Gaming 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

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)
Futuremark 3DMark (2013)
Futuremark 3DMark (2013)
Futuremark 3DMark (2013)
Futuremark 3DMark (2013)
Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

GFXBench

GFXBench 3.0 Manhattan Offscreen 1080p
GFXBench 3.0 T-Rex Offscreen 1080p

Dota 2

Dota 2 Reborn - Enthusiast

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Shadow of Mordor - Enthusiast

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.

Gaming Benchmarks Networking and Storage Performance
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  • astromoose - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link

    How loud is it under load?
  • ganeshts - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link

    If you are gaming with the volume up, then it is a non-issue. On a comparative basis, it is much better than the ZBOX EK71080, but, not as good as the liquid cooled ZBOX E-series. I would say it is as loud as the Skull Canyon - but, it doesn't enter the noisy territory as much. Some hard numbers on the Skull Canyon can be found here : https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comments/7ga2q9/...
  • Crazyeyeskillah - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link

    This would be a nice 1 fit solution for an arcade emulator cabinet. No issues with lower resolution and could essentially run anything you throw at it!
  • Crazyeyeskillah - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link

    nevermind, the 1700$ price tag is laughable
  • Crunchy005 - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link

    "As Configured"...they put a 118GB optane drive + a 512GB SSD on top of 16GB RAM. Optane is already not necessary.

    So get the Kit $999
    DDR4 16GB SO-DIMM 2x8GB $167
    500GB SSD $125
    Windows OS $100(or less depending on how you get it)

    $1391 if you need to buy windows
    $1291 if you already have a windows license
  • 06GTOSC - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - link

    That's still a lot. Yes it's fairly capable. But for $1300-1400, you can build a much more capable desktop. Yes it'll be larger. But I think space is hardly the issue for most unless you're looking for a LAN machine.
  • xeal - Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - link

    You will change your opinion *drastically* if you ever decide to live in (or even visit) Japan.
  • TEAMSWITCHER - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link

    Reading the unwritten ... Not good for 4K gaming ... Got it.
  • ganeshts - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link

    Even Intel is marketing this as a 1080p gaming machine - guaranteeing 60fps for most titles at that resolution.
  • Cooe - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link

    I'm sorry, but what kind of lunatic expected Kaby Lake-G to be able to game at 4K??? Ridiculously stupid expectations are ridiculously stupid.

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