The 2018 Intel Hades Canyon NUC was one of the only bright spots to come out of the ill-fated Kaby Lake-G series. It continues to be both the most balanced and most powerful NUC available due largely to its atypical 100 W processor. We take a look back at the mini PC to see how it holds up against the latest laptops of 2019 and 2020.

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As the successor to Skull Canyon, Hades Canyon represents an immense leap in performance with its unconventional Core i7-8809G package that integrates a discrete Radeon RX Vega M GH GPU to replace the Iris solution on its predecessor. The system even utilizes a vapor chamber cooler to maintain the small size that the NUC series is known for. It was marketed as the crown jewel of the Intel-AMD partnership at the time of launch and it's easy to see why when looking at its significant performance advantages over other NUCs to this day.

By today's standards, Hades Canyon is most comparable to the Core i5-9300H in CPU power while being about 15 percent behind the GeForce GTX 1650 in GPU power. This processor combination can commonly be found on budget gaming laptops like the Acer Nitro 5 or the MSI GP series that retail in the sub $1000 USD range. The GTX 1650 is no weak GPU, however, as it is able to run the latest titles in 1080p and to see the same on an older Intel NUC that's just a fraction of the size is impressive. Driver support is still fresh as well now that AMD has taken the reigns to ensure that the special Radeon GPU stays up to date with games and features including FreeSync.

Where Hades Canyon begins to show its age is in performance-per-watt. Running Witcher 3 on 1080p Ultra consumes a constant 122 W compared to just 95 W each on the 17.3-inch MSI GF75 and 15.6-inch Dell G3 with GTX 1650 graphics. In other words, the GTX 1650 is able to run games faster while consuming much less power in the process — an all too familiar conclusion when comparing GeForce Turing GPUs to Radeon Vega or Polaris GPUs in general.

Relative to other NUCs, however, there's no question that Intel has yet to top Hades Canyon in overall performance and performance per unit volume. The Intel-AMD processor balances CPU and GPU power extremely well despite being on an aging 14 nm package. The supposed delays on the next generation NUCs could mean that we'll have to wait a little longer for a successor to Hades Canyon. With Intel refocusing its efforts on Nvidia and Xe for the foreseeable future, a "true" Core i7-8809G successor will likely be a pipe dream.

Buy it now on Amazon - Intel Hades Canyon NUC8i7HVK (i7-8809G, Radeon RX Vega M GH)