Gaming Benchmarks

The Skull Canyon NUC was the first NUC from Intel that was specifically aimed at gamers, but Intel has never had a great reputation among enthusiasts or gamers for being great for gaming. In the past, the integrated Intel GPU has always been fairly minor, and most gamers replaced it with a discrete GPU as soon as they could. With the Iris series, that all changes. While the Iris 580 is not going to run the latest AAA games on Ultra at 4k, it will play MMO and eSports titles such as Overwatch and League of Legends without a hiccup, and we believe that is the market Intel is aiming for with the Skull Canyon series. The good news is that you can hook up an external GPU via the Thunderbolt 3.0 port should you want to use the NUC for AAA titles. We will take a deeper look into this capability in the conclusion.













We ran a pretty large variety of games, everything from Rocket League to Metro Last Light Redux, a very demanding game. We also ran the NUC through an all-nighter of Overwatch and a couple hours of the latest DOOM game and were pleasantly surprised. While DOOM FPS was not exactly on the enjoyable side, it was playable, which is really impressive given it is a fairly new AAA game. Alongside Diablo 3, Overwatch was just as enjoyable, partially thanks to the wizards at Blizzard for optimizing their games better than any other developer.



Overall, we were so impressed with how this tiny little NUC performed. Not only did it beat (again) the much larger and way more power hungry Skulltrail setup, it was actually a pleasant experience to use. So pleasant in fact that we ended up playing some of the games for several hours before realizing we still had many more to test. Now, the guys over at r/pcmasterrace may disagree about not having a constant 60+ FPS while gaming, but fortunately, Intel has a solution for that. Since the unit has Thunderbolt 3.0 Type C, it is fully compatible with the Razer Core, which is their solution for housing an external GPU. Unfortunately, this unit from Razer is $500, but Akitio has shown off their Node unit which has the same functionality as the Razer box, for only $300, though B&H currently has it listed as a preorder for $249. We were hoping to get one of these in time for the article, but have not been able to find one in stock anywhere. Regardless, you have the ability to add a full desktop NVIDIA GTX 1080 to enable proper 4k gaming of AAA titles.