ULTRA COMPACT 4070 Ti GAMING PC

What happens when you take Nvidia's latest RTX 40 series GPU, Intel's hottest new CPU, and squeeze them into a tiny NUC 13 Extreme case? As Sam Lewis finds out, this compact chassis packs some punch...

- Sam Lewis

GIVEN THE troubles we had getting last month's RTX 4080 build to work, we crossed our fingers for an easier build this time around. The issue is, small form factors don't often go hand in hand with easy building. Fortunately, we got our hands on Intel's latest NUC 13 Extreme kit and, as small form factor machines go, these are as user-friendly as things get. However, this model has changed a lot since we last had our hands on its predecessor, the NUC 12 Extreme. It's grown in size but maintains a sleek and subtle appearance to disguise the power that lurks beneath.

Our goal is to create a machine that does it all-offering overall power and an excellent gaming performance to make the consoles look weak, but that also works efficiently for productivity, design work, and editing. Not asking for much, are we!? The Intel NUC 13 Extreme gives us the platform to do this. Our kit was provided with an Intel Core i9-13900K, 32GB of Kingston Fury Impact DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB Kingston Fury Renegade SSD. A tasty set of components, but the only thing we are keeping is the powerhouse i913900K. There's nothing wrong with the RAM or SSD, but we're future-proofing this system with some more powerful parts.

Our main showpiece is, of course, our Zotac Gaming RTX 4070 Ti Trinity OC 12GB GPU, which wasn't the easiest to obtain. The limiting factor was, you guessed it, the GPU clearance. We had 313mm to play with, yet a lot of cards we researched were longer than that threshold. This card is 306.8mm, so on paper, it physically fits, while its recommended power supply is 750W, the same as included in the NUC 13 Extreme.

There are more powerful cards that would fit, but most of them require at least an 850W PSU or greater. For us, the sweet spot is an RTX 4070 Ti, so let's see what we can get out of this monstrous machine.

WHAT'S IN THE BOX