ASRock DeskMeet B660 Review: An Affordable NUC Extreme?

Setup Notes and Platform Analysis

Upon completion of the hardware configuration, the available BIOS options were looked into. The system initially came up with the four DIMMs operating at DDR4-3200, but activating the XMP profile immediately bumped it up to DDR4-3600. Since the DeskMeet B660 is a consumer-focused system, the UEFI has all the bells and whistles including the ability to update firmware directly from the Internet and fine-grained control of the fan speeds in relation to the temperatures.

By default, the BIOS opens up in the 'Easy View' mode which gives an overview of the system components (processor, DRAM, storage), and system information (temperature and cooling status). Boot priorities can also be modified in this view. More adventurous users can opt for the 'Advanced Mode' view, which allows for fine-grained overclocking of the CPU and DRAM as allowed by the system components under the 'OC Tweaker' tab.

The BIOS also allows selective enabling of the P-cores and E-cores, configuring various PCIe device aspects like ASPM, SR-IOV, etc. Under the 'Tools' tab, support for secure erasing of SSDs is available. Other standard options like secure boot are also available.

ASRock's documentation of the B660-ITX doesn't unfortunately include a block diagram of the I/Os in relation to the processor and the chipset. We resorted to HWiNFO to provide us with the details after connecting different peripherals to the various USB ports and a temporary SSD to the empty M.2 NVMe SSD slot. The diagram below presents the overall high-speed I/O distribution.

The most surprising aspect gleaned from the bus organization report relates to the CPU-attached PCIe lanes for the NVMe SSD. While I had mistakenly inferred that the slot on the underside was the CPU-attached one, it turns out that the one near the PCIe add-in card slot is the ideal slot to connect the boot SSD to. Unfortunately, I realized this only after all the evaluation had been completed, but it is something that other DeskMeet B660 users can keep in mind for optimal storage performance. Other than that, all other I/Os are as expected, sourced off a single 20 Gbps USB root hub in the PCH.

In this review, we compare the DeskMeet B660 and a host of other SFF systems capable of accommodating a discrete GPU add-in card.

While we have reviewed many SFF systems with discrete GPUs in the past, only the NUC Extreme models were available for re-benching again with our latest benchmark suite. The next few sections will deal with comparative benchmarks for the above systems.