Intel Frost Canyon NUC
The latest generation of small form computing from Intel gets a mini makeover, reveals Stuart Burns.
Frost Canyon is the latest iteration of the Intel NUC (Next Unit of Compute) line. These are small form-factor PCS (117 x 112 x 51mm) that can comfortably hang off the back of a monitor (using special VESA mounts) or just tucked under the monitor. The whole premise around the NUC is small and as cable free as possible. This review unit sports the latest 10th-generation mobile based Intel Core i7 with 6 cores and 12-threads with integrated GPU.
While the NUC10I7FNH may look similar to the previous generation,it does sport several new or upgraded features. In daily use the performance increase is noticeable, even though Intel has reduced the standard clock speed to 1.1GHZ. It does, however, boost up to a speed of 4.6GHZ for when extra power is required for short periods of time. This NUC release also officially supports 64GB of RAM. An important factor for some, the previous generation could utilise 64GB but it wasn’t officially supported. All of this in Geekbench 5 scores 5,835 (https://bit.ly/lxf265geek) under its multi-core score. That’s around the level of the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 six-core, 12-thread desktop CPU.
Silence is golden
Using the device as a main PC is a pleasant-enough, snappy experience (even when driving large 4K monitors and consuming 4K content) thanks to the Intel UHD graphics. During daily use it’s virtually silent. It can occasionally get a bit noisy and warm when carrying out intensive work (compiling and such), but even then it’s only a low hum for the duration of the short power bursts. It provides the feature set that you’d expect from a normal PC, just in a smaller (and much more lightweight) package. Out of the box the latest version of Ubuntu LTS (20.04) installed without a hitch.
A word of caution: Ubuntu versions prior to 20.04 (Focal Fossa) won’t fully work straight out the box due to networking drivers not being available at install time. This is partly because Intel put in brand new and improved revision of the network card out with the latest design. Drivers are available – just not in older distro media. It’s the same with the wireless drivers, so apt-get doesn’t work (a classic Catch-22 situation!).
Other upgraded items include support for Wi-fi 6 AX200 (also known as 802.11ax specification) with muchimproved speeds and Bluetooth v5. Using Ubuntu 20.04 on the NUC enables all the mentioned features. If you think that the wireless function is just like Wi-fi before, you’d be sorely mislead. 802.11ax promises to deliver theoretical speeds of up to 9.6 Gigabits/s, assuming you have the appropriate (and expensive) base stations. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s backward compatible with previous versions of Wi-fi.
The only fly in the ointment is that using the front facing 3.5mm headphone jack doesn’t work out the box. Bluetooth audio for example all still works, no issue. A workaround can be found at https://bit.ly/lxf265fix.
Elsewhere, there are some physical changes in the unit, not least the fact that USB-C ports are now included not only in the rear of the unit but the front as well, giving just that bit more versatility. The rear USB port is also Thunderbolt 3 capable. Internally, it supports both an NVME drive and a 6GB/S 2.5-inch SATA drive. The review unit came with a 256GB boot NVME and a bulk storage 1TB SATA drive. This can be considered the barebones configuration, and other options are available.