Benchmarks for the Intel Hades Canyon NUC with Core i7-8809G CPU and RX Vega M GPU leak out

Announced in the second week of January 2018, Intel’s Hades Canyon NUC managed to create some hype around the Core i7-8809G CPU that powers it. According to current Intel roadmaps, the i7-8809G remains the fastest 8th gen 14 nm Kaby Lake-G chip that combines a CPU die with a Radeon RX Vega M GPU die. South Korean site Playwares managed to test the hades Canyon NUC ahead of its official launch and the benchmarks reveal the small factor design delivers solid performance, although there still are problems with the cooling system.

To be clear, the tested NUC is the US$999 (more expensive) version, but these systems do not include RAM or storage solutions out of the box. The quad-core/8-thread i7-8809G CPU is clocked at 3.1 GHz by default (4.2 GHz in boost mode) and integrates a UHD Graphics 630 GPU, as well as support for dual channel DDR4-2400 RAM. On the other hand, there is a dedicated Radeon RX Vega M GH chip, which integrates 24 compute units and 1,536 stream processors clocked at 1,063 MHz (1,190 MHz boost), plus 4 GB of HBM2 memory. The unified chip has a TDP of 100W, while the tested system also includes 16 GB DDR4-2133 RAM.

Most of the 1080p games tested run at around 60 fps, and the synthetic tests look good, however, Playwares also took the liberty to overclock the system to 4.3 GHz and discovered that the limited cooling system can enter throttling mode when CPU temperatures go over 90 degrees Celsius. Average power consumption is around 140 W, but it can peak at 186 W in OC mode. The GPU operates at 53 degrees and only peaks to 57, which is well within specs.

The Hades Canyon NUC mini PC will be launching some time in Q2 2018. Apart from the US$999 variant that was tested by Playwares, there will also be a US$799 version that comes with the i7-8705G CPU and Radeon RX Vega M GL GPU.

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