Hades Canyon Gaming PC

jusomdude

What do you hardware experts think about this? I kind of want one but don't need one right now. My next upgrade might just be one of these small systems, if they continue making them. I'd suspect there would be better ones by the time I want/need to upgrade.

Thing is smaller than consoles.

Quizzical

There's no sense in even considering one unless you really want the extra small size.  You could perhaps think of it as being an 11" gaming laptop without a monitor or battery, and hence a lot less portable.

However, if you want a legitimate gaming rig and it absolutely has to fit in a very small space, this is the best that you'll be able to do.

One issue to beware of is driver support.  It might be fixed by now, or I might have simply looked in the wrong place.  But I was curious whether Intel or AMD would provide the GPU drivers, and as best as I can tell, neither of them do.

jusomdude

Didn't you use to go on about how there would be powerful PCs smaller than a shoe box? But now they're here and you think they're pointless?

Quizzical

Silverstone has made some small form factor cases that let you build a legitimate gaming laptop in a case the size of a shoebox.  That's a totally different class of product than this, as it allows you to fit a high-end gaming CPU and GPU (say, a Core i7-8700K and a GeForce GTX Titan Xp), and then upgrade it later.  Or replace it if it fails.  You'd be limited to Mini ITX motherboards, but that leaves a lot of options and you can get plenty of external ports.

Hades Canyon is much, much smaller than that, as it's closer to the size of a discrete video card alone, not an entire case containing one.  If your shoes come in boxes the size of Hades Canyon, your feet must be far smaller than mine.  The memory and storage are replaceable, but that small size comes with sacrifices.  The CPU and GPU are decent for gaming, but hardly high end, as you simply can't get high end performance inside of 100 W combined.  They're also not replaceable or upgradeable at all.

It's not like this is some stupid Ultrabook where "gaming" means "FreeCell".  You can expect performance in the ballpark of a Radeon RX 570 together with one of the lower clocked Core i5 quad cores CPUs.  That's a legitimate gaming rig.  But it's not at all similar to getting a Core i7-8700K together with a GTX 1080 Ti, which you absolutely could put in something the size of a shoebox.

I didn't say that Hades Canyon is pointless, period.  For the sort of person who wants a laptop because even a small form factor desktop would be too big, this might be a nifty product.  It's only pointless if you don't put a high priority on the very small size.

jusomdude

Discrete parts still hold the spot for top performance for the time being, but they're also much more expensive. I wonder just how long it will be before the gap between integrated and discrete is so small that integrated will be the go to option, especially when Intel and AMD are coming together to make them.

Quizzical

jusomdude said:

Discrete parts still hold the spot for top performance for the time being, but they're also much more expensive. I wonder just how long it will be before the gap between integrated and discrete is so small that integrated will be the go to option, especially when Intel and AMD are coming together to make them.

You'll always be able to get more performance out of more wattage, and you can't put huge amounts of heat in a very small space and have it still work.  There's no technical reason why Intel and AMD couldn't put the chips for the top end Sky Lake X and Radeon RX Vega 64 chips in a single (very large) package akin to what they did with Kaby Lake-G, but trying to dissipate 400 W would mean that you'd need a large enough box that you might as well just go with the discrete parts and not tie them together.

Quizzical

The key size advantage that Kaby Lake-G brings is all about what the Vega GPU can do, not about putting the CPU and GPU together in a single package.  Traditional higher end laptop GPUs in an MXM form factor have a ring of about 8 or so GDDR5 memory chips around the GPU.  Vega Mobile needs a single stack of HBM2 for memory and that enough to about match the memory bandwidth that another card might get out of 8 GDDR5 chips.  Needing space to effectively lay out two things rather than nine (the GPU takes space, too) is where the big space savings come from.  You could have a laptop CPU in a BGA form factor right next to Vega Mobile as a discrete card and take about the same amount of space as Kaby Lake-G.

jusomdude

How much would a discrete system comparable to the hades canyon cost though?

Quizzical

jusomdude said:

How much would a discrete system comparable to the hades canyon cost though?

If you mean a larger desktop, then perhaps a $200 CPU, $300 GPU with an MSRP of $200 (blame miners), $100 motherboard, $50 case, and $50 power supply.  So about $700 for a little better performance than a Hades Canyon barebones that costs $1000 and can't be upgraded.  The Hades Canyon doesn't come with memory, storage, an OS, or peripherals, so you have to add those separately.

Small form factor desktops such as you could have bought several years ago would commonly come with a much smaller price premium such as $50 for the form factor, and could take high end parts and be upgraded later.

jusomdude

I guess I don't really need a PC as small as the hades canyon, but I would like a smaller one than I have now. I have a mid tower from like 2006ish or something. I have a micro atx motherboard. I think it's time to get a micro atx case.

Quizzical

It depends on how small you want.  For example, this seems to be the latest generation of Silverstone's small form factor gaming cases:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAD6F6A11351

You'd want an external exhaust video card for that, so that it can pull air in the side of the case and blow it out the back of the card.

That size of case does add some assembly complications and some SKUs just won't fit, but you can build a genuinely high end gaming rig out of it.  It's only perhaps 1/3 of the volume of a typical mid-tower, but even that is about 20 times the volume of Hades Canyon.  Hades Canyon is more the size of a book than a shoebox.

Ozmodan

Really nice system, if you are space limited.  Personally, I much rather have a laptop with that cpu/gpu in it as I then have portability.  I just think you would end of up with peripherals hanging off it eventually so that would kind of defeat the small size.   Definitely a niche product.