Since I’ve now reviewed every Bean Canyon NUC model currently on the market, I wanted to do a simple comparison on how do they fare against each other in a few games. Now I’m not really that much gaming these days but I hope you find the article interesting.

The three Bean Canyon NUCs are very similar when it comes to hardware specifications. All of them have a Coffee Lake Core CPU. The CPUs included in order of performance are i3-8109U, i5-8259U and i7-8559U. All of them have the same Iris Plus 655 GPU, but on the i7 it’s clocked up to 1.2 GHz whereas the others will have to do with 1.05 GHz. Each NUC was equipped with HyperX 2×4 GB DDR4-2400 CL14 RAM (Amazon) for the comparison.

Games

Dirt 3

Dirt 3 is an older rally game, but when played on Full HD resolution with high level of details it’s already making the NUC work for its money. It’s also got a very handy benchmark feature that makes it easy to collect the performance figures.

The following settings were used:

Resolution: 1920×1080

Vertical sync: off

Refresh rate: 60 Hz

Detail preset: High / Ultra

Anti-aliasing: 2x MSAA

From the above results we can see that the difference between the i3 and the i7 models is approximately 20% and the i5 sits comfortable between these two. With high details levels the game is quite nicely playable on all three Bean Canyon models and then again, yanking the details up all the way to ultra will make it more or less unplayable on all three models.

Battlefield 4

BF4 is a first person shooter from a couple of years back as well. It’s not spectacularly beautiful by today’s standards, but it still can be a lot of fun. And it’s just the type of game that the NUC is able to run pretty nicely.

The following settings were used:

Resolution: 1920×1080

Detail preset: Medium

We’ll notice that the average FPS on the i7 is quite respectable 48 frames per second, on the i5 ~10% less and then on the i3 ~10% less than i5 again. The minimum frame rate on the i3 dipped down to 31 frames per second, so here the difference between i3 and i7 might be that you’ll need to use lower detail level on i3 whereas the i7 will be ok with medium details.

FIFA ’18

Finally some football or soccer, depending on what you prefer to call the ball game.

Resolution: 1920×1080

Detail preset: High

Anti-aliasing: 2x MSAA

The game’s nicely playable on all Bean Canyon NUCs, even if we see that minimum frame rate drops at times below 25 on all of them. However, the average frame rate stays above 40 and I suspect the lower frame rates we see during the animated replays etc. scenes.

Conclusion

If you’re not into playing the most demanding games with ulra high resolutions, the Bean Canyon NUC might actually work just fine for you if you’re more of a casual gamer. There’s not a huge difference between the different models here as the GPU is the same on all three of them. I found in my benchmarks earlier that the NUC8i7BEH actually has a faster CPU than the Hades Canyon NUC that costs twice as much. The GPU is just much weaker. Against this background it’ll be interesting to see if Intel is going to introduce more NUCs with the AMD GPUs than the Crimson Canyon and the Hades Canyon.





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