Intel NUC9V7QNX

Identifier: Intel Core i7-9850H on Intel NUC9V7QNX (Ghost Canyon Compute Element) Form factor: SFF NUC with PCIe slot Status: active

The Ghost Canyon NUC — a 9th-gen Coffee Lake mobile CPU on a “Compute Element” card slotted into a chassis with a PCIe x16 slot for a half-length GPU.

Build & Cost

ComponentSpecCost
NUC9i7QN Extreme KitIntel Core i7-9850H (6c/12t), full barebones$369.98 (2024)
RAM64 GB DDR4-3200 (Crucial SODIMM)$119.99 (2024)
GPUMSI GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB — same physical card as the MSI Codex R 4060shared (included with Codex R prebuilt)
Total invested$489.97 (4060 cost not double-counted)

Geekbench AI Runs

BackendComponentSingleHalfQuantResult
ONNX / DirectMLRTX 4060 8 GB13,112(existing template, ID not in source dump)
ONNX / CPUCore i7-9850H2,2835922,35329215

AI Capability

  • Best Single: 13,112 (RTX 4060)
  • Best Half / Quant: partial — only the CPU run is fully captured here
  • ACI: ~145–250 (estimate; depends on rerunning the GPU benchmark for full numbers) — likely Tier C

This rig is bottlenecked by the 9th-gen CPU and the 8 GB of VRAM. Useful for vision workloads and small LLMs (≤7B) but the Compute Element form factor limits future upgrades. Worth re-benchmarking the GPU to fill in the half/quant numbers.

See Also

  • Benchmark Methodology
  • Benchmark Index & Rankings
  • MSI Codex R — same RTX 4060 GPU on a more modern Intel platform; useful direct comparison for the CPU bottleneck on this rig
  • Mac Mini M4 — same SFF form factor, very different architecture (Apple Silicon + Neural Engine); good baseline for “small box, what’s possible in 2024–2026”
  • Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold — adjacent older-Intel-mobile rig at the bottom of the leaderboard; together they bracket what 9th-gen-era Intel mobile silicon can do for AI workloads