Comet Lake i7 NUC Review (NUC10i7FNH/K)

It is again that time of the year when Intel’s latest mainstream NUCs hit the shelves. This is the bread and butter 4×4 inch NUC that has existed since the beginning of the Intel NUC era. Usually people refer to the NUCs by their code name, which in the case of this NUC is Frost Canyon or by the code name of the CPU: Comet Lake. So this is the Frost Canyon NUC or the Comet Lake NUC – you’ll see both names being used. Some refer to it only as NUC10. The Comet Lake NUC is available with dual-core i3 CPU, quad-core i5 CPU or a hexa-core i7 CPU. We’ll start our review round with the i7 model that was kindly loaned to me by TeraStore.

The Comet Lake i7 NUC comes in two variants: NUC10i7FNH with a taller case and a 2.5″ SATA drive slot and NUC10i7FNK in a more compact case without the drive slot. The model we have here in this review is the compact NUC10i7FNK. The only difference between these two models is the case though – the mainboard and the CPU are the same in both units.

Specifications

The key features of the Comet Lake NUC are listed below.

• Intel Core i7-10710U CPU (hexa-core with HT, 25W TDP, 12M Cache, up to 4.70 GHz)
• Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU (up to 1.15 GHz, 24 EUs)
• 2x DDR4-2666 SO-DIMM RAM slots, max. 64 GB
• M.2 slot with PCIe X4 lanes (22×42 and 22×80 form factors supported), Optane support
• Display connectivity: One HDMI 2.0a port and one USB Type-C port with DisplayPort 1.2
• 7.1 digital audio over HDMI/DP, 3.5mm headset jack on front panel
• USB ports: 2x front (Type-A, Type-C) and 3x rear USB 3.1 Gen2 (2x Type-A, Type-C); 2x USB 2.0 via internal headers
• Gigabit Ethernet port (Intel i219-V)
• Wireless 802.11ax adapter integrated (Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200) with Bluetooth 5
• Thunderbolt 3 on USB Type-C port
• Full size SDXC card reader
• Quad array microphone, IR receiver, Kensington lock…
• Dimensions: 117x112x38 mm (for the NUC10i7FNK model in test), 117x112x51 mm (the taller NUC10i7FNH model with a SATA slot)

The full technical product specifications are available here (75-page PDF document).

What’s New?

So it looks like the NUCs before it, but what has changed? Well, this is basically an incremental update when compared to the NUC8i7BEH that is the predecessor of this NUC. Remember, there was no NUC9 when it comes to the mainstream NUCs.

Of course, the most obvious update is the CPU. Instead of the quad-core i7-8559U CPU that was based on the 8th generation Coffee Lake architecture there is a hexa-core i7-10710U CPU that is based on 10th generation Comet Lake architecture. Mind you, both are still manufactured using the 14 nm process. This time also the Core i7 model is available in the slim, compact case.

The GPU change looks initially like a step backwards though. Instead of the relatively potent Iris Plus Graphics 655 GPU (48 execution units and 128MB eDRAM cache) in the NUC8i7BEH we now have the older Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU (24 executions units, no eDRAM) in place. The TDP of the CPU/GPU package has been decreased to 25 watts instead of 28 watts, most likely due to the GPU change.

The maximum amount of RAM has been doubled from 32GB of DDR4-2400 to 64GB of DDR4-2666.

The integrated WiFi adapter supports WiFi 6 (802.11ax) now, one of the front USB ports is now a Type-C port and there’s a quad array microphone instead of dual microphone array. Oh, and the micro SD card reader has been changed into a full size SD card reader.

Assembling

Intel NUCs are barebones PCs which means that you’ll need to add your own RAM and storage. The box contains only the NUC itself.

I’ve decided to use the following components in my review:

• Intel NUC10i7FNK (currently $598.95 on Amazon)
• 2×16 GB DDR4-2666 RAM modules (two Kingston KVR26S19D8/16 modules, currently $68.70 each on Amazon)
• WD Blue SN500 250 GB NVMe SSD (M.2 22×80 form factor, newer and better SN550 version currently $54.99 on Amazon)

I’ve used Kingston RAM without issues for years in my NUCs and the RAM I’m using is part of their standard ValueRAM line. The WD Blue SN500 is a low-cost NVMe SSD drive. At that price point there’s little reason to look at slower M.2 SATA SSD drives. Since my purchase the SN500 has been replaced by the SN550 model that’s a bit faster.

If you would like to configure a NUC of your own take a look at our NUC Guru tool. It will provide you with a list of recommended components and a shopping list you can use to easily order your NUC for a competitive price.

If you’ve built a NUC before this is all going to be familiar to you. You’ll start by unfastening the four screws that hold the bottom plate in place.

You’ll see the bottom (or is it the top?) of the mainboard.

Next step is to insert the memory modules into their slots until you hear a clicking sound. Finally unfasten the small screw that will hold the M.2 drive in place, insert the drive into it’s slot and replace the screw.

Now you’re ready to close the bottom cover and start your NUC after connecting the necessary cables for power and your peripherals.

Teardown

What else can we find inside that tiny case? Let’s do a quick teardown to see. The WiFi antennas have to be disconnected very carefully in order to not break the connectors. They’re really small and pretty fragile (learned that the hard way once).

The mainboard can be removed after unfastening the two black screws that hold it in place.

Once we flip the board we can see the cooling solution. It seems to be very similar as the one used on NUC8.

Finally, after detaching the fan the heat sink solution is visible and again that looks very familiar.

64 GB Should Be Enough for Everybody…

Ok, so this NUC officially supports 64 GB of RAM unlike the ones that came before it. The thing is there are not that many 32 GB RAM modules available that work with this NUC. However, the Samsung RAM M471A4G43MB1 ($129.95 per module on Amazon) that I tested on the NUC seems to work flawlessly.

The RAM was detected in the OS and in the BIOS as expected and works at full 2667 MHz rate. What’s there more to say, it’s memory and it works, eh?

For some reason the new Visual BIOS does not have a screenshot functionality like the old one did. However, I captured a short video if you’re interested in the various options available:

The Comet Lake CPUs are still manufactured with 14 nm process but at least there are six cores available. BIOS version 0037 was used for these benchmarks.

Cinebench R15

Cinebench runs 3 separate benchmarks and provides us figures that are comparable between systems. First a simple 3D car chase that measures mainly the GPU (OpenGL) performance. The result is in frames per second. Second there’s a rendering of 3D model with all cores. This stresses purely the CPU. This test is repeated with single core/thread and using multiple cores and threads.

The CPU test starts with promising results. The single core of the NUC10i7FNK is just a tiny bit faster than the core of NUC8i7BEH. However, there are two more of those cores this time! This gives the Comet Lake i7 NUC a 15.7% advantage over the previous i7 NUC. It’s also clearly faster than the Hades Canyon NUC (NUC8i7HVK) in this test.

The OpenGL test that puts more emphasis on the GPU processing power is another story. The NUC10i7FNK with its UHD Graphics 620 GPU is significantly slower than any of the Coffee Lake NUCs or the Kaby Lake i7 NUC that’s already two years old. Of course all of these are sporting the much more powerful Iris Plus GPU. In any case the Comet Lake i7 NUC is almost 33% slower than the Coffee Lake i7 NUC in this test.

3DMark

My expectations were not high before running the 3DMark as the benchmarking suite tests mainly the video and gaming performance of the computer.

And as expected, the NUC10i7FNK cannot hold a candle to the 2019 NUC models. Of course, this was expected as the NUC10i7FNK CPU has a lower TDP and a worse GPU.

Geekbench 3

Things look again better in Geekbench 3 test where the NUC10i7FNK achieves the highest score I’ve ever measured in the multi-core test. Single core result is on par with the NUC8i7BEH but multicore result is significantly better (+37.4%).

Passmark

Also in the Passmark CPU tests the NUC10i7FNK beats the competition.

Dirt 3

As always, I did run the benchmark of Dirt 3. It’s an older game, but gives you an idea of real world performance.

There’s a strong correlation between the 3DMark results and these scores. Bean Canyon beats Frost Canyon NUC hands down.

Power Consumption

I do use a consumer-grade simple EM240 power meter made by Brennenstuhl to measure the power consumption. There’s no guarantee that any of the readings are 100% accurate, but at least the figures should be comparable between units I’ve reviewed since the same device was used.

Task	Power
Stand-by	2.5 W
Idle, Windows 10 desktop	8.4 W
Watching a 4K video in Kodi, Windows 10	20.4 W
CPU-Z stress test	93 W initially, scales down to 57 W after a while.

The fan noise of the NUC is about the same as previous model. Meaning it’s pretty quiet when not heavily loaded and then again under heavier loads it’s audible. I’d compare the fan noise to a gaming laptop.

Often when you get brand new hardware there is something that doesn’t fully work under Linux. Sometimes the GPU isn’t supported and you cannot get a graphical desktop open and sometimes it’s something small that doesn’t work such as the Wi-Fi adapter. This is why it’s a good idea to select the most recent version of your favorite distribution.

I downloaded the version 19.10 of Ubuntu Linux and quickly installed it on the NUC. To my great surprise everything seemed to work straight away. I was expecting issues with Wi-Fi since the NUC has the brand new Intel AX 200 Wi-Fi adapter with 802.11ax support. However, it seems even that was supported since kernel 5.1 and the Ubuntu has kernel version 5.3. Here’s my full boot log if you’re interested.

HTPC Use

There’s not much to say about the media playing performance in Windows 10. For the last couple of years any NUC has been able to decode HEVC video at 4k resolutions effortlessly. That is the case this time as well. HDR output to my TV was fine as well.

LibreELEC

It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing to get LibreELEC running on the NUC10i7FNK. My first attempt with the latest stable version (9.2) resulted in a black screen staring at me with the infamous Failed to start xorg. Is your GPU supported? error. Well, apparently not. Things got a bit better when trying out a recent nightly development build. At least it would work, I mean. However, hardware decoding using VA-API was not working which meant that all videos were decoded by the CPU. Of course this 6-core i7 effortlessly managed to decode even 4k resolution HEVC coded video. 4k HEVC (Sony Swordsmith demo clip) is quite a bit for the CPU to chew so the loads were up to 60%. This of course meant that the CPU fan boost up annoyingly.

Now I’m sure that things will improve soon but at this moment running a LibreELEC-based HTPC is not something I’d do on the Frost Canyon NUC.

EDIT: With the nightly build VA-API can be enabled by running the following command in the shell:

echo LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD >> /storage/.config/kodi.conf

Conclusion

The Comet Lake i7 NUC failed to impress initially. There’s not much improvement compared to last year’s Coffee Lake i7 NUC. Basically it is very much the same product with a yet another iteration of Intel’s 14 nm CPU. In addition, Intel decided to drop the Iris Plus GPU from this NUC and replace it with much weaker UHD Graphics 620 GPU. No doubt this is done intentionally to differentiate the Frost Canyon NUC and the upcoming gaming-oriented Phantom Canyon NUC that will feature a discrete GPU.

However, I liked the good CPU performance and the fact that the i7 model this time has a hexa-core CPU. I’m sure many home lab enthusiasts will welcome the addition of 2 more cores. Furthermore, this year the i7 option seems worthy as it gives you extra 2 cores over the i5. Previously the i7 has often been more or less the same as i5 offering with some increased CPU frequency (and thus heat and noise). This is the fastest CPU currently available in a 4×4 NUC form factor I believe.

When it comes to the performance in GPU-demanding applications I’m not so impressed. A decrease of 40% in the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark or a decrease of 37% in Dirt 3 FPS is not something you’d like to see when comparing to the corresponding previous generation NUC. Some have pointed out that the previous NUCs didn’t have a capable GPU anyway (even if clearly better than UHD Graphics 620) so why waste any effort on that.

As said before, I’m sure this was partly done because of product positioning. The NUC10i7FNH/K is a pretty powerful small computer provided that your usage does not include gaming or other GPU intensive tasks. I think the message is clear: Frost Canyon for typical office tasks, content creation, mini servers etc. and Ghost Canyon or upcoming Phantom Canyon for gaming.

All in all, I don’t think it’s a bad product. There are small improvements here and there. You’ve got Type-C port in the front panel now (wish there was power delivery on those ports, but no) and the Wi-Fi adapter supports 802.11ax a.k.a. Wi-Fi 6. The 6-core CPU is faster than anything on a NUC before this. It’s not ridiculously noisy either and the fan behaviour can be adjusted in the BIOS rather extensively. Shame about the GPU really but if you’re not looking forward to playing games or doing other GPU intensive tasks on the thing it could be just the ticket.

Thank you for reading and let me know what do you think in the comments section below!