Intel NUC NUC10i7FNH Review – Frost Canyon – Comet Lake

Temperature, Power and Noise

When it comes to power consumption we ran Cinebench R20 four times with the a five minute pause between each run while HWiNFO64 was run in the background.

Using the default 2s polling rate we found that the Intel NUC10i7FNHA topped out at 98C on core #2 and the system did thermally throttle during the benchmark. The power limit was exceeded on each core as well, but that is normal for a NUC as Intel generally tunes these tiny systems to reach their power/thermal limits in order to get the best performance from the platform.

With regards to power consumption we noticed that our system would idle at 5.2 to 6.1 Watts with no applications running on the desktop. When we fired up the multi-threaded benchmark in Cinebench R20 we noticed that the power draw at the wall topped out at 96.2 Watts while the Intel Core i7-10710U processor was running at its top turbo clock speeds. When running 3DMark Night Raid we noticed that the CPU was running around 38 Watts at the wall on Game test 1 after turbo boost.

When it comes to the sound level the Intel NUC10i7FNHA was running under 30 dBA at idle, which is lower than our EXTECH sound level meter is accurate at. It is very quiet at idle, so don’t let the open mesh sides be a concern to you about noise levels. At full load with the turbo clocks at their highest the NUC reached 49.9 dBA.