Intel NUC8i7HVK (Hades Canyon) Gaming Performance - A Second Look
by Ganesh T S on May 14, 2018 8:01 AM ESTFuturemark 3DMark
Futuremark's 3DMark comes with a diverse set of workloads that target different Direct3D feature levels. Correspondingly, the rendering resolutions are also different. In this section, we take a look at the performance of the Intel NUC8i7HVK (Hades Canyon) on a comparative basis across the different workloads.
3DMark Ice Storm
This workload has three levels of varying complexity - the vanilla Ice Storm, Ice Storm Unlimited, and Ice Storm Extreme. It is a cross-platform benchmark (which means that the scores can be compared across different tablets and smartphones as well). All three use DirectX 11 (feature level 9) / OpenGL ES 2.0. While the Extreme renders at 1920 x 1080, the other two render at 1280 x 720. The graphs below present the various Ice Storm worloads' numbers for different systems that we have evaluated.
Futuremark 3DMark - Ice Storm Workloads | |||
The trend we see here - the Hades Canyon NUC almost catching up with the GTX 1060-equipped ASRock DeskMini Z370, but, not quite able to surpass it consistently - is something that we will see throughout the rest of this article.
3DMark Cloud Gate
The Cloud Gate workload is meant for notebooks and typical home PCs, and uses DirectX 11 (feature level 10) to render frames at 1280 x 720. The graph below presents the overall score for the workload across all the systems that are being compared. In this workload, the CPU power also comes into play, allowing Hades Canyon to overtage the ZBOX MAGNUS EK71080. However, the rest of the systems come with much more powerful CPUs, allowing them to leapfrog the Hades Canyon NUC easily.
3DMark Sky Diver
The Sky Diver workload is meant for gaming notebooks and mid-range PCs, and uses DirectX 11 (feature level 11) to render frames at 1920 x 1080. The graph below presents the overall score for the workload across all the systems that are being compared.
3DMark Fire Strike Extreme
The Fire Strike benchmark has three workloads. The base version is meant for high-performance gaming PCs. Similar to Sky Diver, it uses DirectX 11 (feature level 11) to render frames at 1920 x 1080. The Ultra version targets 4K gaming system, and renders at 3840 x 2160. However, we only deal with the Extreme version in our benchmarking - It renders at 2560 x 1440, and targets multi-GPU systems and overclocked PCs. The graph below presents the overall score for the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark across all the systems that are being compared.
3DMark Time Spy
The Time Spy workload has two levels with different complexities. Both use DirectX 12 (feature level 11). However, the plain version targets high-performance gaming PCs with a 2560 x 1440 render resolution, while the Extreme version renders at 3840 x 2160 resolution. The graphs below present both numbers for all the systems that are being compared in this review.
Futuremark 3DMark - Time Spy Workloads | |||
In this DirectX 12 benchmark, we see the expected ordering on the basis of the GPU capabilities - the RX Vega M GH comes slightly behind the GTX 1060, but, is handily surpassed by the systems with the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080.
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eva02langley - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Well, I think AMD might have wanted to keep their Vega trump card for their own APUs, which I believe is the right thing to do from business standpoint.Anyway, another Intel attempt that comes short of anything except just a proof of concept.
sing_electric - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
If that's the case, then we haven't seen AMD's solution here.Intel's "G" chips with Vega graphics have HBM2 memory on-package, while AMD's APUs just use system memory. That certainly has cost (and power) advantages, but it also means the APUs don't perform nearly this well, even under ideal circumstances. (On top of that, it looks like a lot of OEMs are using single-channel DDR, and sometimes not even at a high frequency, on their Ryzen APU systems, which
sing_electric - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
*REALLY kills performance.only1jv - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Will there be a review of the DeskMini GTX 1080? I know this article mentions the GTX1060 model but why not the GTX1080?Now I'm really curious to know how the ASRock GTX1080 would stack up against the Zotac ZBOX EN1080K
darkos - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
why are there no flight simulation tests included? eg: prepar3d or fsx or x-plane ?s3cur3 - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
If an X-Plane benchmark is something the Anandtech editorial team would be interested in, you can contact me via the email in my profile. The numbers might be more useful after our transition to Vulkan, though.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Our website accounts don't have profiles - can you ping ian@anandtech.com. I'd like to see what we can do.bernstein - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
interesting product! finally a performance competitive SoC gaming (or 3d work) rig from intel!! just imagine the possibilities if they used coffee lake + vega 64!however the a price/performance ratio on gpu limited tasks :
- compared to a Shuttle XPC Gaming Cube is abysmal
- compared to a Skull Canyon NUC is phenomenal
so while expensive, it's certainly less overpriced than previous intel gaming NUC offerings...
kmmatney - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Looks like similar performance to a GTX 1050? or 1050 Ti? Would have been nice to include one of those cards.Yojimbo - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
The difference between the 1050 Ti and the 1060 is quite large. This Intel chip with AMD graphics has a performance between them, but closer to the 1060 than a 1050 Ti, on average. Of course one would have to look closely at one's use case to decide whether it will run closer to a 1060 or to a 1050 Ti.