Intel’s small form factor PCs are growing in power, but the size of these PCs are also going up to accommodate more power.
Intel released the NUC 9 Extreme last year which brought two new things to the NUC family- a flexible Intel Compute Element and support for a discrete GPU. The latest generation of NUC – the NUC 11 Extreme – builds on the NUC 9 Extreme. It provides support for the latest 11th gen Intel processors, a full sized graphics card and a beefier power supply to power it all. And yes, there’s some RGB lighting thrown in as well. For the unfamiliar, the Compute Element is an all-in-one board that features the chipset, processor, RAM, storage and IO. It plugs into a PCI-E slot and potentially allows you to upgrade your NUC to the newest platform easily. You could take the Compute Element from this new NUC 11 and drop it in a NUC 9 to get most of its functionality. Though this year’s NUC 11 is much larger in size, it can still be classified as a small form factor (SFF) – and one that packs a punch when it comes to performance. Though these „extreme editions“ of NUCs are targeted towards gamers, they can also comfortably be used in smaller spaces for creative work that requires powerful computing such as 3D rendering or video processing. Although Intel announced the NUC 11 at Computex in May 2021, it only went on sale in late July. At the time of announcement, the NUC 11 Extreme was expected to be available with 11th gen Core i5, Core i7 and Core i9 processors. However, Intel is now only making it available with the Core i7 or Core i9 processors. Intel has put an MSRP of US$1,150 on the Core i7 model and US$ 1,350 on the Core i9 model for bare kits. Realistically speaking you’d be hard pressed finding them without any added RAM or storage from resellers. Expect to find it equipped with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD as standard for a couple of hundred dollars more. As you can imagine, prices for the NUC 11 Extreme can increase very quickly based on your preferred configuration.
