Installing Windows on an Xbox One APU: The Chuwi Aerobox Review
by Dr. Ian Cutress on December 24, 2020 9:45 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks, Power, Temperature, Noise
For office productivity, there’s no getting around the fact that these are Jaguar cores. Coupled with the memory bandwidth means that flicking between the basic documents can be somewhat laggy, and this isn’t really a system for anything other than email and web browsing. We still put it through our test suite, and the full range of tests were conducted. A few of them are highlighted here.
For reference, the Athlon 5370 mentioned here is a quad-core Jaguar.
Power, Temperatures, Noise
I will say a few words on power and temperatures.
Our normal tools for extracting power do not work on this embedded processor, likely a function of its age (similar Jaguar desktop processors that were public have the same issue), however we were able to take some wall measurements.
At idle, we saw power consumption in the 65-70W range. This is fairly high for a HTPC, so we would suggest not leaving it turned on when not in use. During our Borderlands 3 gaming, the system power hit 150 W, which should actually be clipping the power supply that is only capable of 150 W. This may be a limiting factor in gaming performance as a result. During high CPU loading, the total system power only went up to 85 W or so, showcasing that the GPU is the key component here.
For temperatures, before we replaced the paste, the system would peak at 75ºC regardless of load, and still offer full CPU frequency. After applying our own paste, that dropped to the 62-68ºC range. All throughout, the fan on the cooler never ramped up enough to be noticeable at a distance of a couple of meters. The one time the system had an odd boot, the fan did spin to 100% and was very loud, but after rebooting it came back as normal.
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powerarmour - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
It's certainly interesting, but it's about 7 years too late performance wise.shabby - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
Disappointed you didn't test cyberpunk 2077 on it...YB1064 - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
He might have, but it probably crashed.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
Had the same thought. Even if it would load, playing at 1-2 fps would be an experience one would want to forget.shabby - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
I'm sure at 360p it could pull off a solid 30fps 😂eastcoast_pete - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
Good one! Ian, can you comment on whether it would even load Cyberpunk 2077, never mind run it?Ian Cutress - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
I don't actually own it. 🤪brucethemoose - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
It runs on AMD 17."...our system shipped with beta versions of Adrenaline 17.12, which indicates we have December 2017 drivers. None of AMD’s regular driver packages will recognize this system as it uses a custom embedded processor. Some games will refuse to run because the drivers are so old."
beginner99 - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
These Jaguar cores were kind a slow/subpar when the consoles released and now it's just ridiculously bad. Actually amazing what console devs managed to do with these.d0x360 - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
True but also remember how tightly optimized you can get with your code when you know the hardware and also when you can code to the hardware without needing to worry so much about abstraction layers, other overhead and DRM that a publisher might slap on after you've already optimized the game.Great example there is ubi soft. If you bought AC Odyssey on steam then there were 4 or 5 layers of drm. You had uplays, steams, denuvo and another denuvo caliber one I can't remember and that might be it but there may be 1 more I can't remember.
Anyways it was the 2 main DRM scheme's (denuvo and the other big one lol) chewing up cpu cycles. I remember playing that game and seeing cpu use average at 70% but then I tried a cracked version (I owned the game) and cpu use dropped to 40% average.
So there are lots of extra things on the pc side that get in the way and that's not even counting problems with the system.