Intel NUC10i7FNH Frost Canyon Review: Hexa-Core NUC Delivers a Mixed Bag
by Ganesh T S on March 2, 2020 9:00 AM ESTNetworking and Storage Performance
Networking and storage are two major aspects which influence our experience with any computing system. This section presents results from our evaluation of the storage aspect in the Intel NUC10i7FNH (Frost Canyon). One option would be repetition of our strenuous SSD review tests on the drive(s) in the PC. Fortunately, to avoid that overkill, PCMark 8 and PCMark 10 have storage benches where certain common workloads such as loading games and document processing are replayed on the target drive. Results are presented in two forms, one being a benchmark number and the other, a bandwidth figure.
We first ran the PCMark 8 storage bench on selected PCs and the results are presented below.
The PCIe 3.0 x2 SSD doesn't perform up to the mark when compared to the PCIe 3.0 x4 SSDs used in the other systems. However, it is still better than the SATA SSDs used in other systems. The Frost Canyon NUC is the first one in our SFF PC set to be subject to the PCMark 10 Storage Bench, and as such, we do not have any other systems to compare its average access time of 204 us and storage bandwidth of 139.58 MBps against.
On the networking side, we are yet to set up our 802.11 ax / Wi-Fi 6 testbed for small form-factor PCs, and hence, there are no bandwidth numbers to report yet. However, it must be noted that the Frost Canyon NUC is the first NUC to come with 802.11ax / Wi-Fi 6 support, and its theoretical maximum bandwidth of 2400 Mbps betters the 1733 Mbps offered by the Wireless-AC 9560 in the Bean Canyon NUC. The AX 201 WLAN component uses the CNVi capability in the Comet Lake-U SiP with only the radio being an external chip. The AX 201 has a 2x2 simultaneous dual-operation in 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands and also comes with support for 160 MHz-wide channels.
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TheinsanegamerN - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
Bleh UHD graphics. Terrible. The previous NUCs had Iris plus GPUs. AMD APU NUCs would dominate these things.drexnx - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
looks like the 2 year old 2400G already does, a 4800U would embarrass thistimecop1818 - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
Yeh, if only AMD had stable/working graphics. Oh, wait...kaidenshi - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
If only you had something else to troll about. How about some citations to back up your claims? Going on a year with my 2400G APU based system with zero graphics issues and far outperforming any Intel iGPU. There's a reason Intel chose AMD graphics for its Hades Canyon NUC.MenhirMike - Wednesday, March 4, 2020 - link
I think he might mean the (very real) issues that the RX 5x00 drivers have, like stuttering and random driver crashes. This has been much improved in later drivers, my 5700 XT is running perfectly fine now, but there were definitive issues. That said, those are Navi cards while integrated GPUs (which are applicable here) are using Vega. And initially, there was an issue with at least mobile APUs where AMD didn't offer their own drivers - I got a Ryzen 5 2500U laptop, and for the first year, I had to deal with way outdated drivers from Dell. But AMD finally came around and is now offering first-party drivers.So: There were definitive issues, there might still be issues, but it seems that all the big ones are resolved.
HStewart - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
You got to take in account of the market of this machine, most people do not need high end graphics for games and such. This is also likely use for engineering stuff where graphics is not actually used too much - like a monitor system, or back office systems for services and possibly reports.29a - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
That's still no excuse for Intel's horrible iGPUs.Qasar - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
nope.. but hstewart, will keep making excuses for them. sorry hstewart, amds new apus would be for this market, and would probably out perform this by quite a bit. face it, your beloved intel, has lost this round.The_Assimilator - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
I strongly doubt that even AMD's latest APUs can idle with a 4K display at under 5W. That power-sipping performance is critical to the market segment these devices are aimed at.evernessince - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
Well yes if you are comparing desktop APUs vs the mobile chip in this system. If you compare apples to apples though, AMD certainly does have chips capable of idling that low even on the high end: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T495...And that's with last generation Zen+, not Zen 2.