Intel Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK Mini PC Review: Palm-Sized And Powerful

There are actually a few overclocking options here as well, but we decided to leave things stock as they were shipped to us, since frankly with this tiny enclosure there likely isn't a ton of extra headroom anyway. The nice thing is you can also dial in some fan profiles based on typical duty cycles, etc. that will let you keep the Skull Canyon NUC very quiet or slightly cooler, depending on your environment or demands.

CPU-Z show us that the Core i7-6770HQ quad-core CPU has a 45 Watt TDP and some fairly low downclocking capability idling at 1.4GHz here, but with boost headroom across some of its cores to 3.5GHz. DRAM timings don't look particularly tight in its auto-configuration but we do have a full 2133MHz interface speed at the ready. Graphics details weren't picked up by CPU-Z so we fired up HWiNFO to take a look under the hood there. The utility details a full Skylake-H with GT4e GPU configuration that offers about 1TFLOP of performance and dedicated video offload and transcoding engines like Intel Quick Sync. Speaking of which...

Just a quick sanity check here on some 4K streamed video content. As you can see, the Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK handles this task without breaking a sweat, at roughly 5% CPU utilization and at about 1.5GHz, far below its top end clock speed. Also, over a wired Gigabit Ethernet connection here, we're pulling down about 35Mbps for this stream, which is obviously a fair amount of data throughput as well, but not a problem for this dark horse NUC.