Intel NUC10i7FNH Frost Canyon Review: Hexa-Core NUC Delivers a Mixed Bag
by Ganesh T S on March 2, 2020 9:00 AM ESTHTPC Credentials - YouTube and Netflix Streaming
The move to 4K, and the need to evaluate HDR support have made us choose Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video as our test sample for YouTube playback. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.
Similar to the last few NUC generations, the Frost Canyon NUC also has no trouble in hardware-accelerated playback of the VP9 Profile 2 video. Thankfully, AV1 (which is not hardware-accelerated yet) streams are not being delivered yet to the PC platform.
The 'new' GPU is not yet recognized by tools such as GPU-Z, and the media engine loading is not being correctly tracked by the various tools we usually use. Hence, we have only GPU power and at-wall power being reocrded for the media playback tests. The numbers for YouTube video playback are graphed below.
YouTube playback results in the GPU consuming around 9W of power on an average, with the at-wall consumption being around 35W.
The Netflix 4K HDR capability works with native Windows Store app as well as the Microsoft Edge browser. We used the Windows Store app to evaluate the playback of Season 4 Episode 4 of the Netflix Test Patterns title. The OS screenshot facilities obviously can't capture the video being played back. However, the debug OSD (reachable by Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D) can be recorded.
The (hevc,hdr,prk) entry corresponding to the Video Track in the debug OSD, along with the A/V bitrate details (192 kbps / 16 Mbps) indicate that the HDR stream is indeed being played back. Similar to the YouTube streaming case, a few metrics were recorded for the first three minutes of the playback of the title. The numbers are graphed below.
Similar to the YouTube playback case, the GPU and at-wall power consumption are slightly below 10W and around 33W respectively for the Netflix playback case.
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TMCHouse - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
Hmm, I was expecting a real review with benchmarks, not just a system / specifications description. As a note, the people commenting on the graphics are spot on, I purchased one of these systems and the graphics performance is sub par to a NUC8I5BEH system. I've based this upon running multiple benchmarks and the frame rates are better on the older system with the Iris graphics. Unless you require loads of processor cores, you are better off with the older systems.GreenReaper - Monday, March 9, 2020 - link
I think perhaps you missed the other pages of the article? There are links and a combo box dropdown at the bottom, above the comments.not_anton - Saturday, March 7, 2020 - link
$600 barebone and they give you a huge ugly generic power brick to save like $10?Intel should but one of those Apple NUC minis to see how it should be done.
crashtech - Sunday, March 8, 2020 - link
I can't believe they would regress in GPU! I question the value of the extra cores in such a device instead of improved graphics.fishjie - Monday, November 29, 2021 - link
Ok I'm glad I read this before buying. I own a NUC 6 skull canyon with i7 6770 and was shocked to see some of the benchmarks beat the new NUC 10. granted my use case is mostly watching netflix on my tv but i would want to game occasionally on it. going to explore some other options. Maybe the NUC 8 i guess. The explanation in the concluding remarks was helpful:"However, while the NUC8 was an upgrade over NUC7 in every respect, the Frost Canyon NUC10 slips up a little. Intel's 10th generation U-series processors come in two different versions – the 10nm Ice Lake and the 14nm Comet Lake. Intel's high-end Iris Graphics is available only on Ice Lake, and unfortunately, the Frost Canyon is based on Comet Lake. This means that, for a variety of graphics intensive workloads, the NUC10 actually performs worse than the Iris Plus graphics-equipped NUC8."