Hades Canyon vs GTX 1060/ GTX 1050 Ti/ RX 570/ RX 580

Our benchmark runs continue as we compare the Hades Canyon NUC with Radeon RX Vega M GH graphics against our mainstream desktop GPU champions - the GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, RX 570 and RX 580. Check out the prior page for the complete list of hardware we used in our test system - there are some important variations against the NUC in terms of CPU frequency and system RAM bandwidth (which do seem to impact our taxing Witcher 3 test area), but we're fairly confident that with this class of hardware, we are indeed GPU-bound for the most part in these tests.

And just to reiterate, we do have two test runs of the NUC here - the first is at fully stock frequencies, while we used Radeon WattMan to overclock the hardware to see what kind of performance increases we could get from it. We managed to push core frequency up to 1350MHz, along with increasing the HBM2 memory frequency from 800MHz to 900MHz, giving us a bandwidth boost of 205GB/s up to just over 230GB/s. CPU overclocking is possible on this unit, but won't yield much in the way of extra gaming results, so we left the i7 at stock settings.

Here are the titles we're testing on this page, and here's more on how to use our benchmarking widget

The Division

We're running this one under DX12, and this does give AMD an advantage on this title, to the point where we'd recommend that Nvidia users stick to DX11. You can see why here, with the RX Vega M GH delivering a 22 per cent boost in performance compared to the GTX 1050 Ti result. That said, once again, RX 570, 580 and 1060 really do set the pace on this one with some vast increases.

Far Cry Primal

Mediocre results from AMD here that reflect fairly poorly on the RX Vega M GH, which only manages a poor seven per cent improvement over the lowly GTX 1050 Ti. Interestingly, there is a relatively large increase from the overclock though - the combination of frequency and memory bandwidth really boosting results here to a remarkable degree.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

While we run Rise of the Tomb Raider on the very high preset, we keep textures on the high setting to ensure that the 4GB cards don't stutter from over-committed video memory. There are some good results here from the NUC that trend above the average, with the NUC scoring a convincing win over the 1050 Ti and sitting at a mid-point between that card and the GTX 1060.

The Witcher 3

The lowest one per cent readings from the NUC are pretty grim here - typically you'd want the bars here to be grouped together as tightly as possible. The stutter here does seem to be memory bandwidth related, and occurs mostly at the beginning of the benchmark area we've chosen, which seems to tax the background streaming systems significantly.

There's a lot more bespoke data and analysis in this piece, so here's a look at everything we have for you across the article:

Intel Hades Canyon NUC8i7HVK Introduction

• Hardware breakdown, ports and IO, CPU analysis and video review

Hades Canyon vs GTX 1050 Ti/ GTX 1060/ RX 570/ RX 580

• Assassin's Creed Unity, Ashes of the Singularity DX12, Battlefield 1 DX12, Crysis 3

• The Division DX12, Far Cry Primal Ultra, Rise of the Tomb Raider DX12, The Witcher 3 [This Page]

Hades Canyon vs Mobile GTX 1060/ GTX 1060 Max-Q Benchmarks

• Assassin's Creed Unity, Far Cry Primal, The Witcher 3

Conclusion

• The Digital Foundry verdict