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[JareBear: Remastered]

Richard from DF provides us with a review of what could be a revolutionary new form factor for PC Gaming

Is it possible to get a fully upgradable miniature PC that offers the full next-gen feature set? Intel's Ghost Canyon NUC offers eight cores and 16 threads of CPU performance, combined with an upgradeable RTX 2070. It's an excellent piece of engineering, but can such a small chassis handle this much power? [/quote[

Intel Ghost Canyon NUC review: meet the performance PC that's smaller than Xbox Series X

The PC is the ultimate evolving platform - available in all shapes and sizes, with a vast array of components designed …

www.eurogamer.net

At the basic level, there are four major internal components to the NUC. Graphics processing is provided courtesy of a special, miniature version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070, crafted by Asus. Alongside that sits the NUC compute element which is to all intents and purposes a complete PC built into a PCIe expansion card. This is remarkable stuff: at the rear of the element is the USB Type-A, USB Type-C/Thunderbolt and display outputs you'd find on a motherboard, while internally, there are two laptop SODIMM memory slots and two NVMe slots.

Crucially, it also houses the main CPU - and in the case of this review unit, it's a Core i9 9980HK - an eight-core, 16 thread processor that's basically identical at the silicon level to the flagship i9 9900K - simply operating with a more constricted power budget. All of this is mounted inside the PCIe expansion card casing, cooled with 80mm fan.

The final component is a flex-ATX power supply, capable of providing a maximum of 485W - easily enough for the system here. In typical gaming scenarios, I noted a maximum of around 280W of total power draw, rising to around 300W when overclocking the RTX 2070.

So much power and heat in such a small area sounds like a recipe for disaster but the NUC doesn't overheat and it's reasonably quiet too. It's not as discreet as Xbox One X, but as quiet or more so than PS4 Pro.

 

[jshackles]

Paging MrMatt555 this is what a Steam Machine looks like in 2020.

 

[Spukc]

It annoys me that intels uses the NUC brand for this.

The NUC is way way way smaller then this clunky thing. The NUC is like an apple tv 5 size.
Or the size of an orange.

Oh well. Small form factor pc's like the normal NUC are really amazing. They run games like forza horizon 4 and doom eternal at ok framerates. On freaking IGPU's

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

Paging MrMatt555 this is what a Steam Machine looks like in 2020.

Personally, I think I will always stick with a nice mid tower or full tower case for my PC but this does look pretty cool just from watching the DF vid

 

[LisaMariaMartin]

That price though

 

[All_Might]

It may be as powerful as a ps5, but I believe the more important thing would be the price of such a pc. If it’s well above 1000$ it does not compete in gaming with the consoles. For work and anything else that’s of course a completely different matter, I’m Strictly talking about gaming.

 

[Great Hair]

Within the first 60 seconds, he manages to praise Microsoft´s XSX "not so compact design" and "shit" on PS5´s "weak GPU onpar with the NUC by Intel for $1,500!".

Alex Buttalias
versus
Richard Meadbutter

Tune in next week!

Spoiler

any deepfake software for voice over? Vit-D deficiency at an all time high.

 

[chaseroni]

Finally. Something to replace my beloved alienware alpha

 

[CamHostage]

Personally, I think I will always stick with a nice mid tower or full tower case for my PC but this does look pretty cool just from watching the DF vid

I would like a really small set-top box for my Home Entertainment System, though. Modern consoles have dropped interest in being media centers (which, yes, the focus should be on the games, but then please open the App library up to media developers beyond the couple of streaming partners you sign as core services. Let me get VLC or Plex on there please, so I can open up some of my own MP4s. Also, your BD/DVD players all suck and your consoles are the only disc players I have plugged in still, so let me replace them if you don't care to make them better. ) And though Roku and Chromecast are nice little trinkets to have, even they don't do all the jobs I sometimes need to get done, and they're cutting older features more and more as they streamline their abilities for mass audiences. (They also drop support after a while, which sucks.) I've for whatever reason never built myself a decent Media PC to have at the ready, but sometimes that seems like the only sane choice if you do any video outside mainstream use.

 

[MrMatt555]

Is this just a small PC built for gaming? Is it missing anything?

 

[Silver Wattle]

"Significantly smaller" it looks slightly smaller at most.

At the end of the year I'd love to see a 12 core Ryzen 4000 desktop + 3080 in something this size, would be much more future proof than this.

 

[-Arcadia-]

Within the first 60 seconds, he manages to praise Microsoft´s XSX "not so compact design" and "shit" on PS5´s "weak GPU onpar with the NUC by Intel for $1,500!".

Alex Buttalias
versus
Richard Meadbutter

Tune in next week!

Spoiler

any deepfake software for voice over? Vit-D deficiency at an all time high.

This is what your brain looks like on console warring, everyone.

Roughly comparable to TDS in terms of reaching for things that aren’t there, and yelling about them in an unrelated topic.

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

Edit

nvm

 

[Portugeezer]

Edit: never mind, misread due to Microsoft's terrible console naming.