Leaving the system for 20 minutes at idle the CPU temperature dropped to just 38 degrees, which is a bit higher than the standard heatsink and fan combo but cool enough nonetheless. We repeated the test while running OCCT (used to stress the integrated graphics engine) in conjunction with Prime95, though this didn’t seem to have any real impact on load temperatures. So with that out of the way we moved on to run a few performance benchmarks… The iTunes encoding tests consist of converting 14 MP3s (119MB) to 128Kbps ACC files and measuring the operation’s duration in seconds. For file transfers, we measure how long it takes to copy two sets of files from one location to another on the same hard drive. On the small files test we transfer 557 MP3s, totaling 2.56GB. For the large file, these same MP3s were zipped into a single file measuring 2.52GB. When it comes to 3d gaming performance our Thin Mini-ITX build is pretty useless and really that will be true for any Thin Mini-ITX systems as they rely on the Intel HD Graphics. Although Intel’s upcoming Iris graphics engine, which will make its debut on the Haswell architecture, is said to be 2 - 3x faster than the HD 4000, that still doesn’t make it a completely competent gaming solution. Where this build does shine is when it comes to CPU performance for productivity and even HTPC use. With a score of 5186pts it was faster than the recently reviewed Gigabyte U2442F which features a mobile Core i7 processor, even if it is the ultra-low power dual-core 3517U. The OCZ Agility 4 256GB SSD also allowed our Thin Mini-ITX build to complete the file transfer tests very quickly. Note that all comparison systems also featured SSDs, as a traditional mechanical hard drive is going to be much slower here.
