Intel NUC 11 Extreme PC

Kizito Katawonga wonders what happened to the NUC of the past?

- Kizito Katawonga

The Intel NUC Beast Canyon is the Godzilla of NUCs. Intel has somehow managed to fit a full-sized discrete GPU into one of the most interesting small form factor rigs we’ve ever seen. The chassis, with its striking Calaveras-style skull logo on the front, makes quite the statement.

Beast Canyon is available with either a Core i9, i7 or i5 processor. We tested the flagship Core i9 11900KB, which is part of the special 65W B-series Tiger Lake family. A bare base Core i5 11400H NUC with 8GB of memory and 128GB SSD starts at £928, while the tricked-out test model costs upwards of £1,900 – and this only scratches its SSD and memory capabilities. This does, of course, presumes you can find somewhere selling it, too…

Aside from the core compute elements, everything else is customisable and our unit came with an Asus Dual RTX 3060 Ti, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB NVMe M.2 SSD. We were pleasantly pleased by the SSD options: you’re able to install three M.2 drives. You can switch these up for lower or higher capacity components, because it remains a normal PC design.