Intel's Bean Canyon (NUC8i7BEH) Coffee Lake NUC Review - Ticking the Right Boxes
by Ganesh T S on April 3, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- NUC
- UCFF
- Thunderbolt 3
- Cannon Point
- Coffee Lake-U
Miscellaneous Performance Metrics
This section looks at some of the other commonly used benchmarks representative of the performance of specific real-world applications.
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
We use CINEBENCH R15 for 3D rendering evaluation. The program provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of different PC configurations in all three modes provided us the following results.
The high turbo frequency allows the NUC8i7BEH to come out on top in the single-threaded cases. However, the TDP limitations and the limited thermals push the system to the middle of the pack in the multi-threaded case. For the OpenGL case, the systems with discrete GPUs provide better results compared to the NUC8i7BEH.
x265 Benchmark
Next up, we have some video encoding benchmarks using x265 v2.8. The appropriate encoder executable is chosen based on the supported CPU features. In the first case, we encode 600 1080p YUV 4:2:0 frames into a 1080p30 HEVC Main-profile compatible video stream at 1 Mbps and record the average number of frames encoded per second.
Our second test case is 1200 4K YUV 4:2:0 frames getting encoded into a 4Kp60 HEVC Main10-profile video stream at 35 Mbps. The encoding FPS is recorded.
TDP limitations prevent the Bean Canyon NUC from performing better than the 45W / 65W TDP-equipped systems in the x265 benchmark passes.
7-Zip
7-Zip is a very effective and efficient compression program, often beating out OpenCL accelerated commercial programs in benchmarks even while using just the CPU power. 7-Zip has a benchmarking program that provides tons of details regarding the underlying CPU's efficiency. In this subsection, we are interested in the compression and decompression rates when utilizing all the available threads for the LZMA algorithm.
The raw clock rates and core counts pull the Core i7-8700 and the Core i7-8809G ahead of the Core i7-8559U in the 7-Zip benchmarks.
Cryptography Benchmarks
Cryptography has become an indispensable part of our interaction with computing systems. Almost all modern systems have some sort of hardware-acceleration for making cryptographic operations faster and more power efficient. In this sub-section, we look at two different real-world applications that may make use of this acceleration.
BitLocker is a Windows features that encrypts entire disk volumes. While drives that offer encryption capabilities are dealt with using that feature, most legacy systems and external drives have to use the host system implementation. Windows has no direct benchmark for BitLocker. However, we cooked up a BitLocker operation sequence to determine the adeptness of the system at handling BitLocker operations. We start off with a 2.5GB RAM drive in which a 2GB VHD (virtual hard disk) is created. This VHD is then mounted, and BitLocker is enabled on the volume. Once the BitLocker encryption process gets done, BitLocker is disabled. This triggers a decryption process. The times taken to complete the encryption and decryption are recorded. This process is repeated 25 times, and the average of the last 20 iterations is graphed below.
In addition to the clock rate, the performance in this benchmark is also influenced by the DRAM speed. Thanks to the DDR4-3000 SODIMMs, the Bean Canyon NUC manages to get into the top half of the numbers set.
Creation of secure archives is best done through the use of AES-256 as the encryption method while password protecting ZIP files. We re-use the benchmark mode of 7-Zip to determine the AES256-CBC encryption and decryption rates using pure software as well as AES-NI. Note that the 7-Zip benchmark uses a 48KB buffer for this purpose.
Removing the DRAM out of the equation results in a slight re-ordering of the results. However, the Bean Canyon NUC still manages to be in the top half.
Yet another cryptography application is secure network communication. OpenSSL can take advantage of the acceleration provided by the host system to make operations faster. It also has a benchmark mode that can use varying buffer sizes. We recorded the processing rate for a 8KB buffer using the hardware-accelerated AES256-CBC-HAC-SHA1 feature.
The Bean Canyon NUC turns out to be the best performer in this benchmark.
Agisoft Photoscan
Agisoft PhotoScan is a commercial program that converts 2D images into 3D point maps, meshes and textures. The program designers sent us a command line version in order to evaluate the efficiency of various systems that go under our review scanner. The command line version has two benchmark modes, one using the CPU and the other using both the CPU and GPU (via OpenCL). We present the results from our evaluation using the CPU mode only. The benchmark (v1.3) takes 84 photographs and does four stages of computation:
- Stage 1: Align Photographs (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 2: Build Point Cloud (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 3: Build Mesh
- Stage 4: Build Textures
We record the time taken for each stage. Since various elements of the software are single threaded, and others multithreaded, it is interesting to record the effects of CPU generations, speeds, number of cores, and DRAM parameters using this software.
The Bean Canyon NUC performs admirably, beaten out only by CPUs with higher core counts and/or clock speeds.
Dolphin Emulator
Wrapping up our application benchmark numbers is the new Dolphin Emulator (v5) benchmark mode results. This is again a test of the CPU capabilities, and the Bean Canyon NUC comes in just behind the ASRock DeskMini Z370 (equipped with a hexa-core Core i7-8700).
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cacnoff - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
These are platform PCIe lanes that come off the OPI (on package interface) as there are no discrete pch options for U series cpus.Check the direct processor page here.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/p...
"PCI Express (PCIe) Configurations describe the available PCIe lane configurations that can be used to link the PCH PCIe lanes to PCIe devices."
DenvR - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
I'm pretty sure all 14nm U-series processors feature at least 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes, some even more (the i5-7200U has got 12 of those and the i7-8559U 16. Please correct me if I'm wrong.vortexmak - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
Did Intel drop the IR receiver from the NUC?mikato - Thursday, April 4, 2019 - link
I wondered this also. The board layout diagram has a "CIR Receiver" so maybe that's it. But I'm really surprised there is no mention in the system specs table next to I/O or in any of the HTPC pages of the article. Wasn't it one of the good selling points of these Intel boxes?CSMR - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
Shame that this is lacking a full displayport output, instead making it an old DP1.2 share a thunderbolt output. Displayport is more important than hdmi for a machine that is overkill for HTPC use. i7s will be much more often connected to monitors than to TVs.mischlep - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
For the Intel NUC8i7BEH (Bean Canyon), in the Comparative PC Configurations, does the listed price "$963 (as configured)" include an OS or not? The other selections (other than the NUC7i7BNH) explicitly said "as configured, No OS". You specifically marked it as "as configured, no OS" in the specifications on the first page.PeachNCream - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
The price is a bit high, but I'm guessing some of that is due to the Iris GPU which is a thing I'd love to see appear in a wider variety of systems. Iris is a good idea from a power consumption and cooling simplification standpoint when compared to most dGPU offerings on the lower end of the scale.QChronoD - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
Still only HDMI 2.0 and DP1.2 on these? I guess I can only hope that next version will have finally been updated to support 4k120 w/ VRR.abufrejoval - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
This CPU IMHO is one of the best designs Intel has and I’ve been itching to buy one of these for quite some time, albeit always in a slightly different form factor.For starters just enter i7-8559U into your Google search bar and hit “shopping”. You’ll notice, there are exactly two offerings: The NUC for around €500 and the MacBooks between €2000 and €3500. Perhaps the latter costs extra, because it includes one Terabyte of SSD, €120 these days in a market with competition. It certainly has just the same CPU/GPU as the €2000 model.
I own the Skylake predecessor, also designed for Apple, an i5-6267U but in a cheap Windows notebook, which has an Iris 550 iGPU with close to identical graphics performance, but only half the number of cores that top out at 3.3 GHz, but doesn’t drop below 2.9 GHz even if abused by Prime95.
It’s a sweet machine, giving nicely balanced CPU and graphics power and most importantly, it had zero price premium at the time, for twice the graphics punch of ordinary 520 or 530 iGPUs. It also performs very much identical to a 512 graphics core Kaveri A10-7850K in *every regard*, CPU INT and FP, GPU, OpenCL, only that the Kaveri uses 95 Watts not 28. It was quite simply the better APU and stopped me buying AMDs since.
It also has such great Linux compatibility CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu and Android-x86, none of the grief Nvidia and AMD give you: I know how to manage that with all those V100, GTX and RTX I operate, but I also appreciate not having to.
Alas, you cannot buy this newer CPU inside a notebook other than at crazy Apple prices. And incidentally, you cannot buy it as a Mini-ITX either: You’re stuck with NUC or nothing… which is sort of ok, now that you stuff terabytes of NVMe at affordable prices inside.
This chip must be quite a bit more expensive to make, twice the GPU silicon real-estate, eDRAM, packaging etc., but Intel doesn’t charge extra for GPU, no matter what type, just for peak clock speed.
But it seems they also simply won’t sell the chip, not for the official price or any other, unless you’re Apple or buy a NUC. I still don’t know how Medion managed to grab sufficient number of them to produce a €600 laptop, but I knew enough to grab one, enjoyed it ever since and I am writing on it just now.
So if I cannot have another as a notebook, I’d love to use it as a mini-server: That’s another use case where the fantastic power efficiency at low loads or idle, combined with its pretty awesome sprint power is well appreciated. But I’d really like it to have ECC memory then and a slightly bigger fan for quiet operation even under load, because it will run “forever” and use consistency critical stuff, including ZFS for Linux.
But because that makes it the nicer Xeon-D for many, Intel will cut that fuse…
For Intel this NUC must be one of the lowest profit items in their inventory, which translates to one of the best value propositions if you can live with the limitations. In theory you should be able to buy the board without the case and there is at least one company out there that sells fan-less cases to fit the guts of this NUC.
Even if that case costs a €200 premium, you can still buy two fully loaded passive NUCs with 32GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD before you reach Apple entry territory.
gglaw - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
"With Thunderbolt 3 having matured, and the availability of various eGFX enclosures, the absence of a discrete GPU in the NUC8i7BEH will hardly be felt."completely disagree. Relying on huge, bulky, and costly external implementations is a horrible idea compared to paying a small premium and getting better GPU inside the NUC. Who in the world would buy a mini PC knowing they're going to frequently need to plug it into a huge box multiple times the size of the NUC and driving the total cost to a whole new bracket? There's a reason why the eGFX market is a tiny, niche market.
These are not priced as budget PC solutions, so the small price bump to get better graphics inside the box is completely worth it for users who want that type of performance. Or for others who will use it strictly for media and productivity the can stick with Intel Graphics. Almost no one should buy the base Intel Graphics with the idea of adding an eGFX solution later. They'd be better off selling the base one and buying a Ryzen or Vega M-Intel solution.