Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Far Cry Primal, GTA: V, Hitman
Far Cry Primal
Far Cry Primal is more graphics-intensive. As a result, we see a big gulf form between the NUC 8 VR and our desktop configurations.
Again, simply overclocking the GPU and HBM2 provides the best results. Intel's NUC is smooth enough to consider playable by our subjective measure, and the frame time variance measurements are encouraging. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060, not bottlenecked by CPU performance, is just quite a bit faster.
Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V responds best to GPU overclocking, unsurprisingly. But even the stock configuration is surprisingly capable under the game's Ultra preset.
Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 continues to scale as we swap out for faster CPUs. However, we only average one frame per second higher after overclocking the NUC's Core i7-8809G. Graphics still looks like this platform's bottleneck.
Hitman
The NUC also fares surprisingly well in Hitman. Intel's little powerhouse may disappoint some enthusiasts for its tendency to show up at the bottom of our charts. But in light of the hardware we're using to compare, it's impressive that Intel has a small form factor system able to hang in the same conversation.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
