86 PCWorld MAY 2020REVIEWS INTEL GHOST CANYON NUC9I9QNX
for work purposes while sheltering in place,
and ran the same tests again.
(Why not the Core i9 9900K? Or Ryzen 7
3700X? Had they been available to me, I
would have used them, but I had to make do
with what I had on hand.)
In situations that rely more heavily on the
GPU, you don’t lose much. On Ultra settings,
Borderlands 3 has a drop of 4.9 percent in
performance at 1080p, and 4.3 percent at
1440p. You still remain above the golden
standard of 60 fps at 1080p, and in the low 50s
at 1440p—not a difference you’d distinctly feel.Metro Exodus
The results in Metro Exodus, also a heavyweight
game, show an even narrower gap in the
numbers. We ran this benchmark on Ultra with
ray-tracing and DLSS turned off. The performance
dip between the PCWorld Streaming PC and the
Ghost Canyon NUC9i9QNX is 3.9 percent at
1080p and 2 percent at 1440p—or about 2 fps at
1080p and just 1 fps at 1440p.Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
But what about a game that leans heavier on the
CPU? Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has a reputation
for gobbling CPU resources, so I threw it into
the mix and ran its benchmark on Ultra High.
At 1080p, the performance drop mirrors that
of Borderlands 3 and Metro Exodus, with a 4.7
percent difference (or 3 fps). That jumps up to 7.5
percent at 1440p, but works out to only 4 fps.
Keep in mind these numbers only loosely
indicate the effect of the Core i9-9980HK on
gaming performance. (If I had used a CoreGhost Canyon NUC
Core i9-9980HKPCWStreamorld ing PC
Ryzen 7 2700XBorderlands 3
Fps69.5350.37Ultra 1080p72.9852.67LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCEGhost Canyon NUC
Core i9-9980HKPCWStreamorld ing PC
Ryzen 7 2700XMetro Exodus
Fps61.3348.74Ultra 1080p63.8649.75LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCEGhost Canyon NUC
Core i9-9980HKPCWStreamorld ing PC
Ryzen 7 2700XAssassin’s Creed Odyssey
Fps6049Ultra 1080p6353LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE