Intel Ghost Canyon NUC9i9QNX Review: NUC 9 Extreme Realizes the SFF Dream
by Ganesh T S on April 16, 2020 8:05 AM ESTMiscellaneous Performance Metrics
This section looks at some of the other commonly used benchmarks representative of the performance of specific real-world applications.
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
We use CINEBENCH R15 for 3D rendering evaluation. The program provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of different PC configurations in all three modes provided us the following results.
The results track what was observed in the media and entertainment category workloads in SPECworkstation 3.
x265 Benchmark
Next up, we have some video encoding benchmarks using x265 v2.8. The appropriate encoder executable is chosen based on the supported CPU features. In the first case, we encode 600 1080p YUV 4:2:0 frames into a 1080p30 HEVC Main-profile compatible video stream at 1 Mbps and record the average number of frames encoded per second.
Our second test case is 1200 4K YUV 4:2:0 frames getting encoded into a 4Kp60 HEVC Main10-profile video stream at 35 Mbps. The encoding FPS is recorded.
The Ghost Canyon NUC surprisingly performs better than systems equipped with CPUs sporting much higher TDPs.
7-Zip
7-Zip is a very effective and efficient compression program, often beating out OpenCL accelerated commercial programs in benchmarks even while using just the CPU power. 7-Zip has a benchmarking program that provides tons of details regarding the underlying CPU's efficiency. In this subsection, we are interested in the compression and decompression rates when utilizing all the available threads for the LZMA algorithm.
Given the brief nature of the benchmark workload and the large number of available threads, it is no surprise that the Ghost Canyon NUC performs significantly better than the rest of the systems in this workload.
Cryptography Benchmarks
Cryptography has become an indispensable part of our interaction with computing systems. Almost all modern systems have some sort of hardware-acceleration for making cryptographic operations faster and more power efficient. In this sub-section, we look at two different real-world applications that may make use of this acceleration.
BitLocker is a Windows features that encrypts entire disk volumes. While drives that offer encryption capabilities are dealt with using that feature, most legacy systems and external drives have to use the host system implementation. Windows has no direct benchmark for BitLocker. However, we cooked up a BitLocker operation sequence to determine the adeptness of the system at handling BitLocker operations. We start off with a 2.5GB RAM drive in which a 2GB VHD (virtual hard disk) is created. This VHD is then mounted, and BitLocker is enabled on the volume. Once the BitLocker encryption process gets done, BitLocker is disabled. This triggers a decryption process. The times taken to complete the encryption and decryption are recorded. This process is repeated 25 times, and the average of the last 20 iterations is graphed below.
The BitLocker benchmark results are a bit surprising, particularly given the clear performance benefits of the Core i9-9980HK for cryptography applications in the other applications below.
Creation of secure archives is best done through the use of AES-256 as the encryption method while password protecting ZIP files. We re-use the benchmark mode of 7-Zip to determine the AES256-CBC encryption and decryption rates using pure software as well as AES-NI. Note that the 7-Zip benchmark uses a 48KB buffer for this purpose.
As expected, the 8C/16T configuration allows for fast encryption and decryption irrespective of the use of pure software or AES-NI instructions.
Yet another cryptography application is secure network communication. OpenSSL can take advantage of the acceleration provided by the host system to make operations faster. It also has a benchmark mode that can use varying buffer sizes. We recorded the processing rate for a 8KB buffer using the hardware-accelerated AES256-CBC-HAC-SHA1 feature.
These results are not surprising given the core count and operating frequency profile of the CPU in the Ghost Canyon NUC.
Agisoft Photoscan
Agisoft PhotoScan is a commercial program that converts 2D images into 3D point maps, meshes and textures. The program designers sent us a command line version in order to evaluate the efficiency of various systems that go under our review scanner. The command line version has two benchmark modes, one using the CPU and the other using both the CPU and GPU (via OpenCL). We present the results from our evaluation using the CPU mode only. The benchmark (v1.3) takes 84 photographs and does four stages of computation:
- Stage 1: Align Photographs (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 2: Build Point Cloud (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 3: Build Mesh
- Stage 4: Build Textures
We record the time taken for each stage. Since various elements of the software are single threaded, and others multithreaded, it is interesting to record the effects of CPU generations, speeds, number of cores, and DRAM parameters using this software.
The Ghost Canyon NUC is better than any of the other considered systems across all Photoscan stages.
Dolphin Emulator
Wrapping up our application benchmark numbers is the new Dolphin Emulator (v5) benchmark mode results. This is again a test of the CPU capabilities.
In fact, the 249s taken by the Ghost Canyon NUC is the fastest amongst all SFF PCs we have evaluated with this benchmark.
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buckiller - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
Power pig. Hades Canyon was great, but this is hot trash, relative to expectations set by last-gen and perf/power capabilities that are possible today.> The Ghost Canyon NUC9i9QNX is a SFF enthusiast's dream come true.
Ooph. Hardly.
Dolda2000 - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
I have to admit that I still don't really see the point of this system. It seems that its main gimmick is the fact that what is essentially the motherboard plugs into a PCIe riser card. That's fine and useful and all, but PCIe riser boards and cables are nothing new, and I don't really see what this does that hasn't already been doable for quite some time. You can replace the compute element? Sure, but being able to replace motherboards is nothing new to most form factors. Please do enlighten me if I'm missing something.Dragonstongue - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
the series adds the ability for end-users to add a standard PCIe video card to the system system.to the system's system ... or just to the system..
as for folks complain about the price, CPU alone is ~580 USD .. RTX 2070 mini ~539
so there is over $1k right there
I personally wouldn't be buying NUC "overall" based on should be Ryzen A and B absolutely not given seems Intel is "up to their same old BS tricks" via "preventing" folks from offering AMD based options available...
Destoya - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
$580 CPU, you have to be kidding. Nobody, including OEMs, pays the tray MSRP intel has listed.If you want to look at it in terms of value, it has the same performance as a Ryzen 3600 ($175)...
Deicidium369 - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
First off, there are no OEMs, it is single source Intel. I love Intel NUCs - not sure what the use case for this model is.Namisecond - Friday, April 17, 2020 - link
I don't think Intel manufactures those CPU cards (soldered BGA CPUs). They're probably integrated by a 3rd party OEM like Foxxcon. It's one thing to have engineering samples, but for Intel to step into the motherboard manufacturing game requires a lot of capital resources...unless the NUC parts are actually going to be made at Intel's engineering labs...If it's a production run in the 10Ks...that just might be feasible.Deicidium369 - Friday, April 17, 2020 - link
And like I said there are no OEMs available for you to buy from - single source - Intel. I thought I saw something a few years ago about possibly PNY - I know they do the Nvidia branded graphics cards.BlazingDragon - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
The article is misleading... and very Intel biased, IMHO.The ~$1500 USD price is for the i9 barebones kit only... just compute element [w/CPU], daughter board and PSU - i.e. not including a GPU, DRAM memory or SSD - that's why it's so outlandish...
Good ITX m/board & Ryzen 3900x CPU, plus really nice case and PSU is << $900 USD.
Deicidium369 - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
So a review of a product from Intel is very Intel biased.... That has to be a huge conspira-plotBlazingDragon - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link
A review of anything can be positive or negative on that thing... and is unbiased if it seems balanced and fair in that criticism [be it positive or negative].If said article seems to over exaggerate the positives, and/or misrepresent them, and miss out or under call some of the negatives, then yes, it's biased... and IMHO, that's exactly what this article does...