The Intel Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK mini-PC Review
by Ganesh T S on May 23, 2016 8:00 AM ESTPerformance Metrics - I
The Intel NUC6i7KYK (Skull Canyon) was evaluated using our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs. Not all benchmarks were processed on all the machines due to updates in our testing procedures. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph might not be the same. In the first section, we will be looking at SYSmark 2014, as well as some of the Futuremark benchmarks.
BAPCo SYSmark 2014
BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 is an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation and data/financial analysis. Scores are meant to be compared against a reference desktop (HP ProDesk 600 G1 with a Core i3-4130, 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive) that scores 1000 in each of the scenarios. A score of, say, 2000, would imply that the system under test is twice as fast as the reference system.
We started using SYSmark 2014 quite recently, which is the main reason for the absence of many of the comparison systems in the above graphs. In any case, the most interesting of the compared lot when it comes to CPU-intensive benchmarks like SYSmark 2014 is the ASRock VisionX 471D, equipped with a Core i7-4712MQ processor. We can see that the Core i7-6770HQ-based Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK is miles ahead of the other two systems when it comes to office / business workloads. Readers interested in comparing the SYSmark 2014 scores for systems based on other CPUs can peruse the Bench results here.
Futuremark PCMark 8
PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU in the system. As expected, the Core i7-6770HQ enables the NUC6i7KYK to easily come out on top in the charts.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
The graphics benchmarks present a different story, though. In these, the NUC6i7KYK does perform well enough to come in the top half. However, in scenarios which are not CPU-bound, the systems equipped with discrete GPUs easily turn out to be better than Skull Canyon.
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
CINEBENCH R15 is a standard benchmark for 3D rendering. It provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of select PCs in all three modes provided us the following results.
In the single-threaded case, the Core i7-4770R (a 65W TDP CPU which can turbo up to 3.9 GHz) performs slightly better than the Core i7-6770HQ. However, the latter wins out in the multi-threaded cases. In the OpenGL case, the GIGABYTE system with the discrete GPU wins out, showing that a combination of CPU power as well as GPU is needed to perform well in this benchmark.
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KurtKrampmeier - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link
Can Undervolting achieve significantly better thermals and less cpu throttling? And if so, by how much? I want to use this as a 24/7 load and very small and light portable cpu package. Thank you!Drazick - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link
Ganesh, When will we have high TDP (65W and above) CPU with Iris Pro?I would even go farther, I'd like to see Extreme Edition CPU's with Iris Pro.
I hope Core I7 7820K will also have a configuration with Iris Pro and 128MB of eDRAM.
It's time Intel to bring Iris Pro to the high end desktop chips.
sharath.naik - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
Not sure about the price. At this price isnt it just better to buy a Laptop with discrete graphics and remove the display if you donot want it?Eva Green - Thursday, May 26, 2016 - link
The PC provides cutting edge hardware to run the best games ->http://www.gamernode.com/the-pc-power-and-money-in...
cm2187 - Saturday, May 28, 2016 - link
Just received mine. It is quite noisy, even when idle.Madpacket - Monday, May 30, 2016 - link
Neat computer but niche. I'll wait for the fire sale on this one. I could see uses as a dev / portable VM box with the m.2 PCI ports (raid striped). As a gaming machine this thing is about as useful as a A10-7870K or even less for driver reasons. But at least it can do some low end gaming however you would be much better off with an Alienware Alpha which is still tiny and packs a real GPU and is about half the price.gue2212 - Saturday, June 4, 2016 - link
"Connecting the Thunderbolt ports on the two machines and allowing the PCs to talk to each other automatically creates a 10Gbps network adapter."Can anyone shed some light: When TB3 can transfer 40Gbps (bundle the 4 PCIe 3 lanes), why do we end up with 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen2 speed for networking?
Well, woulda been too good at 40, but I guess I´ll abuse the NUC6i7KYK as an external storage (partition backup) for my Dell XPS 9550 until I see a TB3 SSD with the Samsung T3 SSD form-factor. ;-)
mystikmedia - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
I have this NUC. I am very happy with it overall. I can't seem to get the Thunderbolt port to work, though. I bought a USB 3.0 hub that has a Type C connection. I figured I might as well put that Type C port to use and not waste an existing USB port. But, it doesn't seem to work. Should it? I had assumed the USB 3.1 aspect of it would be backwards compatible with 3.0, as has been the case in the past. Is that incorrect? TIAgue2212 - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
Hey mysticmedia,I don´t understand what you´re trying to accomplish. You got 4 USB 3.0 ports on the NUC6i7KYK. Why in heaven would you hook up a USB 3.0 hub to the TB 3?
gue2212 - Sunday, June 19, 2016 - link
How are the connectors / headers supposed to be used (left back cut-out in the metal under the top plastic cover)?According to the circuit schema they are internal USB 3 and 2, NFC and LPC Debug.