[The Exiled]

Intel NUC8i7HVK (Hades Canyon) Review: AnandTech, PC Perspective i HotHardware

The NUC8i7HVK is a unique product in the market. Never has any vendor managed to cram in this amount of graphics and computing prowess in such a form factor. Intel has managed to do it, and it is mainly due to the out-of-box thinking that led to the creation of the Kaby Lake-G (KBL-G) family of products. Without KBL-G's capabilities, this product would have simply not been possible without some kind of compromise. While Hades Canyon has its strengths, it does fall a bit short of perfection due to its disappointing performance in our evaluation of it as a 4K HTPC. The Vega GPU can't decode VP9 Profile 2 - so no YouTube HDR support - and more importantly it doesn't support the Protected Audio Video Path technology required for UHD Blu-ray playback. The latter unfortunately came as a bit of a surprise to even some at Intel, as the company was claiming as recently as CES 2018 that the Hades Canyon platform would support UHD Blu-ray playback.