Intel Hades Canyon NUC8i7HVK Review: Pint-Sized Gaming Powerhouse


Intel NUC NUC8i7HVK Hades Canyon: Cinebench, POV-Ray, Fluid Dynamics

Cinebench R15 is a combination CPU and OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Cinebench
3D Rendering Benchmark

cinea

The NUC8i7HVK finished right about in the middle of the pack in the multi-threaded Cinebench test, just behind the Core i5-8400. Its single-threaded performance, however, was among the best and trailed only two of the other reference systems.
POV-Ray Performance
Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

pova 

The NUC8i7HVK fared slightly better in the POV-Ray benchmark, but overall the story isn't much different than what we saw with Cinebench -- multi-threaded performance is relatively good, but single-threaded performance is particularly strong.

STARS Euler3d
Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache and memory bandwidth and latency affect the score as well...

starsa

The NUC8i7HVK put up a very good number in the STARS Euler3D test, besting the Core i7-7700K and trailing only the full-power 8th Gen Core desktop processors and top-end Ryzen 7 parts.

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