- Intel's been trying
to build small gaming PCs for a while
but this is one of the smallest,
yet most full featured I've ever seen.
This five liter box is a full desktop gaming PC,
and one of the most easiest
to upgrade computers I've seen in quite a while.
In fact, it's easier to upgrade
than today's desktop computers.
That's because inside this five liter chassis,
you won't just find a traditional CPU
with a heat sink and fan
or a GPU board.
This is called the Intel NUC 9 Extreme
and I'm gonna show you exactly what's inside it
and how it might change
how you build your next gaming computer.
There is a brain inside this computer
that contains it's own CPU,
memory and storage that you can plug in to this PC
just like you plug in that graphics card.
So to pull out most of the main system components
to this computer,
I'm just gonna disconnect a few cables,
attach the main brain module up here,
which they're calling the Element.
NUC Element Compute module.
Still have a lot of headers on there
but this is the Element NUC module.
And inside of here I'm gonna show you even a little bit more
how modulated this system is.
So as you can see inside here,
not only is the entire CPU brain of this computer modular
but inside here you can replace the memory modules
and the storage modules as well
with no laptop memory sticks
or solid state drives as well.
It's got support
for three NVMe solid state drives in total,
two of them right in this module.
So maybe a couple of years down the road
you're thinking of replacing this Core i9-9980HK
with something faster and newer,
when you do that you can also replace all
of your ports as well.
You've got dual gigabit ethernet here,
a pair of Thunderbolt 3 USB-C jacks
that are multipurpose,
HDMI and four USB 3.1 ports right on this card.
And you can imagine as newer
and better port technologies come out,
you just swap out this one module.
It's like replacing your entire motherboard
of your computer.
That's because this computer doesn't really
have another motherboard,
all it has connecting the rest of the computer together
is this single baseboard with a couple
of PCIe X16 slots and an X4 over there
if you wanna add something extra like a video capture card,
instead of dedicating all 16 lanes to your graphics.
So you can see there's not a lot going on here,
this is just there to connect these main pieces
to the computer together.
All the rest of the I/O,
all of the rest of the processing power,
it's all here in this modular replaceable card.
Theoretically this all makes for one
of the smallest future-proof gaming PCs we've ever seen
and if you're worried about that future-proof thing,
Intel says it's planning
to ship at least a couple generations
of this NUC Element CPU brain.
The company also says it's 500W power supply is designed
to handle any graphics card on the market
for the next couple of years,
as long as it fits into this frame
which means it needs to be under eight inches
and fits into a dual slot chassis.
In addition to that,
it says that you shouldn't see any kind
of performance detriment from the fact
that all of this is happening over an X16 PCIe slot.
And if you don't like this exact five liter design
with it's prominent skull,
they will be some other options on the market.
Intel is planning to ship this as a Barebones kit,
meaning you need your own storage,
your own memory,
operating system and graphics card
if you wanna make it a gaming system.
From between $1300 and $1700 and i5,
i7 and i9 configurations
but there will be other manufacturers
building their own chassis around the NUC Element as well,
including Razer and some other companies
I can't talk about quite yet.
Those will be shipping this year
with the Barebone system from Intel shipping in March.
I've been a fan of Intel's tiny NUC computers for a while
but I've never seen enough graphical oomph in there
for me to buy one myself
and it looks like that's changing here.
I'm also a big fan of small modular computers,
I've tried to build them
but I've never been able to make them this small.
So if this works out,
I'm gonna be a customer for this actual box.
For now, I'm gonna wait and see how it plays out.
We're in Las Vegas all this week
for the Consumer Electronics Show
so you can check out our other videos
of intriguing gadgets as well,
including laptops,
foldables and more.