Intel’s high-performance Skull Canyon NUC that launched back in 2016 was extremely popular and provided a great platform in a very small form factor. Well for 2018 Intel will be releasing a new high-performance NUC, codenamed Hades Canyon and we got a first hand look at it during CES.
The Hades Canyon NUC is slightly larger than the Skull Canyon NUC with official dimensions of 21mm x 142mm x 39mm. This new NUC will make use of a Kaby Lake-G chip, which makes use of Intel CPU cores and AMD Radeon graphics cores. News about these new chips broke back in November, and the Hades Canyon NUC is the perfect device for this new chip. There will be two different SKUs for the Hades Canyon NUC. First you’ll have the $999 NUC8i7HVK which features the 100W TDP unlocked Core i7-8809G. Then you’ll have the $799 NUC8i7HNK which has the 65W TDP Core i7-8705G.
Besides the different processors the features are the same on both units. These new NUCs are loaded with connectivity, on the front you have two USB 3.1 ports (1x Type-A / 1x Type-C), one USB 3.0 charging port, HDMI, 3.5 mm audio, and a card reader.
On the back you have two Thunderbolt 3.0 (Type-C), two mini-DisplayPort, two Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.0, and one HDMI. You also get Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC + Bluetooth 4.2.
One noticeable different feature on the Hades Canyon NUC is the “Skull” logo which illuminates with RGB lighting and can be customized. If you have the lighting off the Skull cannot be seen at all, which is great for anyone who is not a fan of the skull.
Both of these units will start shipping in March. While we did not get a demo of the unit working, Intel did tell us the $999 unit had gaming performance comparable to a GTX 1060.
