Intel Hades Canyon NUC8i7HVK Review: Pint-Sized Gaming Powerhouse

For our next series of tests with the NUC8i7HVK, we moved on to some game-related metrics with 3DMark, specifically the physics benchmark that's part of the Fire Strike test, along with a couple of actual games. For the 3DMark Physics test, we simply create a custom 3DMark run consisting solely of the physics test, which is CPU dependent, and report the results...

Gaming: 3DMark Physics Taking the GPU out of the Equation

The NUC8i7HVK finished right on top of the Core i5-8400, but behind the Core i7-7700K. What's more notable is that the Core i7-8809G in the machine absolutely smokes most of the mainstream desktop processors represented here.

Gaming / Graphics Tests Putting The GPU To The Test

We also ran some game and graphics tests on the NUC8i7HVK's Radeon RX Vega M GH using 3DMark, VRMark, Cinebench, Tomb Raider, and Middle Earth - Shadow Of War to see what it could do. We used 3DMark Fire Strike, VRMark, and Cinebench's OpenGL test with their default presets, Shadow Of War was run at 1080P with the medium quality graphics setting, and Rise Of The Tomb Raider was run at its Very High setting at the same resolution.

According to 3DMark, the Radeon RX Vega M GH absolutely crushes all of the other on-processor graphics solutions we have tested. There is no contest here.

Cinebench's OpenGL benchmark tells the same story, with the Radeon RX Vega M GH finishing well out in front of the other systems we tested.


In Middle Earth: Shadow Of War, we saw more of the same. The Radeon RX Vega M GH is significantly faster and more powerful than any integrated graphics solution. We should probably see how it fares versus and array of discrete GPUs, so here you go...



In the Rise Of The Tomb Raider, the Radeon RX Vega M GH on the Core i7-8809G finishes the benchmark right in between the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and Radeon RX 470 and manages an average overall framerate above the 50FPS mark. That's not bad at all considering we tested the game with a demanding Very High DX12 graphics preset.

We don't have much reference data with VRMark just yet, but since Intel claims the NUC8i7HVK is VR-Ready, we figured a VR-related benchmark wouldn't be a bad idea. Here, the Radeon RX Vega M GH is about half as fast as the higher-end, discrete Vega GPUs, though the benchmark does report that the GPU is capable of a good VR experience.