hi everybody Alaina from PC world here I am here today
to show you Intel's latest Nook which is their mini PC line this is the Hades
Canyon Nook well used to be called that that was the codename now it has one of
those kind of insanely long names that Intel likes to give its mini pcs I think
it's something like the nook 8i 7h VK it's a little bit of mouthful two years
ago I actually got to review its predecessor which is this fella here
this one was codenamed Skull Canyon as you can see there's a nice little skull
here on the top this one was really awesome I actually ended up giving it a
5 out of 5 at the time I also really liked this particular nook which is
codenamed Hades Canyon and sometimes I wonder if
it's code name that because you know Hades got of how Intel partnering with
AMD hell freezing over I don't know if that's kind of a reference to that I
think it's kind of funny if it is but this one is a lot more powerful it has a
discrete GPU which the skull canyon up did not have this one had integrated
graphics although the best at the time and as a result this is actually a lot
more expensive too so there's two models this time around this one we have is a
thousand dollars for the bare-bones system so that means it doesn't come
with any storage or RAM or even the OS you have to provide all that on your own
or you have to find a reseller who's actually selling it as a complete system
this is the model we have the one $1000 model
there's also another model which is a step-down that's $800 as a bare-bones
system again no storage no ram no OS and that one is like I said $800 it's a
little bit slower this one on the CPU side of things it has a processor that
runs at 3.1 gigahertz base goes up to 4.2 gigahertz as turbo the lower model
is similar it's 3.1 base and 4.1 for turbo
on the graphic side of things so like I said earlier this has a discrete GPU
it's a what was the name it's long it's a long string of words here it's the
Radeon rx Vega M graphics and this one is the Vega mgh version that one is I
believe about was it 10 63 megahertz so 1063 megahertz for base clock and then I
think it's like eleven 90 gigahertz or sorry megahertz for the turbo or the
boost clock if you go step down to the 800 model I think everything's about a
hundred megahertz slower so there is a small performance difference and it's
really I mean I didn't get to test that model but honestly I would if I was
going to choose I would just go with this thousand dollar model because if
you're going to put that much into a small barebone system you may as well
just go for the top-end this is actually a little again different from skull
Canyon and that this was not overclockable this actually is
unfortunately I didn't have enough time before the embargo lifted for our review
to do that I actually still plan to so stay tuned and check out the written
review to see updates for that until told us that they were able to get as
high as I think 4.7 gigahertz for their overclock again that's all based on you
know if you win the silicon lottery or not so we'll see what we got in this
particular fella in general it runs really cool and I feel like that's kind
of a question a lot of people who you know use many pcs or into many pcs want
to know and buy cool what I mean is that the fans don't really get that loud when
I had a full CPU utilization didn't really hear the fans the only time I
heard the fan was when I was running games and even then it was still a
fairly quiet fan hum it's not shrill it's not you know unbearable I have a
couple of a mini pcs here so this gigabyte bricks which i reviewed
a long long time ago has a very loud very shrill fan that just kind of runs
whenever there's a you know heavy load rather whatever you know tossed you're
throwing at it then it's not the case here this is definitely far higher and
far more premier level of mini PC as I mentioned earlier or if I didn't there
is this led you get on the front with this one and it's configurable so I
don't if you can see here on the screen that you can actually change the colors
and as we all know RGB makes everything go faster
that's spoiler that's actually not true but if you want to play around with it
you can so you can change the outline of the skull you can change the color of
the eyes this actually defaults so I think a red and blue scheme I chose
purple and yellow for funsies but you can you know go ahead and play with that
there's different patterns so there's the breathing strobing and the pulsing
options that you can choose from and you can even customize the colors on the
front for the three LEDs or like right here so that's the customization I think
everyone probably wants to know as I did how it performs when you play games on
it so I would say in general the Vega mgh part that we have in here is kind of
falls between gtx 1050 TI and a gtx 1060 max-q
that you'd find on laptops I was getting let's see for current games I should
preface this so current games I play pub G but I'm not really a much of a pub G
player so I spent most of my time on the fringe of the map trying one not to get
killed and shoo just to figure out where I was supposed to go because as I'm
revealing here I really don't play pop G so with that in mind I was getting about
mid 50s for average framerate on high and it felt pretty smooth but again
because I was in the thick of things and I
you know running around what other people shooting at me I don't know how
much of a frame drop you would see and how that would affect the average frame
rate for games that aren't quite so variable I played I see I brought up
shadow of war so Middle Earth shadow of war which was released last October so
it's a fairly new game if you put that game on all ultra then you're gonna get
about to mid 30s for framerate so not that great so if you step it down too
high it jumps up to about mid 40s and then if you finally step it down to what
is it medium or normal whatever they call the next step down then you finally
hit that golden you know over 60 rate so I think it's like low 60s at that point
starting to step back further you know time rise of the Tomb Raider let's see
got about 51 frames per second in let's see very high and dx11
and then a shadow of mordor so the older Middle Earth shadow series game that one
was about low 50s I believe for ultra so with 4k texture pack on and then just
rounding out our benchmarks Tomb Raider interesting how it didn't quite scale
very well but Tomb Raider which is like what five years old now if you put on
ultimate we I got chest over sixty frames per second which was a little
strange but it scales with what I got on the skull canyon nook which was gosh I
think that one's like barely like mid 20s for that particular set of settings
so all in all it's a it's a really good little PC I mean if you have the money
to spare if you need something that's really compact it's gonna be really hard
to beat this I know that other vendors like you know gigabyte and ZOTAC have
their own systems with just great graphics you know like Nvidia discreet
graphics and they'll probably outperform this by a good margin but they're gonna
be bigger so if you fall in that camp of people that don't need that extra screen
and just really want to not to worry about the constraints of you
know laptop plumbing basically you know without where everything goes with the
heat sinks and everything which can affect performance then this really is
going to be a great choice for you I am really looking forward to seeing what
else I can get out of it if you'd like to see the full rundown of what I find
out you can check out our written review on PC real calm and that's it for now
thanks for tuning in