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.
Office & Productivity
Test Setup
| NUC 8 VRNUC8i7HVK | NUC 8 VRStock | CPU 4.2 GHz (1250/900) | CPU 4.5 GHz |
| Core i7-8809G | Stock | 4.2 GHz All-Core (1.05V) | 4.5 GHz All-Core (1.05V) |
| Vega Graphics | Stock | 1250 MHz (1V) | Stock |
| HBM2 | Stock | 900 MHz (1V) | Stock |
| System Memory | Stock | DDR4-3200 | DDR4-3200 |
We include our stock and tuned CPU/GPU/HBM2 results in this round of benchmarks, along with data from our 4.5 GHz run. That overclocked setting turned out to be stable during all CPU stress tests and our application suite, but proved flaky through our game benchmarks (even with the Vega GPU at stock settings). Still, we include it as a demonstration of peak application performance if you optimize the NUC specifically for these workloads.
Adobe Creative Cloud
The NUC 8 VR lands in the middle of our expanded line-up for Adobe's Creative Cloud aggregate score. The 4C/8T CPU provides a nice balance between lightly- and heavily-threaded tasks. As expected, overclocking helps substantially, though the jump from 4.2 GHz to 4.5 GHz is smaller than we expected.
Web Browser
The Krakken suite tests JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. Intel's NUC 8 VR is competitive throughout, placing third at its stock settings. Overclocked to 4.5 GHz, it leads the field.
The MotionMark benchmarks, which emphasize graphics performance (rather than JavaScript), are also sensitive to CPU clock rates. Whereas a moderate CPU/GPU overclock helps improve performance a little bit, the 4.5 GHz setup lands in first place, reminding us that host processing resources still play a large role in driving the graphics subsystem.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Naturally, that's particularly relevant to what we all do with our PCs every day. The test benefits from a refined storage subsystem and higher clock rates, affording the 4.5 GHz configuration an easy win. Even at stock settings, the NUC 8 VR matches Intel's quad-core Core i3-8100.
Video conferencing measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for video playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection during the workload to model real-world usage. The stock NUC fares even better in this test, rivaling Intel's Core i5-8600K.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries that use the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, so we see many of the same behaviors, albeit with less performance uplift from our balanced CPU/GPU overclock.
Spreadsheet-heavy tests emphasize clock rates even more, so it's no surprise that the agile 4.5 GHz configuration takes the lead over competing stock processors.
MORE: Best PC Builds
MORE: How To Build A PC
MORE: All PC Builds Content
