Intel Compute Stick Review – Windows 8.1 PC For Under $150

Intel Compute Stick General Performance

In 3DMark Ice Storm we got an overall score of 9,183 points and the CPU temperature got up to 72C during the benchmark run on the Intel Compute Stick. In Graphics Test 1 and 2 the average FPS was right at 40 FPS, so the Intel Compute Stick should do okay with very basic games.

The benchmark built-in 7-zip showed that Intel Compute Stick had a total MIPS rating of 3,479.

A quick look at the memory performance showed we are getting 5 GB/s of bandwidth on the single channel DDR3L 1333MHz memory solution.

In Sandra Processor Arithmetic the aggregate native performance score was 13 GOPS.

The Sandra Processor Multi-Media aggregate performance score was 16.7 MPix/s.

We ran the SunSpider 1.0.2 JavaScript Benchmark on Google Chrome 42 and received a score of 862.2 ms.

The last performance test that we wanted to run was Bootracer 4.9 to see how fast the system is able to boot Windows 8.1 32-bit. We were ecstatic to find that it takes 13 seconds to get to the welcome screen and another 23 seconds everything ready on the desktop! This meant our total boot time was 36.6 seconds.

Video Playback

The Intel Compute Stick has the basic Intel HD Graphics and lacks support for technologies like Intel QuickSync (hardware accelerated decode and encode) and Intel Clear Video HD (hardware accelerated decode). We were really curious how video playback be handled, so we ran a few tests at 1080P to ensure there were no Full HD issues to be had.

In the screenshot above we played the new Star Wars 1080P movie trailer on YouTube and found that we were using up about 21% of the available processing power once the video was cached. It played smooth and our system had no issues with online HD video unless we were multitasking and then you’d get some delays for caching. The Intel Compute Stick is about doing primarily one thing at a time.

We also downloaded Media Player Classic – Home Cinema along with several 1080P clips at various bit rates and had a good overall experience.