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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Pretty decent GPU performance, 80% performance of the non-overclocked 4790K, which is my go to desktop processor these days. And it has 40% of the performance of the top end processors available.

The GPU is rated 1,921 on the PassMark website, which is about 6x slower than the top GPUs. It is 3x slower than what were mid-range GPUs 4 years ago. It is okay-ish, but it is pretty slow compared to what is available.

Thus it is a good desktop machine for non-3D workflows. Like using Word or Web Browsing at 4K. I can not imagine anyone having problems with that. It will likely be quite snappy.

I think anyone interested in 3D games will be dissatisfied with the GPU performance, and that will be very pronounced at high screen (4K) resolutions.

I could see picking these up for our non-developer non-content creator employees. But not for our developers or 3D artists.

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Web browsing at 4K is a surprisingly expensive task in itself. I own a Surface Book and one of my biggest gripes (aside from the broken firmware) is that the integrated GPU is too weak to drive browser rendering fast enough to keep up with the touch screen on the vast majority of websites* . This gets a lot worse when hooked up to an actual external 4k display - the scrolling latency is pretty unpleasant.

* It seems that they optimized Edge to have really good scrolling performance, but ff/chrome/opera all have serious scrolling issues.

I have the same problem globally in Linux. On dual 4k monitors, scrolling isn't an animation so much as it's a slow progression of frames in a slideshow.

I notice the same with a maximized Firefox on 4K, but it became much snappier after I deactivated smooth scrolling in about:config. For fullscreen videos in Firefox, it helps to suspend compositing (Alt+Shift+F12 in KWin).

This is not the 21st century we all signed for...

Why is it smooth under OS X?

Seems to be Linux-only problem. Care to check for driver updates, and that GPU rendering is actually enabled?

FWIW, I run 2d desktop apps and the web browser at 2560x1440@144Hz just fine on my NUC6i7KYK. I use a non-composited desktop with DRI3 turned on. Tear-free in chromium (since it does internal compositing buffering) and perfectly smooth.

I find fanless designs that use Intel NUCs, or similar, way more interesting [1-5]. If I want power, I'd do a custom build and use a much bigger form factor for better cooling and FLOPS/$.

[1] http://www.fit-pc.com/web/

[2] http://www.logicsupply.com/

[3] http://www.aleutia.com/computers/

[4] http://www.cirrus7.com/produkte

[5] http://www.fanlesstech.com/

Well obviously this is a "performance" NUC but it surprises me they don't offer a Core-M model (price?), which would facilitate a fanless 'kit', without specialised 3rd-party housing.

I don't need the performance, so if I'd probably go with the budget sensitive Celeron-based Brix that is fanless. Braswell based, so I guess Apollo Lake will be another year away.

Yes, I couldn't agree more. All of the ones I posted above are fanless. There are many cases that would allow you to build a fanless NUC by replacing Intel's case.

If you want extra 3d juice I guess you can connect one of these to a Thunderbolt 3 external gpu.

This has Thunderbolt 3 with 40Gbps output, so once the external chassis start coming out you can use an external GTX 1080 with this.

> word at 4k

why, that's certainly not a striking argument

Well, you could tape your screen around to just show 1080p

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