Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK Running HyperX Impact 1600MHz and 1866MHz Memory Review

Civilization: Beyond Earth and Metro Last Light

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth –

The first game we’ll be looking at is Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth as it is a fairly popular DirectX 11 game title and isn’t really that graphics intensive once the image quality is lowered down.

We tested at 19201080 with Anti-Aliasing tuned off and with Minimum image quality settings.

Benchmark Results: We found that the Intel HD 6000 graphics did indeed like the additional memory bandwidth that comes from the faster HyperX Impact Black Series memory kit to the tune of about 4.4%. Not a huge improvement, but we’ll take any performance gain on a system with integrated graphics! If you wanted to get more graphics performance you can go into the UEFI and increase the graphics core frequency. WE were able to set the GPU clock up to 1050MHz without any issues and saw another nice boost in performance. A couple FPS here and there will add up to a better gaming experience at the end of the day!

Metro Last Light –

Metro: Last Light is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features action-oriented gameplay with a combination of survival horror elements. It uses the 4A Game engine and was released in May 2013.

Metro: Last Light was benchmarked at 1920×1080 with low image quality settings with the SSAA set to off, Tesselation disabled and and the minimum 4x AF. We used the game titles built-in benchmark (seen above) and ran it 3 times at each screen resolution to ensure accurate results.

Benchmark Results: The Intel HD 6000 graphics don’t have enough horse power to play the more graphically intense game titles out, but we did see a nice performance improvement by moving from a 1600MHz to a 1866MHz memory kit. Even at 1024×768 we were only getting 18.88 FPS on Metro LL and the game was not playable on the Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK.