When it comes to mini PCs, Intel’s NUC product line is undoubtedly the king. From the fully customizable chassis to the highly integrated motherboard and Intel’s own processors, everything showcases a high level of industrial standards and design. This is unmatched by other brands in terms of size and performance, which is why the NUC product line has continued for so many years.
This generation of NUC products has already reached the ninth generation, adopting a modular design that integrates the power supply into the host. The dimensions of the unit are only 238mm x 216mm x 96mm, larger than previous NUCs, but it supports upgrades to discrete graphics cards, M.2 solid-state drives, and memory sticks. The performance has significantly improved compared to the previous generation, and this generation of NUC9 has finally upgraded from a mini PC to a high-performance mini PC.
Overview
The Quartz Canyon is a standard barebone mini PC, equipped only with a motherboard, processor, power supply, and chassis, requiring additional purchases for graphics cards, memory, and storage devices. The Quartz Canyon is more oriented towards a small workstation or server, supporting ECC memory but not XMP functionality, so it can only use DDR4 2666MHz memory at most. For practical testing, we chose HyperX Impact DDR4 2666MHz 8GB x 2 memory, which is also a popular notebook memory stick. The solid-state drive is Kingston’s recently launched flagship M.2 NVMe SSD: KC2500, using an 8-channel SMI SM2262EN controller paired with BiCS4 3D TLC NAND (96 layers), supporting TCG Opal encryption and eDrive functionality, making it very suitable for small workstations. The graphics card is the Gigabyte RTX 2060 MINI ITX, which is quite suitable for gaming with an 8-core 16-thread processor.
Detail Introduction
In appearance, the Quartz Canyon is just a square box, with a height and length equivalent to two stacked bottles of Pepsi, easily held in one hand. The sides of the host are designed with metal mesh holes, enhancing the airflow and heat dissipation performance of the chassis. It also adopts an easy-to-disassemble buckle + sliding rail design, with the side panels and top forming a mortise and tenon interface that secures the host. The front has a power button, SD card slot, 2 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, and 1 x 3.5mm audio port. The power button on the top also serves as a power indicator. When operating normally, the white light stays on, and if there is an issue, it will flash to perform a self-test, with the flashing pattern representing different error codes, which can be checked on the official website. The top features a metal mesh design, equipped with 2 x 8cm fans blowing air outwards, serving to drive the upward airflow of the entire host, further enhancing the cooling performance. The front half of the bottom is the power intake, and since it uses a small SFX power supply, the fan area is also relatively small. The back half is the product information label of the host. The NUC9 is a conventional mini PC, with a motherboard layout similar to traditional computers. The back of the motherboard serves as the main I/O interface with 4 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps ports, 2 x RJ45 network ports, 1 x HDMI port, 2 x Thunderbolt 3 ports, and 1 x 3.5mm audio port. The right side has dual slots for expanding PCIe devices, such as graphics cards, while the bottom part consists of the power socket and the exhaust port for the SFX power supply. The upper back position adopts a separated design, with two screws being the only screws securing the host shell. After unscrewing these two screws, the chassis can be opened. The lock position is usually used for display in stores and is generally not used by regular players. After unscrewing the two screws, the top side panel can be pushed back to open the top cover of the chassis. After removing the tool-free side panel, the host can be disassembled. The top cover includes two 8cm fans that connect to the host via a unique 6Pin interface, eliminating concerns about fan wiring issues. Additionally, the fan near the power supply interface is covered with a mesh to prevent external power supply cables for the graphics card from hitting the fan blades, which is a thoughtful and detailed design. After removing the side panels, it can be seen that the NUC9 essentially uses a single motherboard to connect other devices. The motherboard has 2 PCIe x 16 slots, 1 PCIe x 4 slot, and 1 M.2 slot. The 2 PCIe x 16 slots are used to connect the motherboard and graphics card, while the M.2 slot is used for connecting the solid-state drive. Interestingly, the motherboard is designed to connect using a PCIe connector, with the graphics card also using a PCIe connector. This means that the motherboard connects to the graphics card and M.2 slots using a PCIe extension method, cleverly reducing the overall size of the host.
NUC 9 Installation GuideNUC9 is a barebone system; is the installation of hard drives, memory, graphics cards, etc. difficult? Actually, it is not; the installation process is quite simple.
Place the chassis down, lift the shield to see the two screws on the motherboard module, which are the only components blocking the installation of the hard drive and memory. All we need to do is unscrew the screws, open the motherboard cover, and then install the memory and hard drive. The installation process is similar to adding memory and solid-state drives to a laptop.
NUC9 has a side plate that reinforces the graphics card. This plate can be removed during the graphics card installation process; the graphics card can be installed vertically from the top into the NUC9, or it can be installed from the side if the plate is removed, which is more convenient.
Once the installation is complete, it looks like the image shown; if you are a player with strong hands-on ability, the entire installation process should take no more than ten minutes.
Testing Platform IntroductionTesting Platform Processor: Intel Xeon E-2286M Motherboard: Intel NUC9VXQNB CM246 Memory: HyperX Impact DDR4 2666MHz 8GB x 2 Graphics Card: Gigabyte RTX 2060 MINI ITX OC Hard Drive: Kingston KC2500 NVMe 1TB Power Supply: FSP500-30AS Room Temperature: 27 degrees
CPU-Z correctly identifies the model and specifications of the E-2286M processor. Memory information cannot be recognized, possibly due to the CM246’s SM Bus. Although the Xeon E-2286M has a maximum turbo frequency of 5GHz, the power consumption and energy-saving strategy of the NUC9 do not allow it to reach 5GHz single-core frequency; under low load conditions, it can only reach about 4.8GHz, while under high load multi-threaded stress, it fluctuates around 4.1GHz to 4.3GHz.
The graphics card used is the Gigabyte RTX 2060 MINI ITX OC, which is a proper desktop-level graphics card. Although the base frequency is slightly lower, the boost frequency is not much different and should be comparable to the desktop-level RTX 2060 performance.
The memory used is HyperX Impact DDR4 2666MHz 8GB x 2. Notebook memory has higher compatibility requirements than desktop memory, and the quality of the chips and compatibility testing by the module manufacturer can affect the compatibility of the memory sticks. HyperX, as one of the largest manufacturers of notebook memory sticks on the market, uses high-quality original chips and implements stricter testing processes, which can meet the needs of the NUC9 Quartz Canyon.
KC2500 is Kingston’s newly launched flagship M.2 NVMe solid-state drive, using an 8-channel SMI SM2262EN controller paired with BiCS4 3D TLC NAND (96 layers), supporting TCG Opal encryption and eDrive functionality. It boasts a rated sequential read speed of 3500MB/s and write speed of 2900MB/s, achieving peak performance for PCIe 3.0 x4 interfaces, providing durability guarantees ranging from 150TBW to 1.2PBW, making it a great companion for the NUC9 Quartz Canyon. Review link: http://www.pceva.com.cn/article/4943-1.html
Processor Performance Testing
The Intel Xeon E-2286M, codenamed Coffee Lake, was announced in May 2019 and can be regarded as the server-level twin brother of the eighth-generation Core processors. For comparison, we selected the i7 10875H, i9 9900K, and Ryzen 7 3700X, all of which are 8-core 16-thread processors, while the Ryzen 7 3600X is a 6-core 12-thread reference.
From the test results, the E-2286M outperforms the i7 10875H in multi-threaded performance due to the NUC9’s higher power consumption limit compared to the laptop’s i7 10875H, providing an advantage in high-load multi-threaded tests; however, in single-threaded tests, the i7 10875H has a higher turbo frequency, and the memory supports XMP DDR4 3200 overclocking, plus Super PI is sensitive to memory frequency, so the i7 10875H achieves a higher score. Compared to desktop processors, the E-2286M falls short in frequency, power consumption limits, and memory frequency. Although the NUC9 is a desktop-class PC, its mini PC design, volume, and cooling space lead to performance that is higher than mobile laptops but lower than desktop processors.
The PL1 power consumption limit of the Intel Xeon E-2286M is 60W, and the PL2 power consumption limit is 107W, strictly adhering to Intel’s 28-second PL2 turbo window time. For example, in running Cinebench R20, the Intel Xeon E-2286M can turbo boost to 4.1GHz with around 100W performance in the first 28 seconds, and then drop to 3.1GHz-3.2GHz with 60W performance after 28 seconds, depending on the load of the application; typically, the heavier the load, the lower the frequency, and vice versa, such as running Super Pi can easily reach around 4.7GHz.
In the NUC9 BIOS, there is a setting for Tau, which is the power consumption window time, which can be set to a maximum of 224 seconds, close to 4 minutes.
With this setting, the processor scored 3831 points in Cinebench R20 multi-threaded, a 10.2% performance increase compared to the default score of 3476.
Gaming Performance Testing
The biggest difference between NUC9 and previous NUCs is the ability to configure a discrete graphics card, which is fundamentally different from the mobile graphics cards embedded on the motherboard. From the test results, the RTX 2060 MINI ITX graphics card we paired with the Quartz Canyon performs normally, comparable to the performance of the desktop-level RTX 2060 6GB graphics card. This level of graphics card can play large 3D games without issues at 1920 x 1080 resolution. The NUC 9 Quartz Canyon can be configured with up to an RTX 2070 Mini graphics card.
Comprehensive Performance Testing
PCMark 8 Creative mode primarily targets content creators, with test content including video and image editing, as well as gaming and video chatting. The NUC9 Quartz Canyon, due to its energy-saving features, cannot completely turn off, resulting in a slight disadvantage in running PCMark8. The Intel Xeon E-2286M + RTX 2060 Mini graphics card and Kingston KC2500 solid-state drive scored a total of 6573 points.
3DMark Fire Strike mode primarily measures the gaming and graphics performance of the host, scoring a total of 16932 points, with graphics scoring 18367 points and physics scoring 21773 points.
AIDA64 Memory Benchmark primarily measures the read and write performance of memory and processor cache. The Intel Xeon E-2286M paired with HyperX Impact DDR4 2666MHz 8GB x 2 memory shows memory read and write capabilities around 37GB/s, with a copy speed of around 34GB/s.
CrystalDiskMark primarily tests the read and write speeds of the hard drive. We tested the Kingston KC2500 solid-state drive, where the reading speed was slightly affected by energy-saving features, while the writing speed basically reached the rated value of 2900MB/s, with sequential read and write speeds around 3GB/s, demonstrating strong performance even in the compact NUC form factor.
Conclusion
I still remember when I reviewed the previous generation NUC, the “NUC of the Underworld”, I described it as “undoubtedly a cross-generational product, compared to the previous generation’s ‘Skull Canyon’, it cannot simply be described by specification enhancement, but rather has undergone a qualitative change with the addition of ‘discrete graphics’.” The NUC9 generation, Quartz Canyon, and Ghost Canyon can now remove the quotation marks around ‘discrete graphics’ and genuinely use ITX-spec discrete graphics cards, significantly enhancing graphics and gaming performance.
Of course, such improvements come at a cost; the size of the NUC9 has increased from the original 221mm x 142mm x 39mm to 238mm x 216mm x 96mm. Aside from similar lengths, the width and thickness have increased several folds. The larger size and volume allow for better cooling, and both the Quartz Canyon and Ghost Canyon utilize high-end 8-core 16-thread processors, doubling the specifications compared to the previous generation. Coupled with the high-performance memory, solid-state drives, and graphics cards purchased separately, it essentially becomes a high-performance desktop PC.
The advantage of NUC has always been its high level of integration, compressing the computer host into a smaller size through various clever designs and custom-molded components for the motherboard, chassis, cooling, etc. This is a modern aesthetic that is also easier to move. In terms of size and volume, there is essentially no competition for the NUC 9 in the market. Its advantage lies in having mainstream-level high-performance experience in a 5L volume, while the downside is that it is expensive.
The niche mini PC combined with independently molded designs and the high integration has led to a significant increase in manufacturing costs, resulting in the NUC9’s price rising sharply. The unit we reviewed, the Quartz Canyon, is priced at 16,999 yuan. If we include the separately purchased graphics card, memory, and solid-state drive, the total cost will exceed 20,000 yuan. The top configuration of the Ghost Canyon with an i9 is priced at 12,999 yuan, and with the additional graphics card, memory, and solid-state drive, the total price reaches around 18,000 yuan. If you have a sufficient budget and want to balance strong performance with desktop aesthetic design and compact form factor, the NUC9 is likely the best mini PC experience on the market. However, if your budget is limited, a regular ATX platform desktop is likely more suitable for your needs.
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