Intel NUC10i7FNH Frost Canyon Review: Hexa-Core NUC Delivers a Mixed Bag
by Ganesh T S on March 2, 2020 9:00 AM ESTSmall form-factor (SFF) PCs and gaming systems have represented the bulk of the growing segment in the PC market over the last few years. Intel's NUC line-up has enjoyed unprecedented success, prompting the company to branch off the NUC family to target a variety of market segments and price points. Continuing that momentum, in November 2019, Intel announced the NUC10 series in their line of mainstream ultra-compact form-factor (UCFF) systems, bumping up their NUCs to using the company's latest Comet Lake processors.
More recently, Intel finally began sampling the systems for review, sending us the NUC10i7FNHAA - an Intel NUC10 Mini-PC with Windows 10. The system sports a 256GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB 2.5" hard drive along with a pre-installed copy of Windows 10 Home x64. Traditionally, most SFF PCs we evaluate sport a single storage device, so the inclusion of hybrid storage is stil a bit of an unsteady eara for vendors who are not Apple. In fact, it's so uncommon that this is the first hybrid storage system to cross my desk; Intel's latest NUC doesn't really have any peers as far as any other reviewed systems are concerned.
To that end, we've decided to simplify things a bit for Frost Canyon and take out the 2.5" HDD – essentially reducing it to the barebones version of this NUC, the NUC10i7FNH. This makes for better apples-to-apples comparisons, and in particular avoids the power and performance drag from having rotating rust in the storage mix.
So how does Intel's first Comet Lake NUC fare? Let's find out.
Introduction and Platform Analysis
The NUC10i7FNH is Intel's mainstream HDD-kit NUC with a 100mm x 100mm main-board housed in a 117 x 112 x 51mm chassis. The board comes with a soldered processor - the Core i7-10710U. This belongs to the Comet Lake-U family, and is the first U-series processor with 6 cores and hyper-threading enabled. Thanks to Intel's use of cTDP-up, the TDP of the processor is nominally at 25W, though the default BIOS settings set the PL1 (sustained) and PL2 (burst mode) levels to 30W and 64W respectively. Meanwhile the PL1 Time Window is set to 28 seconds by default.
Switching to peripherals and networking, the board's WLAN component is also soldered - the Wi-Fi 6 AX201 enables the NUC10 family to be the first UCFF PC from Intel to come with Wi-Fi 6 / 802.11ax support. As for storage, for the barebones version end-users have the flexibility to choose their own storage device and RAM. For best performance, a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD can be used, and DDR4-2666 SODIMMs are supported. The system also comes with a host of value-additions such as a quad-microphone array in the front panel, and an infrared receiver (strangely disabled by default in the BIOS).
Our NUC10i7FNHAA sample came with the following components pre-installed:
- Kingston Design-In SSD U-SNS8154P3/256GJ (essentially an OEM version of the Kingston A1000) PCIe 3.0 x2 NVMe SSD
- 2x Kingston ValueRAM KVR26S19S8/8 DDR4 SODIMM for 16GB of DRAM
- Seagate ST1000VT001 1TB 5400RPM 2.5" Video HDD
The hard drive is connected to the board using a slender ribbon cable that can be easily slotted in and out, as shown in the picture below. Our evaluation was processed with the hard drive disconnected completely from the board.
The specifications of our Intel NUC10i7FNH review configuration are summarized in the table below.
Intel NUC10i7FNH (Frost Canyon) Specifications | |
Processor | Intel Core i7-10710U Comet Lake-U, 6C/12T, 1.1 (4.7) GHz 12MB L2+L3, 14nm (optimized), 25W TDP |
Memory | Kingston ValueRAM KVR26S19S8/8 DDR4 SODIMM 19-19-19-43 @ 2666 MHz 2x8 GB |
Graphics | Intel UHD Graphics |
Disk Drive(s) | Kingston Design-In SSD U-SNS8154P3/256GJ (256 GB; M.2 Type 2280 PCIe 3.0 x2 NVMe; Toshiba 64L 3D TLC) (Phison E8-based, similar to the Kingston A1000) |
Networking | Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 (2x2 802.11ax - 2400 Mbps) 1x Intel I219-V Gigabit Ethernet Controller |
Audio | 3.5mm Headphone Jack Capable of 5.1/7.1 digital output with HD audio bitstreaming (HDMI) |
Miscellaneous I/O Ports | 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-A (rear) 1x Thunderbolt 3 Type-C (rear) 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-A (front) 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-C (front) 1x SDXC (side) |
Operating System | Retail unit is barebones, but we installed Windows 10 Enterprise x64 NUC10i7FNHAA comes with Windows 10 Home x64 pre-installed |
Pricing (As configured) | $605 (barebones) $752 (as configured) $940 (NUC10i7FNHAA Bundle with 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 256GB SSD, and Windows 10 Home x64) |
Full Specifications | Intel Frost Canyon NUC Kit - NUC10i7FNH Specifications Intel Frost Canyon NUC Mini-PC - NUC10i7FNHAA Specifications |
The contents of the package include a 120W power adapter, and an additional screw for a M.2 SSD. Since the 2.5" drive comes pre-installed, the ribbon cable for the SATA data and power is already inside the system. Other components of the package include a US power cord, safety information, and a product manual.
The Visual BIOS has undergone a major re-design for the NUC10 series. While the core functionality has obviously not changed, the screens are more streamlined - a vertical organization of the various options compared to a horizontal-heavy layout in the BIOS for the older models. A new set of value-added features include the ability to configure a RAM disk in the BIOS, mount iSCSI volumes prior to boot, and set up various network interface characteristics. Given that these are the first NUCs to support up to 64GB of DRAM, the ability to configure RAM disks is welcome.
The block diagram of the components on the board are presented in the diagram below.
The AIDA64 system report provides a breakdown of the usage of the PCIe lanes and confirms the above block diagram:
- PCIe 3.0 x4 port #5 In Use @ x4 (Intel Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 Controller)
- PCIe 3.0 x4 port #9 In Use @ x2 (Phison PS5008 PCIe 3.0 x2 NVMe 1.2 SSD Controller)
- PCIe 3.0 x1 port #14 In Use @ x1 (Genesys Logic PCI-E Card Reader)
In the table below, we have an overview of the various systems that we are comparing the Intel NUC10i7FNH against. Note that they may not belong to the same market segment. The relevant configuration details of the machines are provided so that readers have an understanding of why some benchmark numbers are skewed for or against the Intel NUC10i7FNH when we come to those sections.
Comparative PC Configurations | ||
Aspect | Intel NUC10i7FNH (Frost Canyon) | |
CPU | Intel Core i7-10710U | Intel Core i7-10710U |
GPU | Intel UHD Graphics | Intel UHD Graphics |
RAM | Kingston ValueRAM KVR26S19S8/8 DDR4 SODIMM 19-19-19-43 @ 2666 MHz 2x8 GB |
Kingston ValueRAM KVR26S19S8/8 DDR4 SODIMM 19-19-19-43 @ 2666 MHz 2x8 GB |
Storage | Kingston Design-In SSD U-SNS8154P3/256GJ (256 GB; M.2 Type 2280 PCIe 3.0 x2 NVMe; Toshiba 64L 3D TLC) (Phison E8-based, similar to the Kingston A1000) |
Kingston Design-In SSD U-SNS8154P3/256GJ (256 GB; M.2 Type 2280 PCIe 3.0 x2 NVMe; Toshiba 64L 3D TLC) (Phison E8-based, similar to the Kingston A1000) |
Wi-Fi | Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 (2x2 802.11ax - 2400 Mbps) |
Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 (2x2 802.11ax - 2400 Mbps) |
Price (in USD, when built) | $605 (barebones) $752 (as configured) $940 (NUC10i7FNHAA Bundle with 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 256GB SSD, and Windows 10 Home x64) |
$605 (barebones) $752 (as configured) $940 (NUC10i7FNHAA Bundle with 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 256GB SSD, and Windows 10 Home x64) |
85 Comments
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ganeshts - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
Has been discussed ad-nauseam.If you don't like Bapco's SYSmark, feel free to skip the section.
We believe it presents credible comparison points because it uses *publicly available builds of commercially used software*. The same Adobe applications and MS Office applications are going to be used by consumers whether they have an Intel-based machine or an AMD-based machine.
FWIW, the Frost Canyon numbers in SYSmark actually show that there is no major gains in the benchmark to be had with the addition of the two cores compared to Bean Canyon. Whether people like it or not, most real-world applications fall back on single-threaded performance - Here, Bean Canyon and Frost Canyon are essentially neck-to-neck.
Irata - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
I know this has been discussed a lot, but isn‘t the consensus that it cannot be used as it‘s essentially an Intel sponsored benchmark. I mean nVidia, AMD and Via pulled out for a reason.Also, they have a history of skewing results by stressing certain tasks that feature specific CPU architectures over others going back to the P4 days. Why should this be different now?
James5mith - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
I have 64GB of RAM in my Bean Canyon NUC running VM's right now. How is this the first one to support it?ganeshts - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
The keyword is 'officially supported'Max Memory Size is 32GB on this page: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
MDD1963 - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
Pg 1 "... is stil a bit of an unsteady eara" Eara? :)Zok - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
Ugh. Come on! Give me a NUC with 2+ NICs.snowsurferDS - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
The AsRock mini 300 should be tested with a 3400G not a 2400G, at least.dontlistentome - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
Prices keep on going up for no reason (seriously, why should this be so much more epensive than the i7s of a few years ago?).And that power consumption? 64W peak.
next gen the power brick will be bigger than the NUC box.
alpha754293 - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
It's too bad that the thermal management design on these systems are so bad that under heavy CPU and/or CPU+GPU load, it's runs very quickly against the thermal limit, and therefore; has to start throttling itself due to the thermals.If the system had a better thermal management solution and was ACTUALLY able to run at full load for extended period of time, in this form factor, then it would be worth it, else, having a 6-core processor in there is so pointless since you can't even make full use of the previous 4-core CPU in the NUC8.
This is my biggest complaint about my two NUC8s that I have. If it had better thermal management so it wouldn't throttle itself due to thermals, it would present a compelling argument against, for example, the Mac Mini.
ROD.LEE - Tuesday, March 3, 2020 - link
was thinking of upgrading from my NUC8I7BEK, after your review, umm no.