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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fanofanand - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
So in other words, another 20 mm gives the customer a 50% haircut on price. Yup, more evidence this is a product in search of high margins and little else.jwcalla - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
You have to understand that Intel thinks its customers turn on their faucets and liquid gold comes pouring out.Shadowmaster625 - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
So its not even as fast as an ancient R9 270M despite being two nodes ahead.... and the power advantage is only 30%. Intel has a problem it seems.ganeshts - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Did you consider the power budget?extide - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Are you kidding? That is actually a pretty damn good achievement, I mean that uses a Cape Verde ASIC, and has about 1TFLOP of compute power, (640 shaders @ ~750 Mhz)The Iris Pro 580 has 576 FP32 cores (72 EU * 8) and runs about 1Ghz, so has a bit over 1.1TFLOP compute -- so really pretty similar in terms of compute horsepower. It seems like it is performing right where it should based on it's hardware config.
fanofanand - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Well, looks like I will be waiting yet another generation. Still can't game on 1080p. I like the storage and Wi-Fi numbers, and I can picture this doing fairly well in some office environments, but are there that many people who are building home PC's (user still has to add RAM etc.) and who will pay that kind of a premium for a device that is somewhat limited in it's use case? I can't speak for anyone else of course, but there is no way my employer would fork out $1k for this, not when they can spend $400 on a cheap business laptop that takes up a similar amount of space in the office but also offers them the ability to extract additional work from me over the weekend. I love the idea, I just don't think the hardware is there yet.Taracta - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
How is Alpine Ridge going to get USB 3.1 if it is not off the PCH?ganeshts - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Alpine Ridge has a USB 3.1 host controller integrated along with the Thunderbolt controller. Please look into our Thunderbolt 3 hands-on coverage here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10248/thunderbolt-3-... : Note the presence of the xHCI controller in the Alpine Ridge block diagram towards the middle of the linked page.tipoo - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
This makes me wish Intel offered GT4e with a cheaper dual, then it could compete with boxes like the Alienware Alpha on price/value.tipoo - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Does this support free sync?