Supermicro SYS-E302-12E Fanless Industrial PC Review: Elkhart Lake for IoT Applications

Digital Signage Credentials

The 2022 Q4 update to our system reviews brings an updated video playback / digital signage evaluation suite for systems. After doing away with the evaluation of display refresh rate stability and Netflix streaming evaluation, the local media playback configurations have also seen a revamp. This section details each of the workloads processed on the Supermicro SYS-E302-12E as part of this suite.

YouTube Streaming Efficiency

YouTube continues to remain one of the top OTT platforms, primarily due to its free ad-supported tier. Our test suite update retains YouTube streaming efficiency evaluation as a metric of OTT support in different systems. Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video is the chosen test sample. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.

YouTube Streaming Statistics

The GPU in Supermicro SYS-E302-12E supports hardware decoding of VP9 Profile 2, and we see the stream encoded with that codec being played back. The streaming is not quite perfect - activation of overlays results in significant frame drops, as can be seen in the statistics in the above screenshot..

The streaming efficiency-related aspects such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption are also graphed below.

Spikes in the D3D usage during overlay activation can be seen in the graph above. These are the regions of significant dropped frames. In general, it also looks like the video decoder is stressed signficantly when decoding 4Kp60 streams. Energy consumption for this workload was 2.5 Wh. Unfortunately, we do not have the corresponding numbers for the other systems as this is newly included benchmarking factor.

Hardware-Accelerated Encoding and Decoding

The transcoding benchmarks in the systems performance section presented results from evaluating the QuickSync encoder within Handbrake's framework. The capabilities of the decoder engine are brought out by DXVAChecker.

Video Decoding Hardware Acceleration in Supermicro SYS-E302-12E

The iGPU is equipped with hardware decoding capabilities for all codec varieties expect AV1. These should be more than sufficient for digital signage purposes.

Local Media Playback

Evaluation of local media playback and video processing is done by playing back files encompassing a range of relevant codecs, containers, resolutions, and frame rates. A note of the efficiency is also made by tracking GPU usage and power consumption of the system at the wall. Users have their own preference for the playback software / decoder / renderer, and our aim is to have numbers representative of commonly encountered scenarios. Our Q4 2022 test suite update replaces MPC-HC (in LAV filters / madVR modes) with mpv. In addition to being cross-platform and open-source, the player allows easy control via the command-line to enable different shader-based post-processing algorithms. From a benchmarking perspective, the more attractive aspect is the real-time reporting of dropped frames in an easily parseable manner. The players / configurations considered in this subsection include:

• VLC 3.0.18
• Kodi 20.0rc2
• mpv 0.35 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next)
• mpv 0.35 (hwdec auto, vo=gpu-next, profile=gpu-hq)

Fourteen test streams (each of 90s duration) were played back from the local disk with an interval of 30 seconds in-between. Various metrics including GPU usage, at-wall power consumption, and total energy consumption were recorded during the course of this playback.

All our playback tests were done with the desktop HDR setting turned on. It is possible for certain system configurations to automatically turn on/off the HDR capabilities prior to the playback of a HDR video, but, we didn't take advantage of that in our testing.

The VLC playback sequence consumed 8.75 Wh at the wall. Playback for all codecs was fine except for AV1 - software decoding of a 8Kp60 AV1 clip on a quad-core Atom was obviously just a slideshow with very high power consumption.

Playback with Kodi was similar, with AV1 again failing the decoding process. Energy consumption was 9.06 Wh.

mpv playback with hardware acceleration was fine for all codecs except AV1. Energy consumption was 8.44 Wh.

Activating shaders for post-processing resulted in significant number of dropped frames for the 60 fps clips. Otherwise, except for AV1, the rest of the samples played back without issues. Energy consumption was a bit on the higher end at 9.38 Wh due to the extra iGPU loading.