The Intel NUC8i7HVK (Hades Canyon) Review: Kaby Lake-G Benchmarked
by Ganesh T S on March 29, 2018 1:00 PM ESTGaming 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
GFXBench
Dota 2
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
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.
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Hifihedgehog - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
“The mass market still uses Kodi and VLC.”I respectfully disagree. Many home theater users I know use Kodi in combination with MPC-HC or MPC-BE, due to MadVR highly superior scaling abilities. Check the Kodi forums. This is a very popular configuration:
forum (dot) kodi (dot) tv/showthread.php?tid=209596
Check out this thread. Many reference it. Perhaps you should as welll in going forward:
forum (dot) doom9 (dot) org/showthread.php?t=171787
I have tried VLC 3.0 and CPU usage and image quality are still inferior to MPC-HC and MPC-BE. For these reasons, it is still not worth recommending.
Hifihedgehog - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
PS:hardforum (dot) com/threads/vlc-3-0-released-with-hdr-chromecast-support.1954247/#post-1043479175
Trixanity - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
Try the latest 3.0.2 nightly. It should work there unless Hades have special drivers.mode_13h - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
Rabid angry people like you are funny, do you really think anyone is going to read or care about your comment? Go away LOLcfenton - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
The claim was about codec support. Just by looking at the DXVA charts it's pretty clear the Intel IGP has better codec support. Hardware decode is pretty important for most people looking for a box to sit near their TV.Of course, you may be right that the Ryzen 5 is a better solution overall if you're willing to sacrifice UHD Blu-ray and some hardware decode ability.
eva02langley - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
Who the hell is using Blu-Ray anymore?mooninite - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
People use Blu-Ray when they want to view the best possible video AND audio quality on something other than their laptop with a 1280x768 17" screen that's on shared wi-fi.PeachNCream - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
Do you mean 1366x768? 1280x800 used to be pretty popular when screens went to 16:10.cfenton - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
Anyone who cares about image and audio quality, which is precisely the market for an HTPC.bill44 - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
As far as I know, no Intel NUC with HDMI 2.x can deal with frame packed 3D ISO.As the Hades Canyon uses AMD GPU's HDMI 2.x output, it may be able to. Can someone test this?