The Intel Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK mini-PC Review
by Ganesh T S on May 23, 2016 8:00 AM ESTGaming Benchmarks
Intel's Iris Pro Graphics SKUs with integrated EDRAM are amongst the highest-performing iGPUs in the market right now. The Core i7-6770HQ is equipped with Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580 - a GT4e part with 72 EUs and 128MB of eDRAM.
For the purpose of benchmarking, we chose six different games (Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite, The Talos Principle, GRID Autosport and DiRT Showdown) at various quality levels. The purpose of this section is not to benchmark the latest and greatest games, or benchmark at 4K resolutions. Intel clearly targets the Skull Canyon NUC towards casual gamers and those wanting to get introduced to mainstream gaming titles. As such, it is expected that people would play games with medium settings at 1080p or lower resolutions.
Sleeping Dogs
Tomb Raider
Bioshock Infinite
DiRT Showdown
The Talos Principle
GRID Autosport
All the numbers point to expected results - Skull Canyon is simply the best when it comes to having the best iGPU for gaming purposes. However, it is a bit of a disappointment when compared to systems having slightly bigger footprints, but, equipped with previous generation discrete mobile GPUs. An external Thunderbolt GPU dock can solve some of the issues for users wanting more graphics prowess than what the Iris Pro Graphics 580 can deliver, but that has a significant price premium, and it is not something that we evaluated as part of this review.
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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.