has anyone else had enough of the
full-size desktop game Intel released their skull canyon nook a tiny gaming
bare-bones all the way back in 2016 it had no dedicated graphics but it still
ignited an arms race prompting competitors like ZOTAC and MSI to try to
pack as much horsepower as possible into
the smallest packages possible and Intel
finally has a follow-up the hades canyon
nook or nu c8 i7 h VK
AVR and triple-a game capable pc boasting an 8th
gen Core i7 quad-core CPU and AMD Radeon
Vega graphics in a package about the
same size as a Harry Potter novel
you know what else is novel origin PC
they offer beautiful custom desktops high performance laptops and life time
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before we get to the new one here's a skull canyon from 2016 the formula that
Intel followed for the design of this nook was actually great solid CPU lots
of i/o including Thunderbolt free and it was easy to upgrade it was basically
perfect for a compact computer except
for the lack of dedicated graphics I mean this pretty much limited it to easy
to run games like overwatch and
minecraft which is a pretty tough pill
to swallow for anyone paying six hundred and fifty dollars which is a
considerable premium over a desktop system for a bare-bones with no RAM or
storage but in the last two years a lot of
things have happened including evidently hell freezing over because AMD and Intel
came together at last to create this
which actually now that I think about it is that where the Hades the name came
from anywho this thing is pretty o P it's 999
dollars for the top tier bare-bones kit
which is pricey but it includes a hyper
threaded quad core Core i7 88 o 9g and
Vega mgh graphics or it's $7.99 for the
step-down one that gives up overclocking support and point 1 gigahertz of CPU
turbo and drops from 24 to 20 compute
units on the GPU first thing I notice
about it is it's really really heavy for how small it is and
that while it is still small it is not
nearly as compact as the old ones so it
better bring some really impressive performance to the table all panels say
for the top are completely covered in hexagonal perforations to allow as much
air as possible to be fed into the dual bottom mounted fans as for IO it's
impressive starting with USB we get a total of seven including a Type C and a
quick charger on the front and it can connect up to six displays including the
access to HDMI for a VR headset overall
it's got more i/o than many desktops including not one but two Thunderbolt 3
ports cracking it open we get a look at
the internals now Oh check that out so you can see through it
that's where the RGB lighting comes through for the skull on the top and
then removing this additional screw right here we can lift up this plate to
get a look at our options for memory and
storage so we've got two sodium slots
with support for up to 32 gigs of DDR4
RAM and dual full-length oops and dual
full-length 80 millimeter m dot 2 slots
with support for both AHCI and NVMe
drives as well as raid 0 and raid 1 so
we're gonna be using an Intel octane 800
p for our boot drive and then a regular NVMe SSD for our storage drive because
like Yolo right
anyway while we're in here we also get a
look at the backside of the CPU and GPU
so it's got this odd rectangular shape to it here and that's
for a reason that's because of the way that the RX Vega mgh so the H here is
for high performance connects directly to the main CPU and
they're actually installed on the same substrate so this special engineering
trick which is basically a PCI Express 8
X link right between them is what makes the system so powerful compact and
power efficient compared to other small
form-factor desktops alright time to plug it in now and oh
that is a beefy power brick that power brick is actually almost the size of the
old Nook anyway fun fact the eyes the skull and
the power button are all separate RGB zones so you can make them any color you
want or turn them off if you prefer that sort of thing
but that's not the most important thing you guys want to know how it performs
and isn't this hilarious this is AMD software but just like with
an Intel skin on it like this so bizarre
anyway let's let's get some games fired up and talk performance here we compared
Hades Canyon with Intel's last generation skull Canyon as well as a
similarly priced desktop excluding costs for storage RAM and operating system and
it's performance is actually pretty surprising compared to the last gem
Skull Canyon Nook Hades Canyon completely blows it out of the water as
Intel integrated graphics just isn't even in the same ballpark as the Radeon
Vega chip that the hades canyon uses as for the gap between the new nook and our
8700 k desktop system it's pretty
noticeable with an average overall increase of about 35% across the
spectrum of games and synthetic tests that we used though this isn't bad if
you consider the Knux 50% lower TDP and it's tiny form factor but does buying
this nook make any sense well actually
especially in light of the pricing of decent dedicated graphics cards right
now as a compact minimal HTPC the hades
canyon is actually pretty awesome like if you told me three years ago that this
was running on this I'd have been looking for the hidden wires but but
this is real and not only is the noise not a problem from like a couch distance
or even from this distance the performance is good enough to play
basically any game even if it's not at
absolute maximum settings so as long as
you're willing to give up future upgrade ability and you'll get some kind of a
benefit from the size maybe you go to a lot of lands for example it's actually
not a terrible deal for all the hardware
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