Modern Nuc vs 10 year old Intel desktop

[Quartz]

How do modern NUCs compare with old desktops? My brother has an ITX box with a 10-ish year old CPU in it. Likely 4th or 6th gen. And my old Titan X. Both are still going strong. But he doesn't play games (my nephew did but is now away) and his wife dislikes large PC boxes and the ITX box still takes up a large amount of room on their desk so I'm wondering how modern NUCs compare? Both the high end boxes like the Beelink GTR 7 Pro / GMKtec K4 / Minisforum HX100G and the lower end Nx00 boxes. The heaviest application usage would be Excel. He has some truly massive spreadsheets but mainly runs them at work on his many-cored workstations. But if he could run them at home... He also has a modernish Microsoft Surface.

Looking at CPUBenchmark.Net shows the AMD Ryzen 7840 clearly outpacing Intel 4th & 6th gen CPUs (22,000 vs 9000) but I'm wondering about real-world usage.

 

[Tetras]

So long as they are proper laptop (or desktop parts) and of a recent vintage, they should be decently faster, though it obviously depends on the specs / gen of what you're looking at.

 

[Rroff]

As long as they haven't cheaped out on the cooling some of the CPUs are as fast or faster than even some recent desktop CPUs, for example the Ryzen Z1 Extreme (based off a 7000 series laptop SOC) at 5 watt TDP will match or beat my 10 year old Xeon 1650 V2 and at 30 watt is not far behind a desktop AMD 5800X.

Some of them won't hold boost clocks as long as a near equivalent desktop part though, even with sufficient cooling under sustained workloads you'll probably see clocks drop 10-15% more after 30 seconds or so.

 

[Quartz]

Some of them won't hold boost clocks as long as a near equivalent desktop part though, even with sufficient cooling under sustained workloads you'll probably see clocks drop 10-15% more after 30 seconds or so.

Do tell: if my brother runs his mondo spreadsheets then recalcs are going to take a lot longer than 30 seconds.

 

[Rroff]

Do tell: if my brother runs his mondo spreadsheets then recalcs are going to take a lot longer than 30 seconds.

It is a case by case really depending on the CPU model and firmware implementation, etc. it won't be a massive decrease but doing longer heavy workloads may see an additional slight decrease compared to the common benchmark numbers.