Intel’s Radeon-backed ‘Hades Canyon’ mini PC runs games at 1080p, Ultra graphics

Korean site Playwares recently published a review with benchmarks from Intel’s upcoming $999 “Hades Canyon” miniature PC. The review is no longer online, but that didn’t stop sleuths from grabbing everything they could before the article went offline, including the NUC’s hardware breakdown and gaming performance. The big deal is that the device sports a new “module” cramming together Intel’s processor with discrete AMD graphics into one chip.

For starters, here are the module’s specifications: 

According to the benchmarks, AMD’s discrete GPU provides almost the same performance (3.7 TFLOPS) as Nvidia’s current GeForce GTX 1060 card (4.0 TFLOPS), only it’s part of a complete module with direct access to the CPU and dedicated memory. 

But how well does Hades Canyon perform as a gaming “machine” despite its small form factor size? Take a look at the numbers in frames-per-second (the higher the better): 

Here we weeded out the synthetic tests – benchmarking games after disabling hardware and/or software to generate higher numbers – and a few minimum frame count entries. AMD’s discrete GPU appears to run just fine at 1,920 x 1080 with Ultra graphics settings, but gamers may want to consider cranking down the visual level a notch to squeeze out better 1080p performance.  

On the processor side, Intel’s refreshed seventh-generation CPU cores (Intel says they’re 8th Gen H-Series) managed a 5268 single-core score in Geekbench, and a 17183 multi-core score. Overclocked, the module saw a single-core score of 5571 and a multi-core score of 18788.

Finally, here are the specifications for the reviewed Hades Canyon NUC: 

 Intel’s NUC8i7HVK, along with the NUC8i7HNK packing the Core i7-8705G module, is expected to arrive this spring. You’ll need to purchase the memory, storage, and operating system separately.