Intel Hades Canyon NUC8i7HVK NUC Review – Radeon RX Vega M GPU

Power Consumption and CPU Temperatures

No review is complete without checking the power numbers, so we plugged the Intel NUC NUC8i7HVK into a P3 P4400 Kill A Watt power meter to see how much power the system uses.

We found the NUC8i7HVK running Windows 10 in balanced mode used 13.5 Watts of power from the wall outlet at idle. When watching Youtube 1080P videos we averaged 45.5 Watts of power draw. When playing Far Cry 5 at 1920 x 1080 with normal image quality settings we hit 190 Watts. Our peak number was observed at 212 Watts when we ran the AIDA64 system stability test on both the CPU and the GPU. The AC Adapter that comes with this model is only capable of outputting 230 Watts, so we are super close to be power limited and we aren’t running the storage drives at full load or any unnecessary USB devices plugged in.

When it comes to temperatures, AIDA64 reported that the Intel Core i7-8809G processor hit 90C on the CPU package as two of the cores had maximum temps that high. No thermal throttling took place as the CPU package didn’t go over 100C, but this is a toasty little system. Note that this stability test was done with the default settings and that the local disks and graphics card were not stressed. Our ambient room temperature was 74F or 23.3C when we ran this test.

With stress added to the GPU we managed to hit 94C and still had no thermal throttling taking place.

Let’s wrap this review up!