Hades Canyon NUC box

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Continuing the discussion from Skull Canyon NUC box:

Yes, I am definitely doing this.

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I set up Hades Canyon standalone – I swapped out the drive and RAM into the new box, let Windows 10 work its detect changes magic + installed the special Intel branded Radeon driver – and it is plenty close.

GRID 2 at 1080p (high detail)

Skull Canyon: 59fps avg, 38 min, 71 max
Hades Canyon: 161fps avg, 123fps min, 220fps max 😱

I tested at 4k just for thrills and

Hades Canyon: 87fps avg, 75fps min, 99fps max

Uh… wow? While Skull Canyon with the external thunderbolt attached 1060 GTX is definitely a bit faster, this is really close in performance to that… with no expensive, bulky, power-hungry thunderbolt 3 box required. I think the problem is a lot of reviewers have such a freakish obsession with running “ultra” settings which are just plain dumb most of the time, you couldn’t even pick out the differences in still screenshots, yet the perf cost for that “ultra” moniker is severe.

Granted GRID 2 is not a new game (it’s from 2013), but it still looks amazing and the relative performance difference is staggering – Hades is nearly 3x faster in practice, and Skull was not exactly chopped liver in the GPU department, approaching 1080p on say medium-to-low for most games that weren’t released in the last 18 months.

I tested using GRID Autosport which is one year newer, on high settings (naturally) and:

1080p – 147fps avg, 111 min, 192fps max
4k – 74fps avg, 47fps min, 98fps max

The system itself is not that much bigger, it’s basically a double-stuf version of Skull that’s twice as tall, but the power brick is comically larger, easily quadruple the volume. I guess that makes sense as the power draw is quite high under full load?

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Power-wise, looks like about 60w playing a video, and 140w+ playing a game. I need to test a bit more.

Also, you can control the LED colors of the skull in software, including making the eyes pulse. Yep.

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Outside of hardcore gaming at 4K, or 1080p 120hz “ultra” addictions, it’s difficult to see where the Skull Canyon box isn’t a clear win, if you want something extremely compact.

2

The only real ding on this box is the disappointing lack of 4k / HDR codec support, which is (surprisingly!) AMD’s fault:

Intel’s decision to route all six display outputs to the vastly faster and generally more capable Radeon RX Vega M GPU makes perfect sense for a desktop. But the one area where AMD’s latest GPU still trails Intel is in the media decode block. The Vega GPU can’t decode VP9 Profile 2 - so no YouTube HDR support - and more importantly it doesn’t support the Protected Audio Video Path technology required for UHD Blu-ray playback.

3

Yeah, it’s unbeatable for the size. It’s basically half a Vega 56. Still very expensive, but that will come down.

I see quite a few airholes, time to break out the dremel!

4

I don’t quite understand your post. Which one are you decommissioning, and which one are you recommending?

5

I guess both are recommendable depending on your needs; the Skull Canyon box is down to like $529 on Amazon, whereas Hades Canyon, the beefy model, is $999 — but it also has 3x the GPU power.

Both are statements that you want the absolute physically smallest box with maximum power. If size is not a concern there are less expensive ways.

6

Okay gotcha.

7

I checked on my little backup battery box and the LCD watt readout says between 25 - 30 watts at idle, with the display asleep. That’s not a great result, considering I’ve seen 10w and 15w idle on previous HTPC configs (albeit with way, way less GPU and CPU power). But surely better than the Skull Canyon + Thunderbolt 3 external GPU idle numbers, I’d imagine.

8

Also here’s the blower difference, the doubling of height has a big effect on the cooling.

9

Just curious, but why does it need two Ethernet ports? Does it also act as a switch/repeater?

10

I’d imagine yes, it’s to do a router/switch-less LAN.

11

In ye olden days you could put two modems into a PC and get twice the bandwidth! (Assuming you had two telephone lines.)

12

I updated the BIOS to latest, and also tweaked a few minor settings

  • disabled WiFi (never gonna use it, gigabit wires all the way baby)
  • disabled the SD card reader (ditto)
  • disabled 2nd ethernet port (ditto)
  • enabled “balanced” CPU performance because “max performance” was somehow selected by default (?!)
  • enabled “quiet” fan mode instead of “normal”
  • loaded the built in 2666 Mhz RAM XMP profile, which didn’t load by default for some reason on the official 2666 Mhz RAM I bought for this box

I had done most of this on Skull Canyon as well.

Also @YakAttack on servers you can get 2x the bandwidth by bonding the two ethernet channels. I can’t imagine doing this on a home box unless you were pretty much insane.

13

Also failover, if one port dies, or if you’re using it as a router, you can have WAN/LAN ports.

14

Yeah, it would make an awesome, if rather ridiculously expensive, PFsense box.

15

Dual gigabit ethernet is not that uncommon, it’s not even particularly interesting as a feature. Tons of small boxes with that.

The small boxes with 4+ ethernet ports, those are interesting…

16

Those little Chinese devices with four ports are also intended as little PFsense boxes. But really you don’t need more than two ethernet ports, because you can setup all the VLANs you might need with a managed switch. Technically you don’t need more than one ethernet port to do that, but that’s a bit tricky and I wouldn’t trust it as an edge router.

17

I don’t agree, there really is a lot of value in having at least three ports. That lets you do proper transparent inline deployments with one port for management, one for uplink, one for downlink. With just two built-in ports you’ll probably end up using a USB Ethernet adapter for the management port.

I went through a lot of these small boxes with 3+ Ethernet ports for a project at work a few years ago. The ones I really liked were some from Lanner, since they had one pair of ports with physical bypass. (I used the FW-7525, but the NCA-1510 would probably be the way to go now).

18

I wouldn’t consider PFsense for the enterprise myself, but that’s true enough for enterprise deployments.