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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cacnoff - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
I see that it can play back netflix 4k HDR?Does this make Intel the first Radeon GPU implementation to handle Playready 3.0?
patrickjp93 - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
Actually that's handled by the iGPU on Kaby Lake. Vega is not PlayReady 3.0-capable.ganeshts - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
On traditional KBL systems, you are right about iGPU handling PlayReady 3.0 video decoding.On the Hades Canyon, it appears that the Vega GPU is handling it. I have updated the '4K HTPC Credentials' section with the appropriate text after capturing the screenshot below:
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12572/Netflix-GP...
gigahertz20 - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
I've built two Intel NUC's for family members in the past couple of years and they love them. Fast, quiet and so far reliable. They don't game at all which is why I convinced them to buy them. I'm not sure if this NUC is going to be popular at all though at $1,000 barebones. Who is going to buy it? The gaming performance of this NUC is nothing special, gamers and enthusiasts are going to stick with desktops, alot of people are just waiting for the cryptocurrency craze to die down so we can get video cards at decent prices again. If that takes another year or 2 so be it.Your average person that just needs an office computer won't buy this at $1k, you can get a much cheaper NUC and throw in a SSD and that will work fine. Why pay a premium for a cute little powerful box, if you want small and portable you can get a laptop for cheaper. If they would have priced this at $600 barebones it would have been much more appealing to your average user that might want to play the occasional game at 1080P.
Crazyeyeskillah - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
Nuc's have always been geared as thing clients for businesses. It's a niche market that pretty much just wants reliability and 'good enough' performance. I don't see many people loading up on the $1700 version like we see here, but Intel will get good sales from the lowest tier when ordered by the hundreds for large companies.Sailor23M - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
I bought the Skull Canyon version last year at a good discount on newegg. I am very happy with it and intel’s support (for at least the skull canyon) has been great with a dedicated website and easy to find updates, firmware and drivers. I have it mounted behind my monitor and use it as my main PC. I’m sure that although the retail price on these is $999, you will be able to find it for much less in a few months time.The_Assimilator - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
For the love of god Ganesh, please, PLEASE give us proper teardowns of the units you review. That means taking the damh things apart and showing us what all the bits look like, NOT just removing the lid that allows you to access the user-upgradable bits.Crazyeyeskillah - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
Why do you need a tear down of this product?The_Assimilator - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
I don't "need" it, but a review should attempt to be as thorough as possible, and for hardware that means showing as much of the system as possible.cfenton - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
Usually review units are on loan from the manufacturer. They aren't typically too keen on reviewers tearing them apart before returning them.