69)
Nintendo GBA - Full set
Nintendo DS - Selects (51)
Nintendo 3DS - Selects (18)
Genesis - Full set
Sega CD - Selects (9)
Sega 32X - Full set (only 33)
Sega CD 32X - Selects (1)
Dreamcast - Selects (33)
Sega Saturn - Selects (3)
Playstation - Selects (149)
TurboGrafx/PCE - Selects (94)

For the full set consoles, LB/BB has a system for creating playlists which allows you to create lists of selects. So I've been going through the full sets and picking the however many titles that I will likely play. BB even allows you to pin playlists to the main carousel. I've created custom graphics for those. It's pretty great. These playlists are clutch for MAME as LB/BB will auto-create playlists for different systems too.


BigBox - click for full size

So how does it work? Well so far so good! I've now gotten each emulator working (was waiting for this milestone to post this). Every console runs through retroarch except GameCube (since the Dolphin core for retroarch is still a bit buggy) and Citra for 3DS which is by far the earliest of the emulators. But some of the 3DS games seem to work just fine while some are a bit troublesome. Likewise Saturn is still a bit troublesome with the way it emulates CDs but I got one game working so I'm moving on for now.


BigBox - click for full size

Back to the NUC. The specs are mighty impressive for the price. I nabbed the BOXNUC8i3CYSM1 on Amazon for $329 with a Win10 Home license. Tough to beat that price and I never knew how easy it is to get RDP and gpedit working on Home. I swapped out the stock mechanical 1TB HDD for the Samsung SSD I pulled out of my last system. I also tossed in a 16GB Intel Optane memory module which I grabbed for only $15 cause at that price it can't hurt. Does it work? I'll have a full benchmark breakdown of all the different configurations in an upcoming post.

Full specs:
Cannon Lake 10NM i3-8121U 15W Dual Core @ 2.2GHz
8GB LPDDR4 2400MHz soldered on
*Added Intel Optane 16GB M.2 2280
Radeon 540 2GB GDDR5
Seagate 850 EVO SSD (Replacing Seagate ST1000VT001)
Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 9560 + Ethernet + SDXC slot
Win10 Home

Long story short, the system has perfectly played everything I've thrown at with the exception of some of the 3DS games that bog way down. From what I've read this is more about Citra and its preference for nvidia GPUs over AMD. But then again, I'm playing mostly pretty old stuff so I would expect most of it to work. And I'm very happy with it so far.

As I mentioned, I'll add some more photos and a full suite of benchmarks soon. I'll also be adding MAME sooner or later and will report back on that. At some point I should probably actually play some games too.

Nice!

I set up a system with Launchbox, only for MAME, as I use the MiSTer for all the other stuff. Love Launchbox. It took hours to get it set up the way I liked it, but was worth it.

I had to crash that Honda though.

I plan to set up another like it though at some point.

Benchmarks

So like I did before, I've got all the raw data benchmarks in the same linked google document but there is now an HTPC Benchs tab at the bottom. I'll summarize some interesting findings here though.

First off, as far as the old AMD A4-7300 3.8GHz (Richland 32nm) Mini-ITX HTPC as compared to the new NUC (max specs) goes:
PCMark10: 55.8% avg gain
AIDA64 CPU perf: 77.1% avg gain
AIDA64 GPU perf: 66.1% avg gain
WinRar multithread test: 46.1% gain
WinRar real world tests: 222.3% avg gain
Dolphin emu bench: 40.5% gain

Now, for something a bit more interesting, I benchmarked the NUC under four different hardware configurations:
A. 5900 RPM HDD & No Optane
B. 5900 RPM HDD & 16GB Optane Acceleration
C. SSD & No Optane
D. SSD & 16GB Optane Acceleration

Takeaways from these tests:

• The Optane didn't affect 3DMark11 at all

• The SSD bumped 3DMark11 up about 3.5%

• The Optane had a big 18.6% effect on the PCMark10 score when added to the 5900RPM setup but no effect when added to the SSD

• Switching to the SSD boosted the PCMark10 score by 25% (or by 7.5% comparing the two Optane setups)

• Optane isn't worth anything in the WinRar benchmarks but it does boost an average of 5% in the realworld tests

• The SSD had no effect on the WinRar bench either but boosted the realword tests a whopping 30%

• Interestingly, the 5900 with no Optane up to the SSD with Optane was a 41.3% jump for the realworld WinRar test

• All 4 system configurations had nearly identical Dolphin emu bench scores

So no real big surprise that the SSD had the bigger effect on this. It's quite speedy now especially compared to the old box. But for $15, I don't feel bad about throwing the Optane in there if for nothing other than the WinRar boost which is something the emu box will be doing a-plenty.

MAME is all up and running and config'd up! Super fun and so slick. LaunchBox creates playlists for each of the big systems like CPS-2, CPS-3, etc. as well as things like Shoot Em Ups and Sports Games. Slick! I also created my own Selects playlist as well as a Give it a Whirl list for things that looked interesting. I actually thumbed through each and every working game's screenshots for the first time ever in MAME history. Some jolly good memories in there.


Full list


Selects


Auto-populated system playlists

Now I just need someone to play with.