Comet Lake i7 NUC Review (NUC10i7FNH/K)

Performance

The Comet Lake CPUs are still manufactured with 14 nm process but at least there are six cores available. BIOS version 0037 was used for these benchmarks.

Cinebench R15

Cinebench runs 3 separate benchmarks and provides us figures that are comparable between systems. First a simple 3D car chase that measures mainly the GPU (OpenGL) performance. The result is in frames per second. Second there’s a rendering of 3D model with all cores. This stresses purely the CPU. This test is repeated with single core/thread and using multiple cores and threads.

The CPU test starts with promising results. The single core of the NUC10i7FNK is just a tiny bit faster than the core of NUC8i7BEH. However, there are two more of those cores this time! This gives the Comet Lake i7 NUC a 15.7% advantage over the previous i7 NUC. It’s also clearly faster than the Hades Canyon NUC (NUC8i7HVK) in this test.

The OpenGL test that puts more emphasis on the GPU processing power is another story. The NUC10i7FNK with its UHD Graphics 620 GPU is significantly slower than any of the Coffee Lake NUCs or the Kaby Lake i7 NUC that’s already two years old. Of course all of these are sporting the much more powerful Iris Plus GPU. In any case the Comet Lake i7 NUC is almost 33% slower than the Coffee Lake i7 NUC in this test.

3DMark

My expectations were not high before running the 3DMark as the benchmarking suite tests mainly the video and gaming performance of the computer.

And as expected, the NUC10i7FNK cannot hold a candle to the 2019 NUC models. Of course, this was expected as the NUC10i7FNK CPU has a lower TDP and a worse GPU.

Geekbench 3

Things look again better in Geekbench 3 test where the NUC10i7FNK achieves the highest score I’ve ever measured in the multi-core test. Single core result is on par with the NUC8i7BEH but multicore result is significantly better (+37.4%).

Passmark

Also in the Passmark CPU tests the NUC10i7FNK beats the competition.

Dirt 3

As always, I did run the benchmark of Dirt 3. It’s an older game, but gives you an idea of real world performance.

There’s a strong correlation between the 3DMark results and these scores. Bean Canyon beats Frost Canyon NUC hands down.

Power Consumption

I do use a consumer-grade simple EM240 power meter made by Brennenstuhl to measure the power consumption. There’s no guarantee that any of the readings are 100% accurate, but at least the figures should be comparable between units I’ve reviewed since the same device was used.

Task	Power
Stand-by	2.5 W
Idle, Windows 10 desktop	8.4 W
Watching a 4K video in Kodi, Windows 10	20.4 W
CPU-Z stress test	93 W initially, scales down to 57 W after a while.

The fan noise of the NUC is about the same as previous model. Meaning it’s pretty quiet when not heavily loaded and then again under heavier loads it’s audible. I’d compare the fan noise to a gaming laptop.