The Intel NUC8i7HVK (Hades Canyon) Review: Kaby Lake-G Benchmarked
by Ganesh T S on March 29, 2018 1:00 PM ESTGaming Notebooks Compared
One of the most common comments posted in response to mini-PC reviews is that the value proposition of an equivalent notebook is much higher than that of the PC. While there are plenty of factors that might make this comparison invalid, we thought it would be interesting to see how the NUC8i7HVK fares against premium gaming notebooks. Towards this, we borrowed a few benchmarks from our notebook reviews and processed them on the NUC. In the graphs below, we also have the gaming mini-PCs on which the benchmarks were processed. First, we will look at some artificial benchmarks before moving on to the games themselves.
3DMark Revisited
GFXBench
Dota 2
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
The takeaway from these results is that the performance of the Radeon RX Vega M GH roughly slots around GTX 970M. There are some benchmarks such as Dota 2 that are more sensitive to the CPU power, and in those cases, we find that the NUC8i7HVK actually comes in far ahead of other gaming notebooks that use processors with TDPs of 45W or lower.
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zodiacfml - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
I just like it for its integrated GPU which is a sign of good things to come.In the future, I just want to see more power from this setup. We'd see motherboards with a 6 or 8 pin connector for providing power to a more powerful GPU. Large coolers will be relevant again.
For AMD, I'd like to see them make a similar setup but with the HBM memory accessible for both the CPU and GPU.
What would Jesus Do? - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
Test comment test!!!santiagodraco - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
Can't play back UHD Blu-Ray? Wow. Intel you just lost a significant portion of the potential market for this pos. Why would anyone in their right minds buy this over say an Nvidia Shield, or hell a Shield + an Xbox X + a PS4 Pro... for the same money or less.Time to fire some folks in management.
santiagodraco - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
Not to mention the price once you add an SSD and memory. My god, what are they thinking? This thing is an utter joke! You could build a far far better system without much more of a footprint than this hunk of junk, for less. Just mind boggling. I thought that after the fiasco with the original Skull Canyon that Intel would have learned something... but instead they went backwards. I can hear them now "Let's make it less capable and cost 1/3 to 2x more than the previous version....people will love it!"Hifihedgehog - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
The hilarious thing is AMD’s Raven Ridge, which has Video Core Next (unlike its other Vega brethren), can properly decode UHD Blu-ray content and VP9 with fixed function decoding. Excluding gaming, AMD did end up giving Intel the second-rate goods after all. I am using a 2400G in a Streacom FC8 and VCN’s decoding quality is such a revelation that I now strictly use MadVR for UHD Blu-ray and HDR->SDR conversion.medi03 - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
And the reason not include 1060 / 1050 in the benchmarks is?bill44 - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
What a mess.Who can recommend a HTPC I can purchase or build that supports the following:
Stereo 3D - BD 3D ISO frame packed support (without issues) over HDMI 2.x (before you reply, please red Intel's official reply from this thread https://communities.intel.com/thread/112109?start=...
HDMI 2.x output that supports 176.4KHz, 88.2KHz as well was the usual 44KHz & 192KHz without resampling. As far as I know, NVidia can't do it. Reviews of GPUs do not include AUDIO specification or AUDIO testing anymore, only GAME GAME GAME!
Apart from picture/movie/streaming, I would like to use my HTPC to play Hi-Res music back without resampling.
UHD-BD playback - requires protected video/audio path, SGX, firmware & software support etc.
That's it. Just 3 requirements. Intel iGPU is out, NVidia is out, maybe AMD?
bill44 - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
Just one more thing: Displayport 1.2 only? I thought AMD supports 1.3/1.4.Hifihedgehog - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
The 2400G actually works for HDMI 2.0 with current gen hardware. I just built an HTPC in a Streacom FC8 and Raven Ridge, which exclusively has Video Core Next (not even discrete Vega has this), has the best hardware video decoding I have ever used, bar none. See here for compatibility information :smallformfactor (dot) net/forum/threads/raven-ridge-hdmi-2-0-compatibility-1st-gen-am4-motherboard-test-request-megathread.6709/
Hifihedgehog - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
PS: Raven Ridge Vega’s VCN has fixed function VP9 decoding without restrictions. Prior revisions of Vega, including the revision on the Intel CPU+dGPU multi-die packages, use the old UVD system which, while considered by most videophiles to be the best hardware decoding option in terms of decoding quality compared to NVIDIA and AMD (see here: forums (dot) anandtech (dot) com/threads/does-anyone-review-video-decoding-quality-any-more.2410025/#post-36936833 ; despite being from 2014, this old post still pretty much applies), still lacks fixed function VP9 hardware support.