Crammed into this five dollar foot long
Chassis is a full fat RTX 20 70 making the ghost Canyon Nook nine extreme as far as we can. Tell the smallest
mass-produced desktop gaming PC or that is
Mostly desktop Intel did take one shortcut here
They used a core I $9.99 a thk mobile processor. So then what is this thing?
Is it a slim and trim desktop or a fax laptop?
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If you take a couple steps back the ghost Canyon nuke actually looks really
similar to the original nuke
Just a lot larger and with more mesh than a European nightclub to accommodate the much more
Powerful internal components and the loads of airflow that they require unlike the original skull Canyon nook
There's no option to switch out the skulls
But I don't think they're that offensive and I don't think most people will care
The IO is one notch below. Perfect the lack of onboard
two-and-a-half Gigabit Ethernet is a bit of a downer for me on a machine with no PCI Express expansion, but in fairness
there are cheap USB dongles to add it after the fact and
Having dual Thunderbolt 3 ports means that if you've got the money you can plug basically anything you could want into this
But how does it game?
TLDR
Darn, well we faced it off against a desktop equipped with a core I nine ninety nine hundred K and a chunky
R-tx 2070 and then we also put it up against a Seuss scar three gaming laptop armed with a mobile core
I $9.99 a th and an RT X 27 T as well and
The Nook landed almost squarely between them
it looks like the only thing holding it back from desktop grade performance is of course the mobile CPU our
graphics card
actually
you can see it right there through the mesh stayed nice and cool only reaching 70 degrees under load and
surprisingly actually even managed to outperform our
Desktop GPU in the GPU portion of 3d mark x by I was ever really concerned about performance though
it was the cooling that worried me and
impressively the nook managed to remain
relatively quiet while gaming with the only minor acoustic annoyance being that sometimes the fans will
Quickly ramp up and down while doing little things like opening programs
That should be fixable with a fan curve adjustment in a BIOS update though
Intel outside of gaming CPU performance was initially
Honestly, pretty disappointing the results in single threaded applications are as expected slightly better than the laptop worse than the desktop
And then in multi-threaded workloads the Nook not only got crushed by the desktop
9900 K
but it also managed to lose out to the asus strix car 3
Laptop with that said during the test. The nook was much quieter and cooler than the Strix and
Intel was nice enough to provide some fun dials to twist in the BIOS
So then what would happen if somebody went in there and cranked the numbers up a bit?
Turns out that by simply changing the sustained package power to 90 watts
the limits of this poor computer's thermal solution
We were able to nearly match the I $9.99 hundred K with its 95 watt TDP
So if you were to put some liquid metal in there
Not that I'm recommending that it can cause problems and give it a bit more juice. You could probably beat a stock 9900
unfortunately getting inside the nook is
Surprisingly easy for a small form-factor computer just like it's easy to buy a comfy. Sure. It's an L
Did you sort accomplish the journey inside begins by loosening these two captive screws at the back and removing the top cover which includes?
280 millimeter cooling fans
Powering the fans with plugless contacts like these isn't required but it does show the engineering that went into making this small machine
Reasonably user-friendly to both take apart and put back together
There were a few comments on my unboxing on our short circuit channel
Asking Oh who's the poor sod who has to put it back together?
It was me and it only took me about 15 20 minutes the mesh side panels then come off to reveal some very weird
internals on the bottom is a 500 watt flex ATX power supply courtesy of
FSP making this one of the only gaming systems this small
To not rely on an external power brick then above that. Our review unit was equipped with a
197 millimeter long RTX 2070 mini from a soos that
Barely fit then four screws on a bracket reveal a second. Hidden 8 pin PCI Express power connector
meaning that theoretically you actually have the power leads available for an RT X 2080 super or maybe even a 20 atti if
One small enough to fit in this thing was ever made behind the GPU though. We find the real star of the show
All of the core components of the nook 9 extreme are on this
Motherboard of sorts that intel calls the compute element to be clear
It is still a motherboard like you're not able to plug a computer element into another
Motherboard and you know yo dawg, I heard you like motherboards
So I put a motherboard and you're you know, you get the point because the PCI Express logic is on the CPU
so those slots on the base board that it plugs into are are dumb in the sense that
Removing the compute element would render them completely useless now. There is some logic on the base board, though
it can operate in two modes either delivering 16 PCI Express gen3 lanes directly to the GPU or
Cutting that down to 8 lanes and splitting off for each for a 4 by PCI Express slot and a 10.2 s SD slot
Intel provided a large 110 millimeter octane boot drive for our review unit
But I suspect that most people would actually end up using the other 2 m dot 2 slots that are on the compute elements itself
So that their graphics card will get its full bandwidth
The main idea behind the computer element aside from making the system super small is to make upgrades
basically plug and play now on the surface that looks like just more a waste because then you're
Throwing away your motherboard every time you want to change your CPU
But the thing is in many cases a meaningful CPU upgrade requires a motherboard swap anyway
So as long as memory and storage aren't soldered so they can be carried forward which they're not
It's basically the same thing
I do find the ease of upgrade ability a bit more convincing on razors
Tomahawk chassis though since access to the computer element doesn't require any tools like it does on this one
With that said if you've ever worked on a laptop swapping storage and RAM on the Nook is going to be a cakewalk
Now that we're in here, we've got a good look at the cooler
Which is basically a little aluminum thin stack attached to a vapor chamber
it's
really impressive that this tiny heatsink allows our CPU to hit 5 gigahertz turbo if this was a desktop chip
I don't think it would have a chance but the ghost Canyon nuke has two big things going for it
First of all mobile views are generally Bend more selectively for power efficiency than their desktop counterparts
That's because increasing the power consumption of a laptop by even 5 watts could be catastrophic
Whereas on a desktop it probably doesn't matter
Second the nuke CPU cooler is in direct
Contact with the CPU died because it's a mobile chip
So that lack of an integrated heat spreader helps bring temps down
It does require higher precision during manufacturing of the cooler itself though. So as good as all of that is
Thing is hyebin's chips and precision manufacturing
Both come at a cost and that cost has certainly been passed right along to the consumer
Let's discuss the inconvenient truths
if you were to build a
similarly small
Form-factor gaming PC for instance in a doctor's a verse entry and case or a den case or something like that
That is assuming you can find any of them in stock. The total is gonna be about
$1,800 with the ghost Canyon Nook with the I $9.99 a thk version you're looking at
$1,800 one small problem
That's for the bare-bones kit after adding some nice-to-haves like ram storage and a graphics card
the total for our configuration comes to
$2,700 woof. I mean sure you're always gonna have to pay a premium for a small form-factor machine, but the thing is
Even compared to a similarly Specht laptop. This is a not insignificant premium
The gigabyte a RS 15 G that we looked at a little while ago performs as well as the NIC in games
thanks to its 2070 super GPU while costing five hundred dollars less and like
It's got a screen attached to it guys
unfortunately, the value proposition doesn't improve much if you move down to an i5 or an i7 configuration because it's
Even harder to recommend shelling out for a premium machine like this
If you aren't equipping it with the very best components as for the easy upgrade bit
Well, there are two problems with that one is that it history is anything to go on?
Initiatives like this rarely survive longer than a generation or two
Am I really gonna get a 12th grade module down the line?
How much is that gonna cost and second B? Well you were gonna have to upgrade and throw away everything
anyway argument might be more defensible in a world where only Intel exists, but the thing is
AMD has done an excellent job of enabling multiple generations of CPU upgrades
Across existing motherboards over the last couple of years
All of this leaves me in quite an awkward position here
then I think that the ghost canyon nook is one of the coolest computers to come out in a very long time and
unlike some of the boutique DIY small form-factor stuff like the
Actually, it's even smaller than this Belk a three case that we built a system in a little while back. This is mass-produced
Which has a cost and like I want Intel to keep building really cool stuff like this
So people out there are gonna need to buy it, but on the other hand, I really can't recommend
in good conscience that someone go out and buy a 5-liter chassis gaming machine when they could
settle for building one themselves in like a you know, an 8 9 or 10 liter chassis and save anywhere from 900 to
$1,000
Speaking of saving $1,000. That's not what we're about to do. This video is brought to you by the msi
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RTX 2070 super gaming x it's got eight gigs of 256 bit g DDR 6 memory it boosts up to sixteen ninety five megahertz
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Three display port port so you can get that triple gaming high refresh rate if you're into that sort of thing
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Check it out now at the link in the video description
If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our build in the vel case Velka 3
It's actually smaller than this and I did see someone build with a 20 70 in it at one point
But it's so cramped that I don't know that I would necessarily
Recommend going that route. It is a very cool case though
definitely not as elegant as this little bit easier these