Intel NUC8I7BEH Review and Custom Build

Intel NUC8I7BEH Review and Custom Build

This is my review of the Intel NUC8i7BEH and a summary of my build.

Custom Build

Intel NUC8I7BEH
500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus
Corsair Vengeance 16GB x 1

This has cost a total of: £659.45.

NUC8I7BEH Specs

i7-8559U - Base 2.70 GHz - Turbo 4.5GHz - 4 Cores - 8 Threads
DDR4
M.2
2.5" SATA3
Iris Plus Graphics 655
USB 3.1 Gen2
Thunderbolt3

500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus Specs

M.2 (2280)
PCIe 3.0 (x4)
NVMe SSD
MLC V-NAND
3500MB/s Read
3200MB/s Write
480k/550k IOPS

This is the second NUC I have bought and as of 2019 was the most powerful one in terms of CPU power, except for the Skull Canyon which has a skull and could be a little off putting.

I've had for just over a year now. On my desk, it looks smart in appearance, has a couple of LEDs, a blue one for power and a yellow/orange one for drive access. The fan can make a bit of a noise, a bit like many laptops do, but this NUC takes less than a quarter the desk space an average laptop would.

Here is a speed test using Crystal Disk Mark of the Samsung drive:

3478 MB/s Read
3264 MB/s Write

Not bad!

So I've utilised the PCIe M.2 slot so I can have an NVMe drive, with a Samsung Evo Pro 500GB for the C drive. I've additionally taken an old 2.5 SSD 128GB as additional storage and utilised the spare slot.

16GB of RAM with Corsair Vengeance

On it's side is a Micro-SD card reader, which is useful should you want to plug in a microSD card from your camera, mobile phone or even Sony Walkman.

2 USB sockets on the front give quick acces when you need to plug in a new cable.

It has 2 front mounted microphones but I haven't used them, I can only imagine they would be useful though. Additionally on the front is an earphone socket.

The back is for more permanent connections like ethernet, 2 x USB in my case mouse and keyboard, with a HDMI and USB-C as well.

Overall I'm very happy with it, laptops costing 3 times as much as this didn't have the same performance matching the CPU and the NVMe drive.