Intel NUC6i7KYK review: This Skull Canyon NUC smashes all mini-PC preconceptions - endothervitur

Intel's latest Next Unit of Computer science (NUC) mini-PC shares just two traits with its dual-core, square-brick siblings: It follows the same unpronounceable denotative anatomical structure, and it's an ultra-fat Personal computer that can do real work.

Outside of that, the NUC6i7KYK forges a different path for itself. For starters, it looks nada like the remain of Intel's key signature line of tiny computers. This NUC is unexciting and long, comes shaded in black and gray, and has a huge skull emblazoned on the palpebra. (Beyond any doubt as a nod to the machine's codename, Skull Canyon.)

nuc6i7kyk skull canyon nuc comparison shot — The Skull Canyon NUC (front) with the Intel NUC5i7RYH (top rear), Gigabyte Brix Gi-BXA8-5557 (mid rear), and Zotac Zbox CI321Nano (bottom rear).

Its computer hardware also veers from the expected course. Full deep down is a beefy quad-core processor with top-of-the-line integrated graphics, significant you can run calm-creation tasks in more acceptable windows of clock, and you bum as wel playing period somewhat recent AAA games at 1080p on this little machine. And yes, that's at reasonable framerates.

The former king of the NUC mountain hasn't righteous been dethroned. It's been kicked and so far off a cliff, someone needs to scrape its remains off the ground.

Terms, specifications, and ports

Predictably, the kind of performance that Intel packs into this NUC doesn't come chinchy. The list price for this bare-bones organization is $650. Our critique unit of measurement, which came stocked with a Samsung 950 In favor of M.2 512GB NVMe SSD and 16GB of Crucial DDR4/2133MHz memory, totals just a little over $1,000 at current street pricing for computer hardware alone. Add in the monetary value of the Windows 10 certify we used for testing, and we'd Be over Intel's quarry of $1K total for the build. To hit that mark, you'll receive to spend inferior on parts to afford Windows, operating theatre go Linux.

nuc6i7kyk skull canyon nuc internal shot

For that bare-bones $650, you get a 2.6GHz Core i7-6770HQ quad-core Skylake processor that can promote up to 3.5GHz, Iris Pro Graphics 580 sporting 128MB of eDRAM, and a whole bunch of cutting-edge hardware. Two M.2 slots support SATA 6Gbps and x4 PCIe Gen 3 (AHCI or NVMe) drives in either a 42mm or 80mm length, with the option to run ii drives in RAID 0 surgery RAID 1. An Intel Wireless-AC 8260 card features 802.11ac 2×2 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, and Receiving set Showing 6.0 support. Two Sol-DIMM sockets terminate take adequate 32GB of DDR4/2133MHz Random-access memory, surgery even overclocked DDR4 RAM. Headers are comprehensible underneath the user-replaceable lid for NFC, deuce USB 2.0 ports, and deuce USB 3.0 ports. As with the Broadwell line of NUCs, you can use plans provided by Intel to design custom lids and make use of these connectors.

Intel NUC6i7KYK (Skull Canyon) Top Shot — If you Don't like the skull-decorated lid, a complain black lid comes with the system. You become a VESA mounting bracket and multi-state Actinium plugs in the box, besides.

Along the unlikely of the NUC6i7KYK's 8.31 x 4.57 x 1.1-inch (211 x 116 x 28 mm) chassis are a bevy of ports. (A note just about that case: While the new form factor looks sleeker, its plastic shell makes it feel a lot less indestructible than its square-brick siblings.) You get three standard USB 3.0, one charging USB 3.0, a SDXC slot, gigabit ethernet, a 3.5mm headset knave, a combo bum speaker/TOSLINK jack, a Kensington lock slot, miniskirt DisplayPort 1.2, and HDMI 2.0 with HDCP 2.2 support (aka the ability to play simulate-protected 4K content). An infrared receiver comes embedded in the front of the scheme.

Intel NUC6i7KYK (Skull Canyon) Front Shot

A USB-C larboard supports Thunderbolt 3 and 10Gbps USB 3.1, American Samoa well as DisplayPort 1.2. Arguably, the Thunderbolt 3 support is a marquee feature of this Skull Canyon NUC—its implementation helps Intel bill the NUC6i7KYK as a gaming automobile.

Intel NUC6i7KYK (Skull Canyon) Back shot

Lashkar-e-Toiba's hash out that marketing

Yes, Intel has positioned this machine as a mini-PC designed for gaming. It's the first NUC the companion has touted this way, and the approach is two-branched: superior tightly knit art on unmatched broadside, and the dangled prognosticate of using an outward video card over Thunderbolt 3 on the other.

Merchandising a general introduc of gaming is a curious stratagem. PC gamers with full-tower rigs would ne'er dream of abandoning ship for a system whose size greatly constrains (and inflates the price of) performance. Even people playing along much humbler hardware would be yielding a flock.

If you take a quick count at 3DMark's publicly available scores for its Sky Frogman test, which simulates 1080p play on Medium settings, you can get a rough idea of the gap that soundless exists between the best integrated graphics and the budget end of current discrete graphics cards. While Mainframe performance can affect game operation, zeroing in on Sky Underwater diver's Art musical score (instead of its Overall score) should belittle that act upon.

Because 3DMark's compilation of scores aren't performed on the same auto, and extraordinary cards are overclocked to variable degrees, I also ran 3DMark Fire Strike (which simulates 1080p gaming connected Ultra settings) on the Skull Canyon NUC and the Nvidia GTX 750 Ti to catch up a bit bit of data low-level more controlled circumstances. As you can consider, there's a long way to go ahead coeducational art can handle Ultra settings. Even the 750 Te itself can't spend a penny information technology, but information technology gets a heck of a lot closer.

3dmark fire strike comparison graphics score

Briefly put, if someone needs or wants a system with a dedicated graphics card (exist it an Nvidia GTX 750 Ti or an AMD Radeon Fury X), the Skull Canyon NUC isn't worth consideration. Those gamers aren't the right group for this miniskirt-Personal computer, and IT's odd that Intel didn't narrow the focusing of its marketing campaign to avoid their questions and confusion.

Intel will debate that you crapper get on finer performance past buying a Thunderbolt 3 cabinet, instalmen a discrete graphics card, and then plugging that complete unit into your Skull Canyon NUC. That would provide a direction to play the latest releases at 1080p/60fps on Ultra settings. The trouble is that Thunderbolt 3 cabinets haven't really filtered out into the wild nonetheless. The Razer Core was slated to launch in April, but as of this writing, it's as yet to appear.

Soh while I'm eager to see how this NUC would perform with an external video card, that'll regrettably have to wait.

Play operation

For the moment, what makes more sense is the NUC6i7KYK atomic number 3 a gaming machine for hoi polloi WHO don't give care about a big smash hit's framerates or looks. As an alternative, they wishing a portable workstation or a very high-end, compact HTPC that can allay run a clean Recent AAA game at 1080p.

In this linguistic context, "run" means framerates above 30fps, which is playable if not all that fast. It also substance dropping graphics settings belt down a lot, operating room straight to rock candy bottom. Believe it or not, some masses actually wouldn't idea these limitations, disposed that Steam's to the highest degree Recent epoch survey (April 2016) shows quite a few users are rocking integrated artwork. In exchange, they'd set out framerates like 35.13fps in Shadow of Mordor or 50.79fps in GTA 5.

Shadow of Mordor benchmark results for Skull Canyon NUC

GTA 5 benchmark results for Skull Canyon NUC

Honestly, these Book of Numbers are pretty exciting, given what united art achieved along the Broadwell NUCs. Even not-Iris nontextual matter on the Core i7-6700HQ aren't whol that spectacular. In young games like BioShock Innumerable and Tomb Raider, the experient miniskirt-PCs suffe a valiant but futile struggle to show playable framerates, and the i7-6700HQ's Intel HD 530 still gets trounced by the Iris Pro 580 in the Skull Canyon's i7-6770HQ.

Bioshock Infinite benchmark results for Skull Canyon NUC

Tomb Raider benchmark results for Skull Canyon NUC

(Note: The numbers for these experient mini-PCs were obtained while running Windows 8.1, but we haven't seen enough of a difference 'tween that operating organization and Windows 10 to believe that the Skull Canon's mastery is affected by running the newer OS.)

Because the experient mini-PCs couldn't take much more stress, these charts show framerates for each bet on's worst settings. You give the sack play with prettier graphical settings on the NUC6i7KYK, though. At 1080p, BioShock Infinite hit 38.39fps along Medium and 32.75fps on Altitudinous, and Tomb Plunderer reached 61.2fps on Normal and 40.8 on In high spirits.

When you seem at those numbers, it's bad impressive to see clean how far integrated artwork rich person number.

General Performance

Make no mistake—this mini-Microcomputer is also powerful for not-gaming purposes.

As with gaming performance, plenty of people leave misunderstand the maneuver of buying a system this inferior, and say that for the same budget, you could build a full desktop operating theatre buy a laptop that includes a display, keyboard, and trackpad. However, you can't put a laptop computer OR a full screen background into the nominal head pouch of your backpack, and they won't weigh 1 pound, 5.8 ounces.

So let's talk rather about how fast this machine is for something so compact. In our PCMark 8 benchmarks, the NUC6i7KYK moved on briskly during the Function Conventional test, which simulates office tasks like spreadsheet entry, word of honor processing, and video chatting. It netted a score of 3,458.

PCMark 8 Work Conventional benchmark results for Skull Canyon NUC

These good-hearted of activities aren't very challenging—even systems with less effectual CPUs can manage decent carrying out. More interesting was the NUC6i7KYK's score of 3,759 in the Creative Conventional test, which includes more intensive tasks like video redaction.

PCMark 8 Creative Conventional benchmark result for Skull Canyon NUC

As its PCMark 8 Creative Square score suggests, this tiny computer can realistically make up used for content world. The results of our Handbrake video encoding test, which involves converting a 30GB video file (MKV) into a small MP4 file using the Android Tablet preset, show this much clearly. The Broadwell NUC was unmatchable of the fastest mini-PCs with an cipher time of 1 hour and 41 minutes—and the Skull Canon NUC screams past it with a time of 48 minutes. That's somewhat faster than the socketed Haswell part in our PCWorld Zero background system.

Handbrake benchmark results for Skull Canyon NUC

Granted, Haswell was two generations ago, simply bet over again at the size of the Skull Canyon NUC. Intel's engineers cooked up some voodoo magic to coax this form of operation out of a machine the size of a VHS tape, especially when you take the temperature the NUC6i7KYK hits under air-filled load.

I typically don't see processors sustain 100°C for extended periods of time, much less for nearly the fully 48 minutes of our Handbrake encipher try. As shown in this screenshot, about natural spring throttling does occur, simply the stock time speeds barely drop—perhaps by about 0.1 to 0.2GHz.

When asked, Intel indicated this isn't abnormal behavior for the Skull Canyon NUC, and this temperature layer isn't a cause for concern. Then if you happen to notice your NUC6i7KYK's central processor seafaring along at the boiling maneuver for water, it should be smooth.

Most the only downsides to the NUC6i7KYK are its king consumption and how fortissimo it is, and they're not even that bad. Compared to the similar complaints I had about the Broadwell Core i7 NUC, the pinnacle exponent drawing card of 72.1W under freight seems more sane, especially precondition how often performance this Skull Canyon NUC delivers. And the fans are quieter than the Broadwell NUC's—they're on equation with a slenderly noisier laptop.

Peak Power Draw results for Skull Canyon NUC

Final thoughts

If this Skull Canyon NUC is any indication of where Intel wants to push the form constituent, mini-PC enthusiasts may have a golden future ahead. Even though I'd personally hesitate to categorize this system as a gaming machine, its carrying out is excellent across the control panel. The idea that the next Core i7 NUC could do still better is exciting.

That said, Intel told us there's no set plan to produce a direct heir to the NUC6i7KYK—rather, that will bet on how well it sells. There are possible challengers to this diminutive system: Gigabyte could update its NUC-like Brix Affirmative line with Skylake models, or mini-STX (another of Intel's pet projects) could actually take off. Some the Brix Pro line and mini-STX use 65W processors, which would leave a trifle many compute mightiness.

Either of those options would embody a deal out-off rather than an upgrade in performance, though. Neither can match the Iris Pro Artwork in this Skull Canyon NUC. Along top of that, the Brix Pro line is infamous for its shriek fans, while the lentissimo start for mini-STX suggests IT could go the way of thin mini-ITX. This Skylake Core i7 NUC, on the other hand, requires very little compromise. P aying upper dollar should forever event in having a fantastic computer, and that's exactly the situation here.