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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jann5s - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
very fun read indeed, thx for the linkkgardas - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
Demo a system on lot of virtualized machines. ECC is a must have for server workloads and although a chance that the demo will fail due to flip-bit is low, still man would rather not risk that at customer premises right?hubick - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
It would be really cool to see them make a Xeon-D based NUC oriented for home NAS/router/micro-server use, with dual M.2 for onboard RAID 0/1, Thunderbolt for external storage, a minimal GPU, ECC RAM, and dual 10GBase-T support!TeXWiller - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
That could cost an ARM, though. ;)BurntMyBacon - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link
I'd give up an "ARM" for that. ;')lper - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
100% agree. If you known how high tech DRAM is and how easy it goes wrong (just google for rowhammer...). I spend already a hughe amount of time to figure out RAM issues which have ECC (as otherwise you would not notice) in embedded systems, that I do not trust RAM without ECC anymore.Still waiting on the first xeon laptop without quadro (which just drains power and produces heat...) but with ECC. I use my computer for work, not for playing games. So if it can drive the display size used, then it is ok... I do not want any laptop with an extra GPU, but I want the ECC.
Ratman6161 - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link
"I use my computer for work, not for playing games."Which is to say that this hardware is not being marketed at you in the first place.
JKflipflop98 - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
Exactly what part of this device tells you "this is for doing serious business"? Was it the big skull on the front panel?jihe - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
This can be better with free beer support. I just can not use any machine without beer for work.Ethos Evoss - Thursday, May 26, 2016 - link
I can PISS on this for that taking piss price !!!