You’re an Animal! Intel Teases the ‘Beast Canyon’ NUC 11 Extreme, a Killer Compact PC

The 2021 edition of Computex, for Intel, is all about the chip giant reinforcing its latest successes with laptop CPUs. The 11th Generation Core processors in its “Tiger Lake” families are filtering out across the world in new laptops everywhere. These chips have debuted in three main waves, with its H-Series (power-user, and most recent), H35-Series (lighter-impact, but still muscular), and U-Series (thin-and-light) Tiger Lake chips being the new laptop norms since the second half of 2020.

Its desktop processors, meanwhile, are between generations, with the early-2021 launch of the 11th Generation “Rocket Lake-S” socketed CPUs. So Intel is throwing a sop to desktop enthusiasts at the virtual Computex show with a sneak peek of a new, power-minded NUC PC. Meet the NUC 11 Extreme Kit, with the evocative code name “Beast Canyon.”

Easy There, Tiger!

Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is Intel’s classic family of compact desktop systems that employ the company’s mobile CPUs. The aim behind NUC is inspiring and furthering the cutting edge of mini PC design. Some of these models are little pockets of power as small as 6 inches square, like the recently reviewed “Tiger Canyon” Intel NUC 11 Pro Kit, which we crowned with an Editors’ Choice award just last week. The new Tiger Lake-based NUC, though, is bigger, a successor to the NUC 9 Extreme Kit (code-named “Ghost Canyon”) that we awarded a Best of CES award in 2020.

Ryan Shrout, chief performance strategist at Intel, gave a group of select journalists a quick flash of the new NUC in a video-call briefing, before Computex began. The PC is more comparable in form factor to the NUC 9 Extreme (closer to toaster-size) than a typical NUC, which is something you can hide behind a monitor.

Intel points out that the new NUC 11 Extreme is the first NUC capable of hosting a full-length discrete video card. That’s in slight contrast to the NUC 9 Extreme, which also supports discrete graphics (that was a NUC “first,” in its time), but only cards up to 8 inches long. (That chassis allowed for a short-barrel Asus GeForce RTX 2070 in our test model, but most top cards are longer than that.) This 8-liter chassis calls to mind an alternative NUC design like that of the Razer Tomahawk NUC from CES 2020.

The Return of the Compute Element

What also sets the NUC 11 Extreme (and the NUC 9 Extreme) apart from the rest of the NUC pack is the use of Intel’s Compute Element platform. Touted first at Computex 2019 and debuting in a retail product in 2020’s NUC 9 Extreme, Compute Element integrates an Intel mobile CPU, the motherboard, main system memory, and other core components into a single module. In the case of the NUCs, the Compute Element looks a fair bit like a chunky video card, and plugs into a PCI Express-card-like slot on a backplane in the chassis. An actual PCI Express slot alongside accommodates the actual video card.

Worth noting here is that unlike the squat, slim NUC 11 Enthusiast Kit (dubbed yet another canyon, “Phantom Canyon”) that we reviewed in the past month, the NUC 11 Extreme Kit employs Intel’s H-Series, as opposed to lower-power U-Series, processors. H-Series isn’t a true desktop chip line, but rather the same kind of CPU you’d get in a gaming laptop or mobile workstation designed for power users and content creators. The 2021 H-Series chips will be unusual, though, in that they will be implemented as part of the Compute Element that slots into the Beast Canyon chassis. Via different Tiger Lake-H Compute Elements, the NUC 11 Extreme will be available in Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 flavors.

Additional details on the Beast Canyon NUC are scarce at the moment, but we did note the signature Intel “performance enthusiast” skull logo on the front face of the chassis, a common theme on its highest-performance NUC PCs over the years and harkening back to Intel’s enthusiast-grade, branded motherboards back when it was a motherboard maker. In the brief flash we got of the machine in Shrout’s hands, a color-fade effect was evident on the skull logo. This will be the first NUC with RGB lighting.

We would also note that employing Tiger Lake-H and its supporting chipset should bring new integrated capabilities to the NUC platform, such as support for PCI Express 4.0 and Wi-Fi 6E. But we’ll have to confirm this once a full spec sheet rears its head.

Pricing and availability details were also not yet shared. Stay tuned for more on the NUC 11 Extreme Kit once we can lure a sample of the Beast into PC Labs for some down-home benchmarking!