• 2 months ago
Transcript
00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here. This is the Hades Canyon NUC. This is Intel's latest super
00:08small computer that's running that Kaby Lake G CPU. So if you don't know what this thing
00:12is, it's like Intel always makes these small computers called NUCs. They're these like
00:17tiny little boxes like this, and they kind of get faster and better every year, but this
00:21year they took it up an extra notch. This is running that new 8th gen chip that combines
00:26an Intel Core i7 with a Radeon Vega-M GPU. It's like this collaboration with Intel and
00:31AMD to make this extremely efficient CPU, and that's what we have powering this whole
00:36device. Okay, so the thing that makes this thing special is its size. This thing is 1.2
00:40liters. It's a little bit bigger than the previous generation, but it's still super,
00:44super small. You don't get cases like this very often. Like you've seen my videos where
00:48I build into ITX cases. The smallest one I've ever done was like, I think 6 or 7 liters.
00:531.2 liters. It's small. There's an external AC adapter, which you obviously plug up to
00:58this, but the unit itself can leave it out as like a media center unit or leave it on
01:02your table if you really want small devices. But I use this thing as, I didn't use it as
01:07a laptop, but I basically brought this thing back and forth from work for a couple months
01:11last year. Not this one, but a NUC, and it was like two AC adapters, one at work, one
01:15at home. These things are just so small, so portable that you can do a lot with them.
01:20Now this is a bare bones unit, so it doesn't come with RAM, storage, or even an operating
01:25system. You have to pop it open and put it in yourself. There's two NVMe drive slots
01:29and two RAM slots. You can pack up to 32 gigs of RAM, and it's actually really easy to build
01:34into the system. Like, very few screws you have to deal with. And every time I open one
01:37of these things up, it surprises me as to how they can fit everything, everything into
01:43something so small, while still retaining all of the functionality. So this thing actually
01:46has a crazy number of ports. There's two Thunderbolt 3s, a bunch of USB-As. This is
01:51completely riddled with ports. But despite that, despite being nothing but ports and
01:55grills all over, it still looks really clean. And the top lights up. So, when I was at CES
02:00and I first saw this thing, it looked like the skull only lit up in blue and red, and
02:04it kind of made sense because I thought the blue was supposed to represent Intel and the
02:07red for AMD's GPU. But it's actually full RGB action. You can change the colors of basically
02:12every single light in here, plus the skull and the eye socket. And if you want to, you
02:16can kill all the lights and just make it look super stealth. And the interesting thing
02:19is that when you remove all the lights, like when you don't light it up at all, you can't
02:23see any trace of that skull on the surface. If you want to keep it really muted, you can
02:27just by turning off the lights. Okay, performance on this thing is quite good. It's running
02:31the highest-end Kaby Lake G chip, so the 8809G, and it's a quad-core CPU with hyper-threading.
02:37I ran a bunch of benchmarks, and it put out strong but kind of expected numbers for the
02:40clock speed, because remember, this is a Kaby Lake architecture, not the Coffee Lake
02:44architecture. But more interesting to me was the GPU performance. So that Radeon Vega MGH,
02:50it's close in performance to a GTX 1060, not quite as powerful, more similar to the 1060 Max-Q,
02:56very capable card. So you'll be able to hit 60 frames per second on most AAA titles. You
03:00might have to finesse the graphics quality a bit. But overall, I'm impressed, and it's
03:04running some earlier drivers, right? There's always room for improvement over time. But
03:07the thing that makes this thing so cool is that the CPU and the GPU all fit into here
03:12on one chip. It's a 100-watt TDP package, and I'm getting 85 frames per second in DOOM
03:18on ultra graphics, 1080p, in a box that's 1.2 liters. Like, that's... Do you see how
03:23crazy that is? This has never been done before. This is a super tiny machine with really good
03:28gaming performance. And VR is actually capable on this. It's not like a VR monster. You won't
03:33be able to keep up with the higher resolution of the new Vive Pro, but it can handle the
03:36regular HTC Vive. Thermally, it's also quite good. The default settings won't have any kind
03:41of throttling. You can overclock it with Intel XTU, but I wasn't able to get any substantial
03:45gains in the short amount of time I played with it. One of the first things I noticed
03:48when I booted this thing up was how quiet it was. So, the Skull Canyon NUC from last
03:52year was pretty quiet, but it was audible still, even on idle. This one was essentially
03:57silent when I first turned it on. On light load, the fans spin up a little bit, but even
04:01on maximum load, this is still a very quiet PC. So, right now, if you're trying to build
04:06a PC and you're looking for, like, a smaller one, you can build something into an ITX case,
04:10and it'll cost you around $800 for something that's similar in performance. This is $1,000
04:14at the top end. There's a lower spec model that goes for $800, so depending on what you
04:18need or what you want, you can swap that around. But, I do think that the premium that you
04:22pay for something this small and this compact with this kind of performance is not that
04:28huge. I think it's very reasonable considering what this thing is capable of. It does have
04:32limited upgrade capabilities because I don't think you're popping out that CPU too easily,
04:36but if you're looking for something that's small and light and relatively powerful,
04:40check this thing out. It's, like, a really cool small PC. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed
04:44this video. Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it. See you guys next time.