Intel Bean Canyon NUC Review: 8th Gen CPU With Iris Plus Graphics

Like its small form factor predecessors, the NUC8i7BEH feature Intel’s Visual BIOS, which has an essentially identical design and layout to all of the company’s previous-gen NUCs from the last couple of years.



The Visual BIOS can be navigated using either a mouse or keyboard (or touch if you’ve got a compatible display) and is home to array of information about the processor, memory configuration, and hardware health data, as well as the time/date and other basics.

All of the integrated peripherals can be enabled / disabled in the Visual BIOS and the fan curve can be tweaked should you want to fine-tune temperatures and acoustics. There are a handful of options for configuring the on-board graphics and storage controllers too, but there are no menus related to overclocking. Although this is a relatively high-end NUC, it is not an enthusiast offering – like Hades Canyon – and is not unlocked.


Once you’ve got everything buttoned up and an OS installed, here is how the processor and graphics engine are identified. Above are CPU-Z and GPU-Z details for the Core i7-8559U processor and Iris Plus 655 graphics. As you can see, the Core i7-8559U is listed as a 4 core / 8 thread processor, with a base clock of 2.7GHz. It has 256K of total L1 cache (128K L1 data cache, and 128K L1 instruction cache), 256K of L2, and 8MB of shared L3 -- and notice that 128MB L4; that's the eDRAM associated with the GPU. The Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655 graphics engine features 48 EUs, with 8 ROPs and 16 texture units. The base clock is 300MHz, but it’ll boost up to 1200MHz. The sensor data at the right was recorded while gaming; you’ll note the GPU temp spiked up to 90’C, which his somewhat high, but the system behaved well and never gets excessively loud.