So Achieva Malaysia invited us to their event which was mainly geared towards server and enterprise solutions. They showed off Intel’s NUC and compute stick which were revised according to previous complaints from other reviewers. Though, we didn’t have a chance to review the previous gen, we are expecting to review these new bad boys which are the ultimate compute war machines when it comes to portability. That wasn’t all, Intel also showed off their new Xeon CPU, of which according to that has made Server solutions more reliable and inexpensive.
Intel Malaysia also showed off their new E5-2600 v4 which is based around the Broadwell microarchitecture built on 14nm process technology which is still compatible with motherboards that support the E5 2600 v3. It also supports 4 Channels of DDR4 with 40 lans of PCIE 3.0.
The NUCs were also being shown off, this time instead of the overrated i7 which they used in the last NUC this time around they have opted for a Skylake i5 option only! To me I could I understand that it is quite okay, but I wish they had a bit lower CPU options only as we could understand that the NUC is going to a a treat for homes and in some office environments which involve simple tasks such as emails and in some productivity applications. Anyways, I really don’t mind having an i5, but if there was an i3 variant as well which would allow a lower price tag.
Next up we had Asus at the event too, since the event was more leaned towards the Xeon consumer, Asus showed off their E3 Pro Gaming V5 motherboard. They had quite a lot to brag about using a Xeon as your gaming system while promoting their motherboard being compatible with Intel’s Skylake and Xeons, quite a treat there!
From here on, Asus was really serious about getting i7 performance for the costs of an i5 CPU if you opted for a Xeon CPU. According to the benchmark they show that there is less a 3% difference in performance between a Xeon E3 1230 v5 and a locked Skylake i7 6700. But here is where I got a question running. What if they compared an i7 6700k OC’ed? Hmmm, that’s one perk. Anyways the point they want to prove to us is the costs of using a Xeon instead of an i7 and the extra cash that you’ll be saving.
The new Intel Compute stick has been revised addressing and fixing the issues that the older compute stick had. This time around according to the complaints such as poor Wireless connectivity and only having one USB 2.0 port this time they fixed these issues around, excellent work there, but that is to be tested.
This time they clearly went a bit thicker, but why should I complain? This time you have one USB 2.0 and one USB 3,0 port, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity (which has been revised), a microSD card slot and a security notch all running under Intel’s Quad Core Atom x5 processor.
And lastly a huge thanks to Achieva Malaysia for inviting us to their event!
