Intel’s Hades Canyon NUC is a minute gaming powerhouse

Below the hood, which you could perchance perchance per chance bag admission to effortlessly by getting rid of the tip of the case, you’ve got received easy accessibility to the total interior ports. That involves home for two M.2 SSDs, two DDR4 RAM slots (supporting up to 32GB), and two SATA connections. Esteem every of Intel’s NUCs, or now not it’s a barebones box, so you’ll be in a position to must decide your non-public RAM, storage and OS to bag going. That’s at the very least one more $500 on top of the machine’s $999 price mark, but or now not it’s within the price vary of same mini-desktops.

One other ingredient price pointing out: the NUC’s energy adapter is comically immense. It’s nearly as heavy because the instrument itself. That is gleaming, given how mighty energy goes by this diminutive box, but it hinders portability vastly.

In vow

The Hades Canyon NUC didn’t feel vastly varied than the very finest model when it came to traditional productivity tasks. However the variation became once evening and day once I loaded up some games. Doom Three ran between 50 and 60 frames per second with High graphics settings in 1080p. Bumping the effective increased dipped the derive to spherical 40FPS, but that became once accumulated impressive. It moreover had no effort keeping up with a mercurial-paced sport like Overwatch, where I seen between 60 and 90FPS in 1080p with Extremely settings. When in contrast, I had to scuttle the very finest NUC at 720p with low-effective graphics to form Overwatch playable.

I became once moreover blown away by how successfully it handled Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a cinematic indie sport that if truth be told taxes the GPU. Even with very high settings, it ran between 30 and forty FPS, which is accumulated playable. Knocking that every person the style down to top of the vary graphics boosted performance to a smoother 50 to 60 FPS. Total, the Hades Canyon NUC proved to be a agreeable 1080p gaming machine.

And appropriate as Intel claimed, or now not it’s a solid VR rig. I had no effort hooking up the Oculus Rift’s sensors and headset, thanks to its many ports. And games like Superhot, Duck Season, and Predominant Sam VR ran flawlessly. There wasn’t any noticeable scuttle or slowdown, which I normally ogle with low-pause VR machines.

The Hades Canyon NUC is three times sooner than the Skull Canyon NUC in the 3DMark Skydiver benchmark, and I seen same ends up in the older 3DMark Eleven exams. It became once simplest slightly sooner when it came to productivity exams in PCMark 7 and Eight, which shows the jump between Intel’s sixth and eighth expertise CPUs is now not nearly as huge because the graphical jump.

On top of being a beast at gaming, the Hades Canyon NUC manages to care for every thing cool as successfully. The CPU and GPU hovered at a protected 55c as I became once gaming, reaching up to 70c for the interval of annoying sequences. That’s basically as a result of the unique closed-loop liquid cooler, which moreover helps to care for fan noise down. It makes the NUC a immense option for a home theater/PC gaming machine, but be conscious that it doesn’t toughen YouTube HDR or 4K Blu-ray playback. As Anandtech stories, the AMD GPU doesn’t toughen YouTube’s VP9 codec, and it doesn’t meet the criteria required for taking half in 4K Blu-ray securely.

Pricing and the competition