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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PeachNCream - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
Ganesh explained why the NUC was opened up in the article. Besides that, NUC systems are built to be user-accessible and are pretty simple to pull apart. It's like 4 screws to get the case open and pulling one ribbon cable off the motherboard to disconnect the mechanical drive. The barebones models are the same hardware and you have to crack the case to add storage or RAM or you do not have a complete computer.nico_mach - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
I don't actually disagree with his reasoning, but I definitely have mixed feelings as a review.I forgot about the Atom NUCs completely. There's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
watzupken - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
With the new AMD APU arriving this year, I wonder if this is dead in the water considering the higher cost of the NUC. 14nm+++ is not going to save Intel when facing off 7nm from AMD as shown in the current processor stack from both teams.timecop1818 - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
"7nm".Intel's "14nm+++++" (keep adding pluses, retards) is closer to 10nm than AMD's crap.
Fulljack - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
while fabrication nomenclature are now nowhere near it's actual marketed size, Intel's 14nm are still nowhere close with their own 10nm, and couldn't compete with TSMC's 7nmQasar - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
keep posting useless, anti amd, crap. keep showing the rest of us, and demonstrate to the world that you are a nitwit, then we will let you hang yourself, king oft trollsLord of the Bored - Thursday, March 5, 2020 - link
Isn't this copy/paste'd from one of your other shill threads? Come on, man. Intel isn't paying you to repost the same old bullshit, your fans demand new content!Korguz - Thursday, March 5, 2020 - link
timecop1818 cant post new content, cause it doesnt have any.xenol - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
The NUC product line is sort of dead in the water any way, I'd argue.YB1064 - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
It would be helpful to include a small table that of benchmarks vs CPU performance scaling. Perhaps this is hard to do, but as a naive simple example:Benchmark#1 - scales with threads/cores
Benchmark#2 - scales with clocks/IPC
This is most likely highly complicated, but if anybody can do it, it is you guys. Ian, care to take a stab?