- Some people will go to any lengths
to make their gaming PC smaller.
But only a select few of them have the engineering expertise
to ensure that the system will still work.
Fortunately, Intel is one of those few.
And I'm really excited to take a look at their
newest, Enthusiast NUC, Phantom Canyon,
featuring an 11th Gen Tiger Lake processor
and discreet RTX 2060 graphics.
Cause, here's the thing guys,
normally a high-performance NUC like this
comes at such a hefty price premium that most people
would rather just have a full-sized computer.
Except, look at this.
An RTX 2060, is gonna cost you as much as $600 today.
Okay then, NUC. Let's see what you can do.
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Intel has been selling NUCs
or Next Unit of Computing since 2013.
And this Tiger Lake variant is interesting to gamers
for a couple of reasons.
First and foremost,
is that you can actually buy the bloody thing.
Now, as Jarrod'sTech pointed out
in this excellent comparison, we'll have it linked below,
an RTX 2060 mobile GPU isn't quite as performant
as one of these.
But, it's also not that far off.
Meaning, that we can expect a solid gaming experience
at up to 1440p resolution, even in AAA games.
Well, that's reason number two.
The first NUCs were small
but they came with a significant performance penalty.
By contrast, our unit here
is equipped with a 10 nanometers Core i7-1165G7.
Now, that's only a quad-core
and it turbos to a mere 4.7 gigahertz,
but architecturally it's more advanced
than Intel's 10th Generation Desktop Processors.
Meaning, that in moderately multi-threaded workloads
like games, it shouldn't be a performance bottleneck.
To test this, we started with Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Now we know, most people aren't playing this game every day
but what we also know, is that if a machine
can deliver a smooth 1440p experience in Shadow,
it'll handle most pretty recent AAA games.
As long as you don't try to flip on RTX.
I mean, it's nice to have the option to turn it on
and admire the eye candy, but the truth is
the 2060 was never really fast enough
for smooth ray traced lighting.
CS:GO though, is a game that runs well
on just about anything but needs a fast CPU
to run at extremely high frame rates
for the best competitive experience.
Our Phantom Canyon NUC kept up well enough
that no casual player would complain
but given the general rule
that you want two frames per second,
for every one Hertz of your monitor,
competitive players with high refresh rate displays
might find it a little lacking.
Finally, F1 2020, drives home the point
that you gotta be realistic.
Okay? It's a 2060.
You won't be cranking everything to max at 4k resolution.
But, when you consider that the size of this thing
is not that different from just an RTX 2060
for the whole system,
there's not a lot to complain about here.
Even thermal stayed well within reason.
We both benchmarked the Enthusiast NUC in our studio
and took it home for some extended gaming sessions
and the GPU never passed 70 degrees
as long as we kept the vents unobstructed.
The CPU though, is a more complicated story.
It's clear that Intel has done some careful tuning
to squeeze as much as possible out of this machine.
So curiously, during a long Blender render
we were hovering in the 80 degree range
but at relatively low clock speeds.
And then, we fired up Cyberpunk 2077,
saw turbo speeds in the 4.6 gigahertz range
and then even though the CPU wasn't fully utilized
we saw temps as high as the low '90s.
Thankfully though, even while the whole machine
is being hit hard like that
it never gets intrusively loud.
On the subject of cooling by the way,
we're gonna be stripping a PlayStation 5
and water cooling it.
So, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it.
Of course, the last big compromise
for anyone looking at a NUC
is what they give up in terms of expansion and IO.
But this one is looking pretty good.
We've got plenty of USB 10 gigabit ports, HDMI 2.0
and Mini DisplayPort 1.4, an SD card reader, WiFi 6
and this is really nice, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet.
That's fast.
Almost as fast as you can cable manage your home setups
with the help of lttstore.com cable ties.
And if that footprint is still too big
for your minimalist lifestyle,
you can also mount it to the back of any
VESA compatible monitor with the included hardware
for a nearly cable-free experience.
So that's already enough connectivity
that most people won't feel limited by it.
And for a compact device, it's pretty upgradable too.
The CPU and GPU are soldered. No swapping out those.
But, you get two M.2 slots for SSDs
and two SODIMM slots if you wanna add more memory.
And the Dual 40 Gigabit Thunderbolt 4 ports mean
that anything from external capture devices,
to high-speed fiber optic networking,
to even a graphics card upgrade is in play
if you're willing to pay the premium
for an external enclosure.
Bringing us to the question of,
what kind of premium will you be paying?
This guy starts at 1339,
but 128 gigs of storage and 8 gigs of DDR4-3200 memory
is less than a decent phone these days.
So realistically, you're gonna be spending around $1,600
by the time you've got enough NVMe storage
for War Zone and another game or two.
Now, normally the premium that comes
with using mobile hardware in a desktop
has made NUCs extremely difficult for us to recommend.
But, as we alluded to before
the current landscape makes it look a lot more competitive
especially considering the quality of life benefits
of having a super compact and quiet machine
for your work or play.
Now, one use case that we can imagine for these
is actually classrooms or other large-scale institutions.
All you gotta do is, swap out the flashy skull logo,
put it on the included stand for optimal airflow and boom,
you've got a discreet looking, little workstation
with a great balance of CPU speed and GPU grunt.
For those who don't need GPU power,
we also got our hands on the new 11th Gen Performance NUC.
It is louder than the Enthusiast model
and it doesn't have quite as much connectivity.
But, it's also less expensive, uses Intel's new Xe graphics,
if you only plan on light gaming
and it even has an included phone charger thing on the top.
Just like, okay, I guess.
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Are you guys trying to decide between a NUC,
a gaming laptop, or even a full-sized ATX build?
Let us know in the comments below,
and if you like small form factor gaming stuff like this,
make sure to watch our smallest gaming PC build ever video,
where I literally cram the computer together
in order to screw it in.
It's pretty bad.
And it's a lot bigger than this.