Skull Canyon NUC box

Polaris 10 will be out by then and it should offer an incredibly compelling value-- 970-class performance on the cheap. That new alpha could be pretty dang cool.

Wumpus, past a certain point, caring about energy usage on a device plugged into the wall pretty much defines “cool toy” to me. It’s like that thin iMac screen. It’s cool, but do I really give a shit on a non-mobile device? No, I do not.

Even a Geforce 1080 idles at <10 watts when you aren’t gaming with it.

Actually, the 1080 idles at roughly between 1 and 30 watts. That chart is FPS per watt, which is… something else entirely.

The 960M call was accurate, comparing more deeply what is in Skull Canyon (Iris Pro 580) is on par with the Radeon 7770 and its rebranded cousin the R7 250. It is mildly slower depending on the resolution, but absolutely in the ballpark of these two video cards.

bloggered

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-golden-age-of-x86-gaming/

It’s neat that intel finally managed to release an integrated GPU worth a goddamn.

Based on what AMD has been hinting, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if their AIB partners like Sapphire release cool/slick thunderbolt 3 docks with integrated Polaris 10 GPUs at roughly R9-390/GTX970-class performance for a very reasonable price. That would be fuh-mazing. We’ll know at the end of the month when they finally announce POlaris.

Yeah a smaller, cheaper thunderbolt 3 external GPu could be amazing. Even a “mediocre” midrange GPU is gonna still be faster than skull canyon, it has way more watt budget to work with…

I was skeptical but I have come around to your way of thinking on this stusser

Huh. Mating a mediocre, cheap (but probably enough for games) I5-5200U with a pretty high end mobile GPU leads to… more mixed results than you would think:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9660/zotac-zbox-magnus-en970-review-a-gaming-minipc-done-right

Compare with AnandTech’s review of the Skull Canyon:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10343/the-intel-skull-canyon-nuc6i7kyk-minipc-review

What mixed results? That GTX960 smoked the skull canyon integrated GPU in every test.

Everything other than gaming suffered pretty bad perf wise. It is exactly the same broadwell 15w tdp I got in the scooter computers from Ali express. Those idle at 7w, but add the mobile gpu and idle becomes a whopping 19w. I measured my Skull Canyon at 13w with display sleeping.

Basically bad cpu value for the price.

Too bad nvidia won’t sell mobile Gpus to consumers, if we had a m.2 like slot for GPUs…

Well, sure. You’re comparing a 3.5Ghz 45w skywell i7 with 128MB L4 cache against a 2.7Ghz 15w broadwell i5 with no L4. I would expect a huge performance difference from that power envelope alone!

It does show that games don’t give a shit about CPU like we knew.

Still these external thunderbolt GPU boxes you are so amped about are expensive as fuck and vapor ware at the moment.

That said I would love to see a (relatively…) cheap Radeon fury nano repackaged in a small thunderbolt 3 enclosure with its own power supply, something substantially smaller and cheaper than the razer core . Let’s see if it happens…

Yes like most cool tech, TB3 docks are delayed beyond belief and the first generation will be overpriced to boot. But there’s no reason why no-name chinese companies couldn’t make them too, and they will, once the market is established as existing.

AMD was a major partner in the TB3 eGPU announcements, and they’re releasing Polaris at Computex at the end of the month. I expect we will see TB3 docks with integrated eGPUs, but they won’t be high-end enthusiast 175w GPUs like the Fury Nano. We’ll definitely see integrated Polaris 11 (roughly GTX950 performance, similar to your NUC) and likely Polaris 10 (roughly R9 390/GTX970 performance).

Primary question there is pricing; full-featured USB3 docks sell for over $200, so $300 for a TB3 dock with an integrated polaris 11 (and a bunch more USB ports, ethernet, displayport, audio, etc) would be quite attractive.

Also, interesting to compare older Nvidia Gt 650m numbers here

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested/8
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested/9
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested/7

Looks like Skull Canyon is on par with the 650m for sure, if you look at Sleeping Dogs and Tomb Raider 2013 and Bioshock Infinite numbers…

One thing that’s kinda nice about running the games more locally on the Skull Canyon HTPC: I can “reverse stream” to my big rig for older games since there’s plenty of oomph for them – and the HTPC is never EVER turned off, or at a lock screen.

I still got mad love for my Skull Canyon NUC. This little box is great. I can play two player Lego Jurassic World at 1080p with zero perceptible slowdown. And it’s down to $589 on Amazon finally:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DJ9XS52

I did experience some weirdness when I changed my TV from 1080p plasma, to 4k OLED. Updating video drivers seemed to fix that. There’s also some gnarly looking recent firmware updates for HDMI (??) and Thunderbolt:

So it goes for being on the cutting edge of hardware, I suppose.

Aside from the cool form factor and power consumption, the rather elderly Alienware Alpha remains a better home theater gaming PC. Cheaper and faster.

If they refreshed the Alpha with a 1060 or 480 it would be amaaaaaazing.

Cheaper? Which one, Newegg has four models, from $329 to $870.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&Description=alienware+alpha

The closest core i7 equivalent is $640, whereas the Skull Canyon NUC is $589 on Amazon at the moment. Granted you need to add RAM ($50?) and a SSD. But that SSD is gonna blow the crummy 1TB HDD in these boxes away.

The cheaper one has a “NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2 GB GDDR5” which… er… I don’t even know what that is? “a custom Nvidia GPU based on the popular GeForce 860M”

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-860M.107794.0.html

obama-notbad.gif

Let me ask you, though – how, pray tell, do you upgrade the video card in that Alienware Alpha? Because on my Skull Canyon box, I just plug in this thunderbolt 3 cable… and 3 years from now I can be running games in 4k on this very same box, with its quite good CPU / memory / SSD config, no problem.

The CPU speed doesn’t matter for HTPC duties or gaming. You can’t upgrade it, that’s why I said it would be sweet if they refreshed with a new model.

Report on DDR4 memory speeds affecting perf with Skull Canyon:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10602/memory-frequency-scaling-on-skull-canyon

Spoiler alert, no practical effect on performance.

I’ve had an Alienware Alpha for just over a year (the original version with an i3) and it’s been a surprisingly capable machine. But man it’s been crippled by its 5400RPM drive like crazy.

I finally bit the bullet and got an SSD for $50-60 and holy shit it’s like a brand new computer. It’s seriously unbelievable how massive a difference it makes. We’re talking exponential differences, not even just multiple times different.

The HTPC boots from power-off to the Windows 10 login screen in under 10 seconds instead of in 1-2 minutes. Navigating around the OS is instant in everything I do, not an utter chore that I need to wait on every step of the way.

My over-the-air DVR records without glitches now. My wi-fi security camera can record at a higher frame rate. Games and files download faster. And more.

I’ve known for years just how big of a difference SSDs can make, but I forgot just how big of a difference it can make.

Cloning the drive was also super easy. I used this adapter to attach the new internal SSD via USB. Then I used Macrium Reflect (free version) to clone the internal 5400 RPM HDD to the SSD currently attached via USB. Then I simply opened up the case following Alienware’s straightforward instructions.

Booted up the device, and everything quite literally magically just worked. I can’t believe how easy it was.