Intel NUC8i7HVK (Hades Canyon) Gaming Performance - A Second Look
by Ganesh T S on May 14, 2018 8:01 AM ESTGaming Performance - Civilization VI
The Civilization series of turn-based strategy games is very popular. For such games, the frame rate is not necessarily an important factor in the gaming experience. However, with Civilization VI, Firaxis has cranked up the visual fidelity to make the game more attractive. As a result, the game can be taxing on the GPU as well as the CPU, particularly in the DirectX 12 mode.
As part of our gaming system reviews, we run the built-in benchmark at two different resolutions (1080p and 2160p), and with two different quality settings (medium and ultra).
| Civilization VI (DirectX 12) Performance | |||
The relative performance numbers across all tested resolutions and quality settings are as expected, with the Hades Canyon NUC managing to comfortably be better than the Skull Canyon NUC with its integrated graphics, but, unable to match the systems equipped with GTX 1060 and better GPUs. That said, users should be able to comfortably play the game at 1080p with medium quality settings in the Hades Canyon NUC.
The differences between the two quality settings are summarized in the table below.
| Civilization VI (DX12) - Evaluated Quality Settings | ||
| Aspect | Medium | Ultra |
| MSAA Sample Count | 4x | 8x |
| Shadow Map Resolution | 4096 x 4096 | 8192 x 8192 |
| Ambient Occlusion Depth Map Resolution | 1024 x 1024 | 2048 x 2048 |
| Ambient Occlusion Render Texture Resolution | 1024 x 1024 | 2048 x 2048 |
| Terrain Synthesis Detail Level | Low Resolution | Full Resolution |
| Terrain Quality Level | 3 | 4 |
| Low Quality Terrain and Water Shaders | Yes | No |
| Screen-Space Reflection Passes | 2 | 4 |
| Video Effects Detail Level | Low | High |
| Clutter Detail Level | Not a Lot | A Lot |
| Ambient Occlusion | Disabled | Enabled |
| Leader Rendering Quality Level | 1 | 3 |
| Motion Blur for Leaders | Disabled | Enabled |
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zodiacfml - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
As usual,pricey. It has a niche though for a powerful desktop system with the machine just behind the monitor.Outside that, alternatives are usually cheaper/more powerful at the expense of being slghtly larger than the Intel NUC.
For my use, I wouldn't hesitate buying a laptop with similar specs attached permanently to a monitor.
eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
This thing is nice, but too expensive for my taste and wallet. I am waiting for a Ryzen 2400G based ENUC (even newer unit of computing) from AMD! Price it right, keep it quiet, give it at least 3 USB 3 / 3.1 ports and HDMI 2.0b, and they'll sell like hotcakes.Alme - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Hello. Can someone please recommend which one of these two will work best for this NUC:- Samsung 960 EVO MZ-V6E1T0BW - Solid state drive - encrypted - 1 TB - internal - M.2 2280 - PCI Express 3.0 x4 (NVMe) - 256-bit AES
- Samsung 860 EVO MZ-N6E1T0BW - Solid state drive - encrypted - 1 TB - internal - M.2 2280 - SATA 6Gb/s - buffer: 1 GB - 256-bit AES
Feel free to recommend something else as well.
Hixbot - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Once again I'll point out that noise measurements should be part of all your sff pc reviews.hanselltc - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Would love to see Ashes of the Benchmarks just for the giggles. Anyway, nice smol product, not my jam.85739gary - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
This little PC gadget is very good, sure, geeks can build something a "bit" higher powered for the same $ or less...it's your call..BUY it, use it now..or get all the parts you need and build something similar or better...yawn...
rosenstand - Sunday, August 26, 2018 - link
Considering buying this NUC to play GTA V. I’m not a gamer, but have always enjoyed the GTA series (even bought a PS3 console + game when V came out, then a PS4 console + game a year later when the PS4 version became available :-))In this review it looks like the NUC will barely run it in 1080p with ultra settings, however there are a couple of YouTube videos showing the Hades Canyon blasting it off with avg 100 FPS at 1080p with almost-ultra settings. One of them does 30-40 FPS at 4K with high settings as well. Are they fake?
Sirkassad - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
The RAM in your Hades Canon says Kingston HyperX Impact HX432S20IB2K2/16 DDR420-22-22-42 @ 3200 MHz 2x8 GB and yet product pages say the max freq for RAM is 2400MHz. I am getting ready to buy a Hades Canon and would like to get two sticks of 16GB RAM such as: Kingston Technology HyperX Impact 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 CL20 SODIMM Memory HX432S20IBK2/32. Will this work?