

Full confession - my wife has been rocking a NUC-like Zotac mini-PC as her primary home desktop for years, with nary a complaint. For users that can live without the flexibility, upgradability, and expansion potential of a full-sized desktop, these little NUCs make for great machines. The fact is, most non-enthusiast PC users, buy a system, set it up, and bang away on it for years without opening it up or upgrading. Intel NUC10i7FNH Small Form Factor System - Find Them At AmazonĪs much as we love big, beefy, powerful gaming rigs and workstations around here, we dig these speedy, ultra small form factor systems just the same.

Graphics performance from the UHD engine is a weak point, however, and is right in-line with other Intel UHD 630-equipped processors from years past. In relation to a full sized / full power desktop, its performance falls somewhere in-line with previous-gen Core i5 and Ryzen 5-based systems. Throughout our tests, the Intel NUC10i7FNH clearly outperformed previous-gen NUCs that topped out with quad-core processors in all of the multi-threaded tests, and single-threaded performance was among the best as well. Performance Summary: Given its diminutive form factor, the Intel NUC10i7FNH is a high-performance little machine. The system is not obtrusively loud under load, but you most certainly can hear it across the room. If the system remains under a sustained workload for an extended period though, the fan in the NUC10i7FNH will spin up faster and generate more noise. With typical, bursty desktop workloads, the fan in the machine will spin up, but it remains quiet overall and emits only a dull whir. When the CPU and motherboard temperature are low, the active cooler in the system is barely audible. Given the low-power of the system when idling or with less-taxing workloads, the Intel NUC10i7FNH remains virtually silent until it is under a heavy workload. There is a an active cooler in the NUC10i7FNH, complete with a dense heatsink array and a couple of heat-pipes, and venting on three sides of the systems. With longer, sustained workloads though, the machine can't maintain the same level over performance, similar to many of today's thin-and-light notebooks. This configuration makes the NUC10i7FNH a strong performer for shorter, bursty workloads and for short duration, heavily-threaded workloads. Then the processor throttles, temps come down to 84'C, and power consumption is cut in half. The NUC10i7FNH's power profile it tuned to allow all six processor cores to run flat out, until temperatures hit around 100'C for a short length of time.
