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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Hifihedgehog - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
PS: Raven Ridge’s claim to fame is support for fixed function 10-bit VP9 decoding.tomshardware (dot) co (dot) uk/amd-ryzen-5-2400g-zen-vega-cpu-gpu,review-34205-4.html
kunal29 - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
What about the latency benchmarks between GPU and CPU?beginner99 - Sunday, April 1, 2018 - link
Not being able to play UHD BluRay basically kills the product as HTPC which limits it to gaming and that is a steep price to ask just for that. My effing TV can play 4k HDR but this $1300 PC can't???Tyler_Durden_83 - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
Here is an idea, the benchmarks as images are so last decade, seeing the review of the zotac without the benchmarks of hades canyon just because it came out one day earlier, or with a terribly old xps 15 model even though you did bench the latest, is quite frankly not the high standard that people expect from Anandkmmatney - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
This is a nice system, but still way too expensive. You can get a gaming laptop with 15" screen, 7700HQ cpu, RAM, Windows OS, usually an SSD OS drive, and a GTX 1060 for around this barebone price. Even less if you go for a 1050 Ti, which is about equivalent to this. It's impressive, but I just have never gotten the point of these expensive NUCs.JKJK - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - link
lack of UHD/HDR support in many cases and those kodi freezes .... meh.I would like to see some update on these freeze-issues in the future.
HakkaH - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - link
Too bad they didn't throw in the AMD 200G and 2400G with the benchmarks. You can build a small system with it which would be a whole lot cheaper and probably pretty decent when it comes to gaming speed.Dev3 - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Hey Ganesh, can you comment on the current status of apparent lack of iGPU/AMD-CPU switchable graphics? Is this just an early BIOS/software issue or an unfixable design flaw where video-out is forced to route through the power-sucking Vega chip? This may be tolerable on a NUC but would be totally unacceptable on a laptop.I have an XPS-15 2-in-1 (9575) on order having assumed that Dell would never release a laptop with such a glaring flaw. But now with the first review out (https://www.digitaltrends.com/laptop-reviews/dell-... saying battery life is really bad, I'm getting concerned. Three hours runtime? Really??
I thought this was the laptop I was waiting for but now I'm seriously considering canceling my order before it ships and holding off until the issue is sorted out or at least understood.
I assume Intel is aware of the issue - can they fix it or did they (intentionally or unintentionally) sabotage their own (AMD) product??
AllThings3D - Saturday, April 7, 2018 - link
I noticed you only benchmarked the faster and more expensive NUC8i7HVK. Do you have any plans to benchmark the NUC8i7HNK? I have found very little on this unit and would love to know how much less is expected in performance. If we can obtain at least 50% over the equivalent KabyLake NUC with Iris 620 Graphics, this would be okay for my needs especially since the TDP is 65W versus 100W for the NUC8i7HVK. My purpose is to use this Microsoft Mixed Reality backpack PC with two Sony V-Lock or AntonBauer battery packs. My current NUC "belt system" using the Iris 620 IGPU has worked out very well for doing engineering and architectural VR visualization and with the MSXR using an unbounded positional tracking system, you can navigate larger spaces than with the current HTC/Vive systems. In this YouTube video (https://youtu.be/hM8uwzmhaJY) I am in my backyard, something I don't think I have seen done with the any of the other VR solution :)One more questions. Do you know what the actual VDC in range is? I know previous NUCs had an actual range between 11-24 VDC. Since the 'Belt System' uses a KabyLake NUC, the 14.8 VDC AntonBauer LiPo works great. I hope this is the case here since it would complicate my battery circuit to have have to go with a custom solution.
JKJK - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link
So... As a future proof media center (mostly kodi use), should I buy the previous gen?Need answer asap if I need to cancel my order