Hades Canyon vs GTX 1060 Mobile and GTX 1060 Max-Q

The Radeon RX Vega M GH will be available for notebooks, running at a circa 65W TDP - as opposed to the 100W of the NUC we're reviewing here. Regardless, we wanted to get a ballpark idea of how the Radeon compared against existing mainstream desktop solutions, so we dug out some archive data for the mobile version of the GTX 1060, and the down-clocked Max-Q version of the chip.

One thing to bear in mind here is that the two laptops used for the GTX 1060 benchmarks are HP Omen models using the Core i7 7700HQ - a chip similar to the Kaby Lake-G i7, but with a max all-core turbo of 3.4GHz. Secondly, the laptops provided by HP only had one 8GB SODIMM of memory, meaning single channel bandwidth and a hobbling of CPU performance. How does this impact results here? That's really easy to tell by looking at the lowest one per cent measurements - you'll see that they drop really low here, and frame-times suffer from noticeable stutter.

We've also included the standard desktop GTX 1060 measurements here, so you can get some idea of how all the different GTX 1060s scale. This one was benchmarked with a Core i7 6700K overclocked to 4.6GHz, paired with 3000MHz DDR4. Here are the titles we've covered off in this section, and this is a more detailed look at how to use our benchmarking widget.

Assassin's Creed Unity

The RX Vega M GH is clearly more in GTX 1050 Ti territory here, and we'd expect that a downclocked GPU in a prospective 65W model would bring us more into line with the desktop 1050 Ti result seen here. Even in its fully enabled form, the Radeon GPU is outclassed by GTX 1060 by 21 or 30 per cent, depending on which mobile version you compare it to.

Far Cry Primal

The mobile 1060s here have frame-times that are impacted by the single-channel DDR4 our HP Omen laptops were provided with, which is unfortunate. Again, the RX Vega M GH is providing performance that exceeds a GTX 1050 Ti, but with a lower TDP will probably fall more into line. Nvidia's GTX 1060 mobile parts have little to worry about here - Max-Q is 22 per cent faster, rising to 30 per cent for the standard mobile part.

The Witcher 3

Our Witcher 3 benchmark is a thorough workout for both CPU, GPU and system RAM memory bandwidth. And we strongly suspect that the lack of the latter on our HP Omen laptops with each flavour of GTX 1060 is causing some issues here. The gap between the Radeon GPU in Hades Canyon and the mobile 1060s lessens as a result to 11 per cent and 18 per cent respectively. With its overclocked 6700K and surfeit of memory bandwidth, the desktop 1060 zooms ahead here.

We've tried to bring you as much data and analysis about this product as possible, so here's a layout of the entire 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 [This Page]

Conclusion

• The Digital Foundry verdict