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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.
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