PC World - USA (2020-05)

MAY 2020 PCWorld 83

speed holds up well against full-socketed
95W+ parts, as the 9900K clocks in at 18
minutes and the 2700X at about 20 minutes.
For processing smaller, shorter jobs, you
don’t give up too much performance.
As in previous years, I also ran HandBrake
separately with Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility
(XTU) open in the background, to see how
hot this NUC gets under a full CPU load.
According to XTU’s monitoring tools, the

Core i9-9980HK hit a max temperature of 75

degrees Celsius while averaging 3.44GHz

across all 8 cores. The result tracks with my

expectations—temperatures drop as NUC

size increases. (Skull Canyon ran at 100

degrees Celsius during this same test, while

Hades Canyon ran at 84 degrees Celsius.)

Gaming performance

Given that the NUC9i9QNX relies on discrete

graphics for its gaming chops, our curiosity

about its performance revolved around three

questions. First and foremost, would its

densely packed chassis lack sufficient air flow

and throttle performance?

On a more philosophical level, we also

wondered just how much skipping the

purchase of a discrete graphics card hampers

the potential of this NUC. What exactly

happens when you rely solely on the Core

i9-9980HK’s integrated graphics?

Finally, does having a mobile CPU pull

down performance relative to a system with a

desktop processor?

3DMark Fire Strike

We kick off the gaming party with 3DMark’s

well-known synthetic benchmark, which

simulates gaming at 1080p on Medium

settings. Since we’re including older NUCs

and their integrated graphics in our

comparison, we’ve once again isolated the

graphics score to minimize potential influence

of the CPU on results.

Alienw51m R1are Area

Core i9-9900K

PCWStreamorld ing PC

Ryzen 7 2700X

Acer Predator Helios 700

Core i9-9980HK

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

Ryzen 9 4900HS

Ghost Canyon NUC

Core i9-9980HK

MCore i9-9880HSI GE Raider-51

Dell XPS 15 7590Core i9-8950HK

HP OmCore i7-9750Hen 17

Hades Canyon NUC

Core i7-8809G

Acer Nitro 5 AN517-51-56Y W

Core i5-9300H

Skull Canyon NUCCore i7-6770HQ

HandBrake Encode 0.9.9

Seconds

SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

1,128

1,386

1,316

1, 595

1,251

1,4 45

1,358

2,115

2,356

2,725

2,871