Skull Canyon NUC (2016) w/ M.2 eGPU

Ruoh said:
Just buy both!
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I will if the 950 Pro 1TB lands relatively soon. I usually wouldn't do such a thing, but I predict these will be extremely easy to pawn off second hand. Can't imagine what fool wouldn't want one. It's not like buying some kid's unstable gaming machine with wonky Silverstone case that looks like it's from 1999.

chx said:
NUC6i7KYK Skull Canyon NUC runs HOT! here's a wonderful guide to quieting the machine.

According to this post Skull Canyon (NUC6i7KYK), dual 4K monitor problems on Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 two 4K monitors is easy. Is there any experience with three :) ? I guess you'd need a HDMI 2.0 capable monitor for the third - Plugable Thunderbolt 3 Dual DisplayPort Adapter | Plugable confirms there's only one DisplayPort line routed into the Thunderbolt port so there simply aren't more than two DP lines coming out of the Skull Canyon box, no matter what.

Finally, I can't wait for the Plugable TBT3-UD1 to ship -- it takes the Thunderbolt port and creates several ports among them an USB 3.1 and a DP port. Very nice.

I wonder how far the mythical Kaby Lake Skull Canyon NUC could be. Would be nice to have say 35W TDP instead of 45W. One can dream :)
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The Plugable stuff is really nice. I have 3 1920x1080 DisplayPort 1.2A monitors so I'm going to daisy-chain all 3 off the DP output.
I can't see the DP bandwidth achieving three 4K panels, that's pretty extreme. Though I bet you can get the 3rd from the HDMI or TB3.
 
housecat said:
The Plugable stuff is really nice. I have 3 1920x1080 DisplayPort 1.2A monitors so I'm going to daisy-chain all 3 off the DP output.
I can't see the DP bandwidth achieving three 4K panels, that's pretty extreme. Though I bet you can get the 3rd from the HDMI or TB3.
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You mean you will get a MST hub? Neat. However, if they are not DP only but have a DVI or HDMI input as well then you can just get a much cheaper USB-C to DP cable from Google or Monoprice and run the three off the DP, USB-C and HDMI ports. Indeed, each of these support 4K so having three 4K monitors doesn't require an (expensive) Thunderbolt converter. That USB C is yummy with things like the Hydradock coming.
 
I don't think I need the MST hub, I have 3 Dell U2414H LCDs which all support passthrough off the single DP output. That's what I was hoping for at least, single cable to 1 panel then daisy chain to the rest.
I sense in the way you guys are talking about this that you're excited about these higher performance NUCs too... at times when I check reviews and comments online, I'm the only person who sees the value or has much interest in this thing.
 
housecat said:
I don't think I need the MST hub, I have 3 Dell U2414H LCDs which all support passthrough off the single DP output. That's what I was hoping for at least, single cable to 1 panel then daisy chain to the rest.
I sense in the way you guys are talking about this that you're excited about these higher performance NUCs too... at times when I check reviews and comments online, I'm the only person who sees the value or has much interest in this thing.
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There's no such thing as "daisychaining" in the DisplayPort standard, what you have there is a built in and problematic MST hub. Perhaps you might want to save the headache by not using it. Excited? Yes. Reserved? Yes. So expensive. Still considering my options.
 
That thread is 12 months old.
The U2415 works (Rev A00) with out problems on my test configurations now (I had a bad Latitude Edock in the mix) The U2414H Rev A03 works also. I'm going to purchase a U2715 at somepoint and test that but that'll be later.
When you get the replacement, please confirm if it is RevA03 - that should resolve your problem if it is.
The end. thank god.
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All 3 of mine are RevA03. That's bs though for all those people. Dell deserves to pay dearly for that and I hope everyone spends their money elsewhere.
Classy of Dell to deny the problem. I had six 22" Dell's with DP 1.0 I believe and they did a similar thing to what people describe, go into power saving mode and never wake up. Which means it may not exactly be the passthrough hub, my old 22" panels did it with a direct connection. Everyone blamed the cables then, but I tried every cable I could get my hands on and no dice. DisplayPort in general always seemed flakey. I figured when I got these panels they figured it all out, and I was right- took WAY longer than I assumed it would though.

Daisy chaining DP is flipping amazing. Especially with these ultra thin bezel LCDs. I got 1 cable powering 3 of these bad boys and seems the issue was with the monitor, not the machines. I'll be fine with Skull Canyon.

Daisy chain FTW!
 
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Purchased the hardware needed to test out the eGPU via M.2

P4SM2, PCIe X4 to M.2 (NGFF) Adapter
PCI Express 4X Male to PCI-E 16X Female Riser Cable
AntMiner ATX Power Supply Jumper Switch
SilverStone Technology 450W SFX - Modular
Sapphire Radeon NITRO R9 380 4GB ($130)
Just under $320 for the project.

I'm going to try connecting the card directly to the P4SM2 directly first, (Supported of course) and if it doesn't fit due to the bracket, I'll have the riser cable. Depending on how successful the results are, I might head to TAP plastics to have them build me an acrylic case for the eGPU.
 
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Suck it, Trabec.
 
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Turns out that my 4x - > 16x cable knocks the speed down to 1x for some reason. I have it plugged directly back in, and it's working much better again.
 
That is awesome. So many kids these days see computers as "upgradable consoles", I don't. One day when they're long gone, you'll still be here Ruoh. I'm looking forward to hear how it performs. That has me dreaming of a case extension that exposes that for cheap eGPU upgrades to my NUC. This is my personal go-to benchmark. Steam Workshop :: FPS Benchmark Real-world and a popular game so it's a pretty good choice.

And update on DisplayPort daisy-chaining on Skull Canyon, works no problem! This setup is beautiful with 3 thin-bezel LCDs and no computer in sight. I used the MVA01 Silverstone NUC extension mount to hang it off the back of my center U2414H. The screws included with the NUC are just a little bit too long for the Silverstone, something I need to fix. Had to replace the always excellent Dell stand with an aftermarket (VESA complaint) one, but it all panned out. Also, much to my delight, power-on via USB works wonderful so I don't have to reach to the backside of my monitor everyday to turn on the NUKE.

I'll get some photos once I clean up my wire mess but it's definitely like stepping into the future when you use a NUC. It could use a little more IGP power (Ruoh is on that..) but it's acceptable for my needs. I knew the IGP would be the worst part but I knew I was never building another s**** box again to store my hardware so I went for it. I've built so many ATX and prior computers over the decades, it's really long overdue to move on, for me at least. Can't believe how long it took someone to reach this point with something like Skull Canyon. I always thought AMD would get here first but their as usual, MIA in a market they could be cleaning up in. It's even better people can and are modding this thing!
 
I'll get you guys some benchmarks, but they won't be impressive. I wound up using a R7 370 that I found open box for well under $100. Since this was a project, and not something serious/long term, I was fine with getting the cheaper card. It's still at least double the power of the Iris Pro 580. Now that I know it works, and well, I'm going to work on getting a RX 480 variant in another month or so. I tried to get to the Steam store to get that FPS benchmark, but it appeared to be down this morning.
 
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Doesn't seem like the cpu is bottlenecking in the least. Desktop res is set to 1440p, if that makes any difference.
 
I'm not sure where that stands exactly in the pecking order. But the Skull Canyon 6770HQ is probably the best gaming CPU on the market today. It's just difficult to hook a GPU up to it. It's pretty much the evolution of the 5775C, which thrashed the i7-6700K where it counts, frametimes and minimums. Which won't really be reflected as well in 3DMark. This thing is no slouch and it'll be a while until Intel puts 128MB L4 in an LGA CPU again, they may never do it, which puts LGA at a permanent and massive disadvantage to the BGA stuff.

So, first things first: the Skylake 6700K takes a clear lead over the Haswell 4790K with a markedly higher FPS average. The differences are a little smaller if you switch to a more advanced metric like our 99th-percentile frame time, but either way, Skylake beats Haswell cleanly.
Things get weird, though, with the Core i7-5775C in the picture. The Broadwell-based CPU with the 128MB L4 cache turns in the top performance in Project Cars, outdoing even Skylake. Looks like that big cache can help with gaming performance, even with a discrete GPU.

The 6700K proves to be just a little slower than the 4790K in each of our metrics here—by an eyelash. Meanwhile, that crazy Broadwell 5775C embarrasses them both with the help of its beefy L4 cache.

Dat 5775C, tho.

The 5775C performs respectably in these productivity tests, but it doesn't continue the surprising excellence we saw in our gaming tests.

The gaming plot tells a similar story, but here, the 6700K is in the running for the fastest gaming CPU on the planet—and it would've won, too, if it weren't for the pesky Broadwell 5775C and its magic L4 cache. The 6700K improves on the 4790K by a tad, but the 5775C upstages it with a freakish string of gaming performance wins, even though its prevailing clock speed is ~500MHz lower.
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Intel's Core i7-6700K 'Skylake' processor reviewed
 
I'm trying to contact BPlus to find out if they can update their next PE4C model to include an M.2 connector that will do full 4x speeds, rather then the 1x provided now.
 
Ruoh said:
I'm trying to contact BPlus to find out if they can update their next PE4C model to include an M.2 connector that will do full 4x speeds, rather then the 1x provided now.
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So, I got ahold of them, and was told that it actually will do PCIE 4x speeds via the M.2 connector. I am concerned about the limited 5Gb/s transfer speed though, as I thought pcie 2.0 4X was supposed to be 10Gb/s.

Hi <>,

Good day.



Our PE4C-M4060A V4.1 can support to PCIe 4X bandwidth:

PE4C V4.1 (PCIe x16 Adapter)





If you have any question ,please feel free contact me.

Thank you very much.

Best Regards,

Roger



曾聖哲 Roger Tseng

BPLUS Technology Co., Ltd.

致宇科技股份有限公司

Tel: +886-2-77360127#730

Fax: +886-2-77360126

E-mail:[email protected]
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OT but I had to return my Skull Canyon. It was unstable, fiddled with it for a week but I think I just got a bad one. Had to return it which was a big disappointment. That said, I'm more sold on NUCs now than I ever was. Boxing up that thing felt like a breakup.
It had been working well in my games, just not much extra gas in the tank. More computer than most people will ever need. Instead of reorder a replacement I'm just going to wait for the revision in late 2017/2018. Picked up a Geforce 1060 for my existing system till then. It's definitely overkill but at the price I paid it doesn't make sense to go with anything less. I'm really hoping someone comes up with a slick commercial alternative using an M.2 slot for an eGPU. Or maybe Rosewill will make a Thunderbolt case. I could easily live with the Iris Pro 580, but even for my use case it's borderline. I think if Intel could get Iris Pro up to Geforce 950 performance levels, they'd wipe out most of the market with their NUCs.
 
housecat said:
OT but I had to return my Skull Canyon. It was unstable, fiddled with it for a week but I think I just got a bad one. Had to return it which was a big disappointment. That said, I'm more sold on NUCs now than I ever was. Boxing up that thing felt like a breakup.
It had been working well in my games, just not much extra gas in the tank. More computer than most people will ever need. Instead of reorder a replacement I'm just going to wait for the revision in late 2017/2018. Picked up a Geforce 1060 for my existing system till then. It's definitely overkill but at the price I paid it doesn't make sense to go with anything less. I'm really hoping someone comes up with a slick commercial alternative using an M.2 slot for an eGPU. Or maybe Rosewill will make a Thunderbolt case. I could easily live with the Iris Pro 580, but even for my use case it's borderline. I think if Intel could get Iris Pro up to Geforce 950 performance levels, they'd wipe out most of the market with their NUCs.
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I understand the gpu performance woes. My existing "egpu" setup isn't pretty, but it works very, very well for what it is. I've had zero stability issues with the latest bios, and I keep the drivers up to date. That being said, I'm still building a Zen box later on in the year, or early next year. I'll set the wife up with the NUC attached to the back of a monitor, and it'll blow the shit out of her AMD A8 (?) based system.
 
I'm using my GF1060 right now but will be going back to either Skull Canyon or the successor. I'm not a AAA gamer and the games I do play (LoL, Hearthstone, CSGo which I run at 1280x1024 anyway) are not graphically intensive. The 1060 has pepped up my old CPU, but it's a lot of overkill and I don't have a tiny NUC which I'd prefer as a form factor. I need a total system update and from my tests when I had it, Iris Pro 580 does what I need it to. Considering the CPU/IGP together are limited to 45watts, that thing is overly impressive. In my estimation, that's mainly what holds Intel IGP performance back, the TDP.

It leaves me wondering if they could do a 140watt TDP Skull Canyon by just investing in a better cooling. Double the L4 to 256MB as Kabylake will and hook the Thunderbolt3 directly to the CPU rather than DMI. They'd really have something. Not that Skull Canyon isn't already impressive. I think a paradigm shift is coming but Intel could force it today if they'd build a more powerful NUC, people would just stop buying anything else. Supply would dry up on any other parts, and people would eventually be forced between choosing a NUC or laptop. No different than how you can't buy a new Commodore64 today.

I was excited about Zen but at this point I'm asking "why". I could see if building a gaming rig the value appeal might be there, but it's not looking like it will beat a 5775C or 6800K so it would be hard to get me interested. 8C Broadwell-equivalent cores for $200 sounds ok if the motherboards are cheap (but not too cheap, I've seen a lot of flakey AMD boards) but it's just overkill for my purposes. If I need big iron, I'll pay for dramatically more powerful server farm processing online or just use the Skull Canyon i7. PS4 Neo and XB1 Scorpio and incremental upgrades there will probably take a large chunk of the attractiveness away from PC gaming anyway. It'll be interesting.
 
I think it's closer to the GF750 (non-Ti) in my testing. If it's really 950 performance (I was having system issues with my NUC), I think I'd be reordering it today and returning my 1060. All my tests were consistent with a 750, give or take a bit.
You got to remember it's not that much faster than last gen's Iris 6200. 950/960 performance would be leaps and bounds over it and it's pretty much widely considered to not be.

I had a 5870 to compare against and I would say Iris Pro 580 was slower than it. Especially once you started using AA/AF (which I never do and didn't care for), with sensible options they're not too far from each other. But the 5870 definitely has the performance lead.
That slots it right in the middle with the GF750 from Tom's GPU hierarchy list. Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
GF750/Radeon 5850/Iris Pro 580 are all within range of each other if I had to commit to a statement. Extremely impressive considering this is a 45watt TDP CPU+IGP.

You could also look at 3DMark, I don't because I thought the world agreed synthetic benchmarks were useless about 16 years ago. But it might give you another idea to poke through their database.
 
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Installed the new video card last night. Starting to get into full retard territory, but it runs damn well. I need to figure out better support for the card though.

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