Intel's Bean Canyon (NUC8i7BEH) Coffee Lake NUC Review - Ticking the Right Boxes

Networking and Storage Performance

Networking and storage are two major aspects which influence our experience with any computing system. This section presents results from our evaluation of these aspects in the Intel NUC8i7BEH (Bean Canyon). On the storage side, one option would be repetition of our strenuous SSD review tests on the drive(s) in the PC. Fortunately, to avoid that overkill, PCMark 8 has a storage bench where certain common workloads such as loading games and document processing are replayed on the target drive. Results are presented in two forms, one being a benchmark number and the other, a bandwidth figure. We ran the PCMark 8 storage bench on selected PCs and the results are presented below.

The NUC8i7BEH with the WD Black NVMe 3D SSD is surpassed only by the Samsung 950 PRO-equipped PCs in the storage bench.

On the networking side, the NUC8i7BEH presented us with an interesting challenge. The system with Wireless AC-9560 is the first we have received with support for 160 MHz channels on the client side. This is a 2x2 configuration, and the 160 MHz support allows it to claim up to 1.73 Gbps of theoretical throughput.

Our usual test router (Netgear R7000 Nighthawk) doesn't support 160 MHz channels. We have just started out with the Netgear Nighthawk AX8 as a test router, and initial results look very promising. The NUC8i7BEH is able to sustain around 900 Mbps of real-world practical TCP throughput with the Netgear Nighthawk AX8 router (configured with DFS channels in order to obtain a continuous 160 MHz block). In future reviews, we will be standardising the test setup with the new router. That will allow us to gather exact numbers that can be compared for different systems in the future.