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

Name: Intel NUC8i7BEH1
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, February 15, 2019, 12:20 PM EDT

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

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The NUC8i7BEH1 performed right about on par with the Hades Canyon NUC, but a couple of notches behind the desktop-class Core i5-8400.

Gaming: 3DMark Physics

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

For our next series of tests with the NUC8i7BEH1, 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...

The NUC8i7BEH1 once again lands just behind the Core i5-8400, and it trails a Ryzen 5 1500X, but it outpaces the 7th Gen Core i5-7600 and Ryzen 5 2400G desktop APU.

Gaming / Graphics Tests

Putting The GPU To The Test

We also ran some game and graphics tests on the NUC8i7BEH1's Iris Plus 655 using 3DMark, VRMark, Cinebench, 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, and Shadow Of War was run at 1080P with the medium quality graphics setting.

According to 3DMark, the Iris Plus 655 lands just behind AMD's integrated Vega 8 GPU, that is a part of current-gen Ryzen 5 APUs, but ahead of previous-gen Intel integrated graphics solutions.

Cinebench's OpenGL benchmark ran well on the Iris Plus 655, and trailed only the much more powerful Vega M GH that's integrated into the gaming-centric Hades Canyon NUC.

In Middle Earth: Shadow Of War, the NUC8i7BEH1's Iris Plus 655 was significantly faster than Intel's UHD 630 graphics, but couldn't quite catch Vega 8...

We did NOT expect the Iris Plus 655 to perform particularly well in VRMark -- this is not a machine targeted at gamers or VR -- but wanted to see how it fared against the Hades Canyon NUC nonetheless. As you can see, the discrete graphics solution is far more powerful.

Tags: Intel, SFF, mini-PC, NUC, (NASDAQ:INTC), bean canyon

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com