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
BAPCo SYSmark 2018
The Intel NUC8i7BEH (Bean Canyon) was evaluated using our Fall 2018 test suite for small-form factor PCs. In the first section, we will be looking at SYSmark 2018.
BAPCo's SYSmark 2018 is an application-based benchmark that uses real-world applications to replay usage patterns of business users in the areas of productivity, creativity, and responsiveness. The 'Productivity Scenario' covers office-centric activities including word processing, spreadsheet usage, financial analysis, software development, application installation, file compression, and e-mail management. The 'Creativity Scenario' represents media-centric activities such as digital photo processing, AI and ML for face recognition in photos and videos for the purpose of content creation, etc. The 'Responsiveness Scenario' evaluates the ability of the system to react in a quick manner to user inputs in areas such as application and file launches, web browsing, and multi-tasking.
Scores are meant to be compared against a reference desktop (the SYSmark 2018 calibration system, a Dell Optiplex 5050 tower with a Core i3-7100 and 4GB of DDR4-2133 memory to go with a 128GB M.2 SATA III SSD). The calibration system scores 1000 in each of the scenarios. A score of, say, 2000, would imply that the system under test is twice as fast as the reference system.
SYSmark 2018 also adds energy measurement to the mix. A high score in the SYSmark benchmarks might be nice to have, but, potential customers also need to determine the balance between power consumption and the efficiency of the system. For example, in the average office scenario, it might not be worth purchasing a noisy and power-hungry PC just because it ends up with a 2000 score in the SYSmark 2014 SE benchmarks. In order to provide a balanced perspective, SYSmark 2018 also allows vendors and decision makers to track the energy consumption during each workload. In the graphs below, we find the total energy consumed by the PC under test for a single iteration of each SYSmark 2018 workload. For reference, the calibration system consumes 5.36 Wh for productivity, 7.71 Wh for creativity, 5.61 Wh for responsiveness, and 18.68 Wh overall.
Bean Canyon turns out to be extremely energy efficient compared to almost all of the other PCs that are being compared against it. It loses the performance crown to the hexa-core Core i7-8700-equipped DeskMini Z370 GTX 1060. This is on expected lines, since the Core i7-8700 has a much higher TDP budget compared to the Core i7-8559U. The mini-STX form factor also enables the DeskMini to accommodate a better thermal solution compared to the one in the Intel NUC8i7BEH.
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jeremyshaw - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
Yeah, I made the mistake of going for an IGP + eGPU setup this time around (X1 Carbon + Lenovo GTX1050 dock). Nevermind the TB3 power issues that Lenovo finally fixed (silently), or GPU driver issues, just the need to lug around another box and its own power brick negates any weight savings over a heavier laptop with even a weak dGPU.This is a mistake I will never, ever make again. The eGPU idea really only works for Mac users, who are "forced" to buy from a range of 4 laptops (5, if you count three year old laptops being sold at full price), of which only one has a dGPU. Another has a passable IGP, that is still weaker than the worse of the current dGPUs (unless if one counts the Lenovo E480's severely throttled RX540). If you are a mac user and intend on staying one, choices are very limited, making eGPUs a necessity for those wanting more power. For anyone else out there, such sacrifices are not necessary.
Death666Angel - Thursday, April 4, 2019 - link
Honestly, the eGPU thing only makes sense to me in one scenario: with a laptop that has an anemic GPU inside (low end AMD/Intel or just integrated) that has great battery life on the go but the owner wants to play some games at home on a larger monitor with good image quality and not have the hassle to maintain two independant systems. So the eGPU enclosure stays in one place, the laptop gets lugged around, is light, long lasting and productive on the go and when you get home, one cable to make it into a decent gaming PC.eGPU on already stationary desktops is just weird (get a slightly bigger case and stick a GPU inside that, more options, probably cheaper as well) and people who lug around the eGPU enclosure and their laptop are also kinda missing the point. If you do that, why not just get a 1060 or 1080 laptop and be done with it? The prices of the whole GPU+enclosure should not be much cheaper than the built in versions and the performance delta is probably negligible compared to the increased ease of use.
flyingpants265 - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
Not sure if I understand these things. ITX is already like 7x7 inches, and supports up to 9900k. Especially with undervolted chips you're looking at under 150 watts.CaedenV - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
I just hope they all come with TPM modules now. The few physical machines we have are Intel NUCs, and in the first batch we bought they didn't have them and I was speechless... I mean, even dirt cheap $300 laptops come with TPMs these days!?! how could a $4-500 machine NOT have it?Then when ordering the next round of devices we found that most of the units available through our vendors did not have them; had to do a special order! This should be a standard feature, not something we have to search out any longer!
Jorgp2 - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
Pretty sure Laptops come with an embedded TPM, which is less secure than a discrete one.Death666Angel - Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - link
"Season 4 Episode 4 of the Netflix Test Patterns title" That's definitely something I had no clue about. :Dimaheadcase - Thursday, April 4, 2019 - link
$963 (as configured, no OS)ok right..
Death666Angel - Thursday, April 4, 2019 - link
That's with a 1TB NVME SSD and 32GB RAM. Look at the base model and configure your own options and see how much it costs then (still not cheap, probably, but not as bad). And compare it to a laptop of similar specs (28W quad core with thunderbolt and eDRAM).mikato - Thursday, April 4, 2019 - link
Yeah it said $503 barebones (need to add memory and storage). I guess you must have to really like that CPU and the case to make that competitive. When I say that, I mean it might be losing the HTPC crowd.mikato - Thursday, April 4, 2019 - link
Actually it's not as bad as I guessed. Here is an alternative-$150 2400G
$120 Mini ITX mobo
$131 In Win Chopin
$401 total. Both would probably be plenty of power for most anyone's HTPC. The 2400G is more power/heat.