ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1165G7 Mini-PC Review: An Ultra-Compact Tiger Lake Desktop

Intel introduced the Willow Cove micro-architecture with their Tiger Lake processors in the latter part of 2020. These were designed to span a wide range of performance levels and applications, with TDPs ranging from as low as 7W up to 65W.

While mobile systems are the prime market for the 7W - 15W SKUs, higher TDP processors have found themselves in a number of different form-factors ranging from notebooks and UCFF mini-PCs to full-blown gaming desktops. Many ultra-compact mini-PCs based on Tiger Lake have been introduced by different vendors in the last few quarters. Competitively speaking, the Tiger Lake UCFF PCs come in at a time when systems based on AMD's compelling 7nm Zen 2-based Ryzen 4000U series of processors are already well-established in the market.

Can Tiger Lake shift the value proposition metric back towards Intel? Read on for our review of ASRock Industrial's flagship 'NUC' based on Tiger Lake - the NUC BOX-1165G7.